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to survive—not the hysterical responses of a climber driven half mad by his ordeal. As
for Herzog's vignette of Lachenal trying to seize Terray's axe to descend alone to Camp
II—Lachenal denies this ever took place.
Yet none of these discrepancies matter, continues Lachenal, because the descent
became a multiplying sequence of errors and desperate acts. As the four men had
stumbled lost through the fog late on the afternoon of June 4, Herzog saw Lachenal's
behavior as proof of his dementia: “Perhaps he was not quite in his right mind. He said
it was no use going on; we must dig a hole in the snow and wait for fine weather. He
swore at Terray.” Now Lachenal reclaims his exhortation at that grim moment as “not
the counsel of an unbalanced man, but of a sane one.”
We were all sorely tried by the altitude—as I said, this was normal. Herzog noted as much
about himself. Beyond that, however, he was illuminated. Marching toward the summit, he
had the sense of fulfilling a mission, and I truly believe he thought of St. Theresa of Avila
on the summit. As for me, I wanted above all else to go down, and that is exactly why I be-
lieve I kept my head on my shoulders.
At last, Lachenal turns to the pivot point below the summit, when he had raised the
possibility of descending rather than pushing on toward the top. It is worth putting
that decision in historical perspective.
Three years after Annapurna, the talented and driven Austrian climber Hermann
Buhl would reach the summit of Nanga Parbat alone. On the only 8,000-meter peak
whose first ascent was a solo achievement, Buhl won his lasting glory and fame, at the
cost, like Herzog and Lachenal, of losing all his toes to frostbite.
In the decades since that Golden Age of Himalayan mountaineering, however, some
of the strongest climbers in the world have perished as they pushed beyond their lim-
its trying to reach 8,000-meter summits. Along the way, an inordinate number have
lapsed into trance states not unlike Herzog's. In 1996, for instance, during the mem-
orable Everest disaster, both immensely experienced chief guides, Scott Fischer and
Rob Hall, drifted into apathetic stupors from which even the frantic entreaties of their
teammates (in Hall's case, over the radio) could not in the end budge them. The pull of
the summit, intersecting with the fog of hypoxic trance, cost them their lives.
In this context, mountaineers have learned to reserve their highest praise for peers
who have had the guts to turn back even as close as a hundred yards below the sum-
mit. Reinhold Messner, the finest high-altitude mountaineer of all time, the first man
to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, survived this most dangerous game by more
than once heeding the mountain's warning and turning back.
