Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
fifty years ago came home with a vengeance, and I realized that no single person could
ever grasp the whole truth of Annapurna 1950.
B
ROODING IN LATER YEARS
about the expedition, heeding his wife's admonitions not to
make a public fuss about his doubts and disappointments, Rébuffat pondered the theat-
ricality of Herzog's summit performance. In the most trenchant of the aphoristic notes
he jotted down about Annapurna in the 1980s, Rébuffat distilled his misgivings into
the single pithiest commentary on the summit day ever penned:
After the sequence of the flags, this jingoistic and supremely pragmatic moment, Maurice
organized his ecstasy. Losing, if not his reason, at least his sense of reality, he began compla-
cently to soar, plunged into a kind of happiness, a beatitude of the moment when a sense of
the real ought to have been primordial. . . . Lachenal was aware: what good does it do to
reach a summit if it means losing one's feet? His repeated entreaties had no effect, so he
began the descent in order that Maurice would come to his senses and follow him.
Yet the last word on Annapurna deserves to be Lachenal's. Bernard George, assem-
bling his 1999 documentary on the legendary expedition, viewed all the period news-
reel and feature footage he could find. “In the hospital [in Chamonix],” George told
me, “not a word comes out of Lachenal's mouth. In all these old films, I heard the
voices of Terray, Rébuffat, and of course Herzog. But I could find not a trace of Lachen-
al's voice.”
Only in those last seven paragraphs of his 1955 “Commentaires”—suppressed en-
tirely by Gérard Herzog—does Lachenal at last speak. As he begins to discuss the
summit day, he warns his readers that they should not expect from him any absolute
truths.
That my memories sometimes differ from those of Maurice Herzog is a very normal busi-
ness, when one thinks of the tension under which we attempted the summit and of the re-
treat in complete disorder (I measure my words) that immediately followed our success. . . .
There was a divergence [in our memories], that is all.
Yet in the next breath, Lachenal takes issue with his portrait in
Annapurna
. For five
years, he knew, he had been “consistently depicted as badly affected by the altitude,
by the final struggle, and especially by the fall that I took in the vicinity of Camp V.”
Herzog, Lachenal complains, had implied “that I no longer knew what I was doing.”
Yet his cries for help, which Terray heard and which guided him to his fallen friend's
side, and before that his instinct to plunge his gloveless hands into his pack to save
them, were both, Lachenal insists, the reflexes of a sane man doing what he had to do
