Breakthrough - True Summit - page 49

real climbing on the expedition with his old partner. Looking back in 1961, Terray re-
membered the joy of reconstituting the matchless cordée on Annapurna:
At 4:30 the following morning Lachenal and I once more formed the partnership which had
so often brought us success. . . . We were back on our old semi-divine form, each reacting to
the other so as to double his normal skill and strength almost in defiance of the laws of
nature. In this supercharged state we literally played with the obstacles, running up them
like cats.
The climbing, however, was harder than either man had anticipated, and snow flur-
ries and clouds made the going all the more tricky. One pitch that Lachenal led, on
steep rock coated with a skin of ice called verglas, was rated, both men agreed, Grade
V—a very stiff pitch for that era in the Alps, and almost certainly the hardest passage
that had ever been climbed at an altitude of more than 18,000 feet. At the end of the
day's probe up the spur, the indomitable Terray wanted to bivouac and continue on the
morrow, but Lachenal talked him into descending.
Lachenal's own diary entry for May 18, written that evening or the next morning,
rather than after an interval of eleven years, bears none of the ebullience of Terray's
account. No hint of any nostalgic glow at the reuniting of the old cordée emerges in
Lachenal's laconic phrases. Instead, he is fretful and dubious. A chilling sleet makes
the rock-climbing more hazardous, and a traverse across rotten slabs seems “extremely
exposed.” On the descent, Lachenal notes, the pair make three dangerous rappels, two
of them anchored by bad pitons. The sleet turns to steady snow. The two men regain
their camp on the moraine “completely soaked.”
Given the difficulty of the climbing, Lachenal wanted no more of the Northwest
Spur. But the stubborn Terray had only grown more optimistic in the face of the severe
pitches he and Lachenal had so skillfully led. Against Herzog's objection that the team
could never get the Sherpas up the spur, he argued that (in his own words) “with the
aid of eight or ten fixed ropes it would be perfectly possible to get Sherpas up to the
point we had reached, and probably also to Point 19,685 ft., since the snow ridge did
not look particularly difficult.”
Herzog was evidently convinced, for after a rest day, he spent the next three days
climbing with Terray to push the route up the Northwest Spur. Both men grossly
underestimated its difficulty. “In the event,” wrote Terray ruefully in 1961, “it took
Maurice and me three days of top-class climbing to reach even the first pinnacle of a
fantastic ridge of purest snow lace, utterly invisible from below.” Four days of brilliant
gymnastics had pushed the Frenchmen only into a cul-de-sac nearly 7,000 feet short