Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Don and I started to share the conceit that we
were
Terray and Lachenal. We went so
far as to address each other as “Lionel” and “Louis.”
Passages from
Conquistadors of the Useless,
as well as other chronicles we could
come across that detailed our heroes' conquests, became canonic mottos on our lips. On
the crux move of a route on Cannon cliff, for example, Don might shout out, “Guido,
the sardine tin!” In M. A. Azéma's
The Conquest of Fitzroy,
which told the story of
the 1952 first ascent of the hardest expeditionary mountain yet climbed anywhere in
the world, Terray and Guido Magnone had solved nearly all the technical difficulties,
only to be stumped by a short blank wall just below the summit. Out of pitons, they
thrashed around, unable to solve the wall, until Terray cried, “Guido, the sardine tin!”
Earlier that day, the pair had used a knife-blade “ace of spades” piton to pry open their
sardine can. Terray dug the piton out of his rucksack, pounded it into a thin crack, aided
the wall, and sprinted to the summit.
In
Conquistadors,
Terray had devoted a long chapter to Annapurna. By and large,
it complemented Herzog's famous story, though Terray performed the invaluable ser-
vice of following up on the lives and careers of the team members in the eleven years
after the expedition. It seemed to Don and me that the
cordée
we idolized ought to
have found its paired glory on the first 8,000-meter peak to be climbed. (The ideal plot
would have had Terray and Lachenal going to the summit together.) Yet in neither
Herzog's
Annapurna
nor in Terray's
Conquistadors
was there much evidence of that
legendary partnership playing a pivotal role. The pairs and trios of climbers setting off
to look for Dhaulagiri and Annapurna permutated relentlessly, as if Herzog were try-
ing to keep strong bonds from forming among his team. The knights of the sky were
in this sense interchangeable.
Only a vignette here and there in the Annapurna chapter of
Conquistadors
hinted
at the sense of twinned invincibility Lachenal and Terray had hammered out on the
Walker Spur, the Piz Badile, the Eiger. On the long march in to Tukucha, the two
guides were designated as the scouting party. Wrote Terray.
Lachenal was also very interested by all that went on around us, but patience was never one
of his characteristics, and he found my halts too frequent. When he got tired of waiting he
would lope off on his own, and I would find him asleep under a banyan a few hours later.
Seven weeks into the expedition, Terray reminded us, the team was plunged into
despair. The most vigorous possible reconnaissance of Dhaulagiri had deemed the
mountain virtually unclimbable. Time was running out.
On May 14, the whole team assembled once more in Tukucha. In the mess tent,
Herzog presided over what he called “a solemn council of war.” He gave a speech, sum-
