Breakthrough - True Summit - page 51

Rébuffat felt a great satisfaction at his discovery of this “favorable and rational” itinerary.
Thanks to his instincts, he had, he thought, perfectly exercised his métier as guide, by find-
ing this route that, on the face of it, would become the route.
Indeed, in Annapurna, Herzog seems to appropriate the intuition of the glacier
route from Rébuffat, crediting himself with ordering the reconnaissance:
As I looked once more at the glacier, and the enormous icefall down below, I felt in my
bones that if there were a way up Annapurna, that was where it lay. So another plan began
to take shape in my mind. Rébuffat and Lachenal . . . [would] attempt to force a way—which
to all appearances would be found along the right bank—up the glacier to the plateau.
Having topped out on the plateau at 11:15 A.M. on May 22, Lachenal and Rébuffat
immediately scribbled a note for the Sherpa Adjiba to carry down to Herzog. Though
it is not clear which man wrote the note, Lachenal gives its whole text in his diary, and
the impatient exhortations of its closing lines sound like that most driven and impetu-
ous of climbers:
Come up, and bring supplies as quickly as possible, for we are expecting good weather and a
solid route almost certainly climbable in a few days. Come en masse with all the Sherpas
and the maximum food and gear. We think we need to act very fast.
So too does Lachenal's voice speak in the single ironic sentence the note contains: “The
sluggards are ready to dash.” The context of the remark is obscure. Had Herzog earlier
denigrated some of his teammates as “sluggards”? No epithet could have more sharply
insulted Lachenal, who seemed to run on sheer nervous energy, and it would have been
like the man to throw the derogation back in Herzog's face.
Immediately after quoting the text of the note, Lachenal wrote in his diary, “We are
very happy. Today is the first day in the Himalaya that I felt this much pleasure.”
During the previous week, in fact, Lachenal had often been in a terrible mood,
wracked with annoyance and irritation, lashing out at what he perceived as the idiocies
of his teammates. On May 19, he noted of a campsite ordered by Herzog: “A huge
waste of time, which disgusts me.” Of a parallel reconnaissance of the glacier along its
left-hand side, ordered by Herzog and undertaken by Schatz, he remarked, “an explor-
ation that seemed completely ridiculous to me.” (Both passages were suppressed in the
1956 edition of Carnets. )
Over another campsite that Lachenal favored but Herzog disdained, a “bitter al-
tercation” raged. On May 20, still bent on attacking the Northwest Spur, Terray and
Lachenal had hiked up through a snowstorm to find Rébuffat and Herzog lolling in