Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chamonix they traded curses in Scots and Savoyard. Out of such animus was born a
caricature of “Ghastly Rubberface,” as the British wickedly nicknamed Rébuffat.
On reexamination, all those beautiful pictures in Rébuffat's books started to smack
of the inauthentic. In
On Snow and Rock
(published in 1959), Rébuffat had been one
of the first to realize that to take a picture that truly captured the vertiginous glory of
our pastime, you had to set it up. Today, most good climbing pictures are set up before-
hand, with photographers resorting to machinations to get in positions that Rébuffat
would never have dreamed of. In 1969, however, Patey could imply that the only hon-
est climbing photo was one taken by the belayer as he whipped a Brownie out of his
rucksack and snapped, one-handed, a shot of the leader scrabbling above.
All those photos of Rébuffat frozen in sublime equipoise against ethereal granite
began to seem an affectation. The insistence on himself as subject, my friends and I
took for arrant vanity (as opposed to what I now suspect—that no other climber was
good enough to pose on the perches that Rébuffat wished to illuminate). The famous
pullover sweater became a standing joke.
Swept up in the iconoclasm of the late 1960s, I could even delight in Patey's morbid
but clever ballad mocking the legend of Annapurna itself (it mattered little that Patey
miscounted the frozen digits):
Twenty frozen fingers, twenty frozen toes
Two blistered faces, frostbite on the nose
One looks like Herzog, who dropped his gloves on top
And Lachenal tripped and fell, thought he'd never stop.
Bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop.
“Take me down to Oudot” was all that he would say
“He'll know what to do now,” said Lionel Terray
“Your blood is like black pudding,” said Oudot, with his knife
“It is not too late to amputate if I can save your life.”
Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop.
No tiny fingers, No tiny toes
The memory lingers but the digit goes
In an Eastern Railway carriage, where the River Ganges flows
There are Twenty Tiny Fingers and Twenty Tiny Toes.
Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop.
Thus I “outgrew” Rébuffat. Had I known, in the late 1960s, that side by side in the
breast of the lyric singer of the brotherhood of the rope there lurked an iconoclast as
