Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In Chamonix, Elisabeth Payot told me, “What's incredible is that Herzog kept this
photo hidden until the death of Lachenal.” Certainly Lachenal had seen the photo. As
they worked together preparing the text of
Carnets du Vertige
, Lachenal told Phil-
ippe Cornuau, “I took a photo of Herzog that was clear. He took one of me that was
fuzzy. And
I'm
the one who was supposed to be out of my mind.” Cornuau also told
me, “Lachenal was deeply shocked that Herzog would raise the banner of Kléber-Co-
lombes—that a man would hold up the flag of the company that employed him.”
There is perhaps a simple explanation of the odd perspective in the summit photos,
which commentators have overlooked. Lachenal's diary for June 3 says,
A little below [the top] on the north face a rock bench received us, so that we could take the
several official photographs that we had to take. CAF, French flag, black [and white], color. I
didn't take my own camera out of my pack, but used Momo's Foca.
From a ledge a bit below the summit, of course, the “summit photo” would appear to
be taken somewhere short of the top.
It is possible that Herzog and Lachenal, hypoxic and exhausted, could have confused
a bump on the ridge for the summit. It is even possible to entertain suspicions of a
hoax. But I am inclined to second the characteristically gnomic remark Michel Guérin
offered
Le Monde:
“If Lachenal had wanted to avoid writing that he was on the sum-
mit, he would not have worded it otherwise.”
Whatever his faults, Lachenal had a bedrock integrity. His diary is full of blunt
truths that more squeamish expeditioneers (including Herzog) preferred to veil. Had
Lachenal chosen to fake the summit, would he have described to Terray that very even-
ing his emptiness on top? Would he not have concocted an imagined transport more
akin to Herzog's? For me, the plain statement in Lachenal's diary settles the case: “It is
the summit of Annapurna.”
I
N
J
ANUARY
2000, thinking I had learned virtually all I could know about Annapurna
1950, I visited Chamonix once more, only to be startled out of my complacency by an
extraordinary encounter with a man named Leonce Fourès. Just a few weeks before,
Fourès had first met Michel Guérin, from whom he had learned about my researches.
Over dinner, Fourès unveiled his revelations. A mathematician in his seventies from
the south of France, he had been a climber of modest abilities but a very close friend of
Rébuffat and Lachenal, as well as a classmate of Couzy. (Both Françoise Rébuffat and
Jean-Claude Lachenal later verified the depth of those associations.)
Fourès seconded Philippe Cornuau's suggestion that, when Herzog had pulled out
his Kléber-Colombes flag on the summit, Lachenal had been shocked and disgusted.
