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and Terray, for instance, he pauses to observe: “This celebrated partnership, which had
conquered all the finest and most dangerous of our alpine faces, was today living up to
its reputation.” Terray's stoic perseverance particularly impresses Herzog. “The next
day,” he writes of an early march, “Lionel Terray set a rapid pace from the start. Dur-
ing his illness he was so weak that he had only been able to walk with considerable
effort, but now it was as much as we could do to follow him.”
The chapters in Annapurna that cover the demoralizing search for an approach to
either Dhaulagiri or Annapurna subscribe to an old, deeply satisfying narrative con-
vention. Like Odysseus's shipmates, Herzog's partners dodge one lethal trap after an-
other. They are headstrong individualists and brilliant climbers, but what holds the
team together is its common pursuit of a goal as precious as life itself.
How different sounds the kindred musing of Rébuffat, in one of his letters to
Françoise:
[The others] have the air of being completely at ease in their egotism. Among us there is no
team spirit, only a necessary politeness. What hypocrisy! . . . So, I live, I exert myself, I
give, and I receive. But here, we are not on the same shore as one another. Here, we are re-
united to bag an 8,000-er. The rest doesn't matter.
Rébuffat was homesick: he missed Françoise and his small daughter badly. With him
he carried his wife's last letter, pausing to reread it now and then. It seemed to him that
the other married men on the team—Lachenal, Terray, and Couzy—hardly suffered at
all from the absence of their wives.
Back home on his native turf, Rébuffat could be a gregarious and charismatic com-
panion. As a self-made intellectual, he loved to discuss philosophical and artistic mat-
ters. Here on the expedition, however, he withdrew into his melancholy privacy. Des-
pite his deep friendship with Terray and Lachenal, he could not find on Annapurna that
distillation of perfect comradeship that had floated him through the cold bivouacs on
the Walker Spur and the Cima Grande.
In his own very different way, Lachenal marched, during the weeks of reconnais-
sance, along a similar gauntlet of irritations and disappointments. His diary, always
plainspoken, clipped, and pragmatic, never blinks at the tensions and follies of the
group's effort. Early during the approach, after he had settled in at the night's camp-
site, Lachenal impatiently waited for the rest of the entourage—porters, Sherpas, and
fellow “sahibs.” Finally the caravan arrived. “They had the courage to come all the way
up to here on ponyback,” he wrote sarcastically, “which seemed to me at first grot-
esque, then completely contra-indicated, since most of the other team members are
totally lacking in conditioning.”
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