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But Fourès went on to say that Lachenal had later told him that when Herzog had
changed the film in his camera to color, he had handed the black-and-white cartridge
to Lachenal, who had kept it on his person. Some forty hours later, as the four men
shivered through their bivouac in the providential crevasse, Lachenal, unable to find
his boots among the drifts of fine snow the pre-dawn avalanche had dumped into the
crevasse, had despaired of getting off the mountain alive. He had then, Fourès claimed,
given the black-and-white cartridge to Rébuffat, making his friend promise that he
would never let Herzog get his hands on the Kléber-Colombes photo.
Rébuffat had smuggled the roll of film back to France, Fourès went on, developed it,
and returned all the photos to Ichac except the picture of Herzog hoisting the flag of his
tire company, which he had jealously guarded until his death in 1985. As punishment
for his subversion, Rébuffat was never invited on another FFM-financed expedition. I
had assumed—as both Yves Ballu and Françoise Rébuffat had told me—that after An-
napurna, Rébuffat had simply chosen never again to climb in the remote ranges. But
Fourès insisted that Rébuffat had told him he would have dearly loved to accompany
Terray on such South American jaunts as his Fitzroy or Chacraraju expeditions. It was
this sacrifice that Rébuffat alluded to in telling Fourès, “I have paid a heavy price.”
On first hearing this outlandish story, both Michel and I were inclined to skepti-
cism. The Annapurna controversy, as Michel pointed out, had brought the fantasists
out of the woodwork. Had such a covert exchange taken place in the crevasse, why
hadn't Lachenal written about it in his
Carnets
? Why had Françoise Rébuffat never
breathed a hint of it? (Later Françoise confirmed that among Gaston's papers, she had
found three or four contact prints of the Kléber-Colombes photo.)
Yet in person Fourès seemed a modest and intelligent man, with no particular axe to
grind. And the more we mulled over what the man had told us, the more both Michel
and I realized that the bizarre story tied up all kinds of loose ends. It might explain
why Ichac had searched Rébuffat for hidden film cartridges in Kathmandu. It could
very well explain why the Kléber-Colombes photo was not published until 1996 (by
Montagnes
magazine). The tire company had made the single largest donation to the
expedition budget; Fourès set the figure at 500,000 francs. Had Herzog returned with a
photo of the company's banner hoisted on the summit of Annapurna, what better ad-
vertising coup could Kléber-Colombes possibly have devised? If the firm had the photo
in their possession, what earthly reason could prevent them from using it? Finally,
Fourès's story might help explain Rébuffat's bitterness over Annapurna in later life.
By the end of the evening in Chamonix, I was awash in a mixture of confusion and
fascination. The full ambiguity of what had happened on that distant mountain almost
