Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
If only everyone could know!
As he stood on the summit, Herzog was awash in a mystical ecstasy:
How wonderful life would now become! What an inconceivable experience it is to attain
one's ideal and, at the very same moment, to fulfill oneself. I was stirred to the depths of my
being. Never had I felt such happiness like this—so intense and yet so pure.
Lachenal, however, was in an entirely different state of mind. He shook Herzog,
pleading, “Well, what about going down?”
His companion's impatience puzzled Herzog. “Did he simply think he had finished
another climb, as in the Alps?” he wondered. “Did he think one could just go down
again like that, with nothing more to it?”
“One minute,” Herzog spoke, “I must take some photographs.”
“Hurry up!”
Herzog fumbled through his pack, retrieving his camera and several flags. For long
minutes, he posed with one pennant after another attached to his ice axe, as Lachenal
snapped photos. Then Herzog changed from black-and-white to color film.
Lachenal exploded: “Are you mad? We haven't a minute to lose: we must go down
at once.”
Vaguely, Herzog sensed that his friend was right. Glancing at the horizon, he saw
that the perfect day had deteriorated. A storm was moving in—perhaps the leading
edge of the monsoon itself. Yet Herzog stood there, unwilling to let go of his tran-
scendent moment, lost in a whirl of emotions and memories.
“We must go down!” Lachenal cried once more, then hoisted his pack and started
off. Still Herzog lingered, drinking a bit of condensed milk, taking a reading with his
altimeter. At last he put on his own pack and followed Lachenal.
Of all the qualities that had made Lachenal such a matchless climber, it was his
speed on difficult terrain that was paramount. Now Herzog watched his friend dash
down the couloir, then hurry along the traverse beneath the rock band. Stumping
downward far more carefully, Herzog saw the gap between him and Lachenal grow.
At the base of the rock band, Herzog stopped to catch his breath. He took off his
pack and opened it, then could not remember what he was about to do. Suddenly he
cried out, “My gloves!”
To open his pack, Herzog had laid his gloves on the snow. As he watched, dumb-
founded, they slid, then rolled toward the void below. “The movement of those gloves
was engraved in my sight,” he later wrote, “as something irredeemable, against which
I was powerless. The consequences might be most serious. What was I to do?”
