Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
napurna. From the latter summit, he gazed across at the north face of the mountain
that had cost him and his comrades so much agony twelve years before.
Terray had never deceived himself about the risks of climbing. He had seen Francis
Aubert and Jacques Poincenot killed before his eyes, and had grieved the loss of his two
closest Annapurna teammates, Lachenal and Couzy. It was remarkable that in all his
big-range mountaineering, Terray had never suffered a serious accident.
Yet in 1959, tragedy struck him again in the Alps of his backyard. On a routine
traverse of the Fresnay Glacier, as Terray moved with a roped client in tow, a jumble
of seracs collapsed above and avalanched over the two men. The client was instantly
killed. Terray came to rest under fifteen feet of debris in the bottom of a crevasse, with
a huge block of ice directly over him. In his glacial prison, he could barely twitch, let
alone move.
Terray's escape is virtually without parallel in alpine annals:
I managed by a series of contortions to reach a knife which I had by sheer chance left in my
pocket. With its aid I was able to reach a cavity in the debris which, once again, had formed
close to me by the merest luck. With an ice piton and my peg hammer I then carved out a
gallery toward the light. Five hours later I reached the fresh air. This stay in the antecham-
bers of death, where yet another companion was lost at my side, ripened me more than ten
years of successful adventures.
As he turned forty in July 1961, Terray wrote the last pages of his autobiography,
which Gallimard published within the year as
Les Conquérants de l'Inutile.
The topic
was immediately popular, for Terray was riding the crest of his fame as France's
greatest active mountaineer. Two years later, the topic was translated into English.
Conquistadors of the Useless
(to use its English title) has its faults. From the outset,
Terray set too leisurely a pace, so that halfway through the topic he was only on the
north face of the Eiger in 1947, with all his greatest climbs ahead. Recognizing this too
late, he crammed his astounding decade of expeditionary triumphs after Annapurna
into a mere forty-one pages. His early success with Rébuffat on the Col du Caïman
thus occupies eleven pages, Chacraraju only a page and a half.
Terray's style can be plain and even clumsy. And his penchant for idealizing his
comrades can get in the way of our seeing them as fully rounded characters.
Yet from humdrum paragraphs of route description or logistical summary, he bursts
again and again into sudden passages of startling eloquence. All in all, there is so much
that is vivid, true, and deeply pondered in
Conquistadors
that more than a few aficion-
ados of mountain literature regard it as the finest climbing autobiography ever writ-
ten.
