Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It was in such a state that Lachenal alone, on June 3, 1950, recognized the conse-
quences of his pivotal decision. In his “Commentaires,” he writes plainly, “I knew that
my feet were freezing, that the summit would cost me them.” (In the margin of the
typescript, Devies ranted, “Between simply feeling cold and freezing, there is a differ-
ence. Lachenal never told me this story.”)
In the last analysis, at this critical juncture, it was Herzog who miscalculated. It was
he who mistakenly thought his feet would “come back” from temporary numbness, he
who loitered in bliss on the summit when every minute squandered narrowed the two
men's margin of safety, he who dropped his gloves on the descent. Though Himalay-
an history would have been radically altered, though there would have been no An-
napurna , had Lachenal's canny judgment prevailed at the moment he proposed giving
up the summit, the French team would have probably returned from the mountain in-
tact and safe, after another gallant failure in the quest to reach the summit of the first
8,000-meter peak. Lachenal's instinct to turn around, with the summit tantalizingly
close, was the right one.
“For me,” continues Lachenal in his “Commentaires,” “this climb was only a climb
like others, higher than in the Alps but no more important. If I was going to lose
my feet, I didn't give a damn about Annapurna. I didn't owe my feet to the Youth of
France.”
And so, why continue toward the summit?
Thus I wanted to go down. I posed the question to Maurice to find out what he would do in
that case. He told me he would keep going. I didn't need to judge his reasons: alpinism is too
personal a business. But I guessed that if he continued alone, he would not return. It was for
him and for him alone that I did not turn around.
Reading this passage in the typescript of the Carnets , Herzog was given pause. Instead
of annotating the remark with the kind of marginal criticism he had indulged in on
page after preceding page, he wrote poignantly, “I didn't sense this. Perhaps after all I
was unfair.” But Lucien Devies was unimpressed, scribbling, “C'est entièrement à re-
voir”—“This must all be rewritten.” In the end, of course, Gérard Herzog suppressed
the “Commentaires” altogether.
N O ONE EVER QUESTIONED Herzog's courage or perseverance. On Annapurna, whatever
his faults, he never led from the rear. Without his ultimate effort, no one would have
reached the summit in 1950. Nor does anyone doubt that Annapurna is a stirring, even
a sublime narrative of bravery, endurance, and teamwork.
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