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etrated the murk and left the two men snow-blind. Rébuffat had mistaken the gray
smear of his blindness for a ceaseless storm.
The weather was windy but clear. Yet now the four men faced a cruel fate: the
blind could not lead the lame down the mountain. Pitifully, Lachenal began to cry out
for help. The others joined in. And then they heard an answering call. It was Mar-
cel Schatz, who had come out from Camp IVA to look for the companions he feared
he would never see again. As Schatz clasped Herzog in his arms, he murmured, “It is
wonderful—what you have done.”
Though the men were saved, the rest of the descent unfolded as a grim ordeal. At
one point, Herzog and two Sherpas were swept 500 feet by an avalanche and par-
tially buried. As the survivors approached Base Camp, even Terray—the sahib whose
strength had made him a legend among the porters—had to be helped down the moun-
tain like a baby, his arms around the shoulders of a pair of Sherpas who held him up
and guided his steps.
Herzog and Lachenal could no longer walk. During the next month, a succession
of Sherpas and porters carried the men through mile after mile of lowland ravine and
forest. Jacques Oudot, the expedition doctor, gave them agonizing daily abdominal in-
jections of novocaine in the femoral and brachial arteries. It was thought at the time
that the drug could dilate the arteries and, by improving the flow of blood, forestall
the ravages of frostbite; today, the procedure is known to be worthless. As their digits
turned gangrenous, Oudot resorted to amputations in the field. Eventually Lachenal
lost all his toes, Herzog all his toes and fingers.
The team members arrived at Orly airport in Paris on July 17, where a huge crowd
hailed them as heroes.
Paris-Match,
which owned exclusive periodical rights to the
story, rushed into print a special issue, with a cover photo of Herzog hoisting the Tri-
color on the summit, that broke all the magazine's sales records.
As he recuperated in the American hospital at Neuilly, Herzog, who had never be-
fore written a book, dictated his account of the expedition. Published the next year by
Arthaud as
Annapurna: Premier 8,000,
the topic at once became a classic. The story
Herzog had brought back from the mountain was a stirring saga of teamwork, self-
sacrifice, and—in the two-week push to the summit—brilliant mountaineering against
long odds. The descent and retreat from Annapurna figured as a tragic yet heroic coda,
which Herzog narrated in a peroration saluting the highest ideals of loyalty and cour-
age.
What moved readers beyond all else in
Annapurna,
however, was the transcendent-
al optimism of the topic. The euphoric trance that had seized Herzog on the summit
persisted through all his convalescent tribulations. With only stumps left where he had
