Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Listening late into the night to Michel's disquisition, I felt my shock and dismay
transmute into something else. The true history of Annapurna, though far more
murky and disturbing than Herzog's golden fable, might in the long run prove to be
an even more interesting tale—one fraught with moral complexity, with fundamental
questions about the role of “sport” in national culture, perhaps even with deep veins
of heroism quite different from those Herzog had celebrated.
The revelations from the grave of Lachenal and Rébuffat, Michel suggested, might
be only the tip of the iceberg. What really happened on Annapurna 1950—and
everything that issued from that cardinal triumph of mountaineering—was a story
that had never been told. As a narrative, it promised to bear a closer kinship to
Melville's
Billy Budd
than to the Hardy Boys. As we sat stirring our coffee in Morzine,
I realized that Michel had led me to a story that, no matter how hard it might be to
separate the “truth” from all the layers of ambiguity in which it lay cloaked, cried out
for a chronicler to grasp and tell it whole.
