Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
he had climbed when he and Terray had stormed up the hardest routes in the Alps in
the late 1940s?
From the moment he had frozen his feet, Lachenal's thoughts had focused on the
similar plight of his friend the great Swiss climber Raymond Lambert. After a survival
ordeal in winter on the Aiguilles du Diable, Lambert had lost all his toes to frostbite.
Yet he had come back to climb at an exceptional level. His triumphant moment was
also the sternest test of his rehabilitation, when in 1952 he reached 28,200 feet on the
South Col route on Everest, higher than anyone before him had ever climbed. (Lam-
bert, who reached that record height with Tenzing Norgay, missed stealing the next
year's first ascent from Sir Edmund Hillary by a mere 800 feet.)
In September 1951, Lambert made a surprise visit to Lachenal in the hospital.
Herzog, receiving special treatments in Chamonix, lay in the neighboring bed. In
L'Autre Annapurna, he recaptures that meeting as a joshing exchange:
“So, Raymond,” says Lachenal, “have we joined the club?”
“Wait a minute, you haven't been enthroned yet.”
“The proof is here,” returns Lachenal, showing Lambert his feet covered with band-
ages. “Do we have to get down on our knees?”
“No, en pointe. Like a dancer.”
To the invalids' astonishment, Lambert takes off his shoes and socks and begins to
dance on the tips of his amputated stumps. “Listen, Biscante, the day you can do the
same, then you join the club. Not before.”
The dialogue, as usual, has been invented by Herzog, recalling an episode forty-sev-
en years in the past. But there is no reason to doubt the tenor and substance of that
meeting. It would have been very like Lachenal to use black humor as a screen to cover
his fears about his future. In any event, Lachenal's son, Jean-Claude, who was eight
in 1951, remembers Lambert's visit. “My father was very low at the time,” he says.
“Lambert came to the foot of the bed and showed him that he could still climb without
toes. He was joking, dancing, kicking a soccer ball.”
That same month, both Herzog and Lachenal were awarded the Legion of Honor.
Terray and Rébuffat were passed over.
For two years after Annapurna, Lachenal was unable to make a single ascent. The
Compagnie des Guides, which had received their comrade as a hero, kept him busy
with administrative jobs. Meanwhile he undertook his first timid promenades in the
foothills with Jean-Claude and with the young daughter of a fellow guide. Alone in his
bedroom, he walked barefoot, trying out some of the maneuvers Lambert had showed
off in the hospital; but the pain quickly curtailed his experiments. As months passed
with little improvement, he lapsed into discouragement.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search