Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And, writes Lachenal, to suffering was added anguish. As the porters carried his
stretcher through the lowlands, he dwelt on Raymond Lambert, on the question of
whether he could climb without toes. “Lambert said that even if [his amputations]
were often a disadvantage, on the other hand there were sometimes holds which his
shortened feet gripped better than normal.”
Perhaps an implicit dig at Herzog, the “amateur,” lurks in the next sentence: “For
me, the mountains are not a Sunday pastime; they are my life.” The anguish over los-
ing that life stirs Lachenal to a lucid bitterness:
For others, to live is to stoop over books, to paint, or to give orders. This can be done with
cut-off feet, with cut-off hands.
For me, to live is to choose a mountain, to find its weakness and feel the wrinkles of
granite under the tread of my feet. Each digit cut off took with it some of my hope.
Next, Lachenal asks the cardinal question: “Was Annapurna worth this suffering?”
Yet he answers it only indirectly, by emphasizing the strangeness of the Himalaya to
his ken.
These were other mountains, and I want to know all the mountains that exist. This said,
however, among the ones I know, I have seen nothing comparable to the beauty of the mas-
sif of Mont Blanc. The scale is much greater [in the Himalaya], to be sure, but for their pro-
portions, the balance of their panorama, their thrust (look at the Chamonix Aiguilles), I dis-
tinctly prefer our own massif.
Lachenal had a vivid memory of being awakened to the alienness of the Himalaya as
he and Rébuffat wandered through a maze of giant seracs on the glacier east of Dhaula-
giri. In the Alps, seracs tend to be modest-sized and benign; In the Himalaya, thanks
to thin air and vertical sun, they grow to massive proportions and teeter menacingly.
An inordinate number of good climbers have been killed in the Himalaya when seracs
fell on them.
Feeling a kindred malaise to Lachenal's, Rébuffat said, “You know, I promised my
wife I wouldn't screw things up here!”
“This day,” recorded Lachenal, “I had the feeling of moving through a strange and
hostile world; the very idea of wanting to penetrate it was also strange. I thought,
'What the hell are we doing here?' ”
By contrast, the Alps were a familiar playground. Yet, paradoxically, that alienness
conferred a boon: “The Himalaya gave us a second youth.”
Next, Lachenal tried to place the style of the Annapurna expedition in historical
context. Later generations would hail the two-week dash up the north face as a brilliant
