June 3 - True Summit - page 8

once had fingers, for the rest of his life Herzog would find the simplest tasks—tying
his shoelaces, buttoning his shirt—almost beyond him. Yet not a trace of bitterness or
self-pity emerged in the pages of his book.
Quite the opposite. In the foreword, he wrote of his ordeal, “I was saved and had
won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose, has given me the assurance
and serenity of a man who has fulfilled himself. . . . A new and splendid life has opened
out before me.” Of his brave teammates, he wrote, “My fervent wish is that the nine
of us who were united in face of death should remain fraternally united through life.”
And in the topics last pages: “Annapurna, to which we had gone emptyhanded, was a
treasure on which we should live the rest of our days.”
The topic closes with a line as resounding and memorable as any in the literature of
adventure: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.”
Fifty years later, Annapurna remains one of the canonic works in exploration lit-
erature. Published in forty languages, it has sold more than 11 million copies, making
it the best-selling mountaineering book of all time. Though he would never again do
any serious climbing, Herzog went on to become mayor of Chamonix and Minister
of Youth and Sport under Charles de Gaulle. Today, at age eighty-one, he is the only
surviving climber from Annapurna 1950 (the liaison officer, Francis de Noyelle, who
never got above Camp II, also survives). In France, Herzog remains a household name,
one of the country's eternal heroes of sport and exploration, in a league with the late
Jacques Cousteau or Jean-Claude Killy. In contrast, as one mountaineering journal-
ist estimates, only about five to seven percent of the French public has ever heard of
Rébuffat, Terray, or Lachenal.
As for Herzog, the sense that despite—even because of—his personal tragedy, a
marvelous new life had thereby opened to him seems to have tided him well into
old age. In 1998, he published a memoir called L'Autre Annapurna ( The Other An-
napurna ). In its opening pages, Herzog declared that nearly half a century after his
“rebirth,” the sense of having discovered a new life still infused him with an “indes-
cribable happiness.” He considered it his duty to share that revelation with his readers.
F OR THIS READER, growing up in Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1950s, Annapurna came
as a stunning revelation. Since the age of thirteen or fourteen, I had checked out of
the public library a number of classic Himalayan expedition narratives—Paul Bauer
on Nanga Parbat, Sir John Hunt on Everest, and the like—and devoured their sagas of
brave men at altitude. But mountaineering topics were for me a kind of escape literat-
ure, not unlike the Hardy Boys mystery novels or Albert Payson Terhune's fables of