Breakthrough - True Summit - page 48

nontechnical passage, and the exposure—that 3,000-foot drop to the raging river—was
giddy in the extreme. Schatz and Couzy managed to work their way down to the river,
cross it, and push on to the base of the gigantic Northwest Spur. But as to whether the
ravine gave access to the broad ice-fields on the north face of Annapurna—which oth-
er team members had seen from the Dhaulagiri reconnaissance, and which seemed the
most likely route for an attack on Annapurna—they could not say.
Now, at the conclusion of the May 14 “council of war,” Herzog deputed Lachenal
and Terray (guided by Schatz) to lead a committed probe with porters carrying loads
along this improbable route. Terray was overjoyed by this call to action, after fruitless
weeks trying to sort out the range's topography. As he set out from Tukucha, he re-
membered later, “I struck up a Chasseur [light infantry] song and led off, twirling
my ice-axe over my head like a drum-major's baton.” That evening, the old comrades
Lachenal and Terray lay in their tent, counting up, in their amiably competitive way,
the number of climbs each had made in the Alps at the level of difficulty of the Grépon
or harder. Terray enumerated 157, Lachenal 151.
On May 16, the caravan reached the crossing of the Miristi Khola. Already
frightened by the vertiginous slope they had traversed on the narrow ledge, the porters
refused to ford the river—or even, Lachenal noted with disgust in his diary, “to make
a one-meter jump” where the stream pinched between boulders. (An observation sup-
pressed in the 1956 edition of Carnets. ) Instead, the three Frenchmen hoisted the loads
themselves and waded the torrent. Even unladen, the porters had a bad time at the
crossing, which, Terray noted, “gave rise to some picturesque scenes, with a cowboy
Lachenal lassooing coolies as they were swept away.” Eventually the Frenchmen built
a bridge of branches.
By May 18, the six principal climbers had at last reached the foot of Annapurna.
Here, however, they made a serious mistake, which ended up costing them five wasted
days and came close to extinguishing their chances of reaching the mountain's summit.
Carried away by the prospect of confronting steep rock and ice after weeks of wander-
ing about the lowlands, Terray pleaded for an attack on the Northwest Spur. Herzog
agreed, immediately assigning the task to the “celebrated partnership” of Lachenal and
Terray.
At this juncture, the four sources of the story that have come down to us—Herzog's
Annapurna, Terray's Conquistadors, Lachenal's unexpurgated Carnets, and the letters
and interviews that went into the making of Yves Ballu's biography of
Rébuffat—curiously diverge. All agree that Terray, with his limitless energy, was the
driving force behind the attack on the spur. During the last few days, in fact, his mood
had soared to something like euphoria. Now he was exhilarated to perform the first