Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pullouts. It took a concerted effort for both men to force their feet into their frozen
leather boots. Lachenal was unable to fasten his gaiters over his ankles, so he left them
in the tent. Both men strapped their crampons onto their boots. Because the snowfield
stretching above them looked easy, they did not bother to rope up. The pair were off
by 6:00
A.M.
Soon, as the sun crept over the skyline to their left, the men emerged from the icy
shadow of Annapurna's east ridge into flooding sunlight. Already, however, Lachenal's
feet were numb. He stopped to take off his boots and rub some feeling into his feet—as
virtually all the team members had done even below Camp V. “This didn't help much,”
Lachenal later wrote, “because there was a fairly cold wind.” As he sat there chafing
his stockinged feet, “Momo told me that in the war he had often felt as cold as this and
that his feet had always come back to life.” With difficulty, Lachenal got his boots back
on, and the men continued, plodding slowly upward and toward the right across the
interminable snowfield.
“For my part,” Lachenal wrote in his diary, “I moved slowly but without too
much difficulty.” Herzog, however, was beginning to lapse into a trance. Of this silent
trudge in the cold, he later wrote, “Each of us lived in a closed and private world of
his own. . . . Lachenal appeared to me as a sort of specter.” Once more, according to
Herzog, Lachenal voiced his fear of frostbite: “We're in danger of having frozen feet.
Do you think it's worth it?” Herzog's own feet had gone dead, but he wiggled his toes
and climbed on, convinced this was simply another passing numbness such as he had
often undergone in the mountains.
Curiously, Lachenal never mentions in his diary the pivotal event of the
day—although he acknowledges it in the “Commentaires” he wrote five years later.
This was the exchange in which Lachenal suggested turning back, giving up all chances
for the summit. For forty-five years, the only rendering of that critical moment avail-
able to the public was Herzog's.
Annapurna
fails to make clear at what point in the
day the exchange took place, although a few sentences before, Herzog notes, “We still
had a long way to go to cross [the summit snowfield], and then there was that rock
band—would we find a gap in it?”
Here, then, is the version of that brief exchange that
Annapurna
presents, stripped
of Herzog's internal commentary. Lachenal suddenly grabs his partner and says, “If I
go back, what will you do?”
“I should go on by myself.”
“Then I'll follow you.”
In the next paragraph, Herzog feels all the weight of ambiguity and indecision lifted
from his shoulders:
