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their tent at the foot of the spur at 10:00
A.M.
Lachenal exploded in fury: “What the
hell are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Can't you see the snow?” one of the “sluggards” rejoined.
“We've seen it as much as you! More than you, since we've been climbing since
dawn to get here.”
Lachenal persisted in his tirade, calling his teammates “a bunch of schoolgirls” and
“weaklings.”
Rébuffat protested, “It would be crazy to go up in this. I have no desire to 'come off'
here.”
“We'll show you who's going to 'come off'!” Without another word, Lachenal flung
himself at the dangerous first pitch, climbing with a reckless abandon born of his an-
ger.
Curiously, this scene appears not in Lachenal's diary, but in
Annapurna.
Though
Herzog marvels at Lachenal's skill, he is dismayed by his fury. “I wasn't at all happy,”
Herzog writes: “it seemed to me that it was wrong to take such risks in the present con-
ditions.” In the end, the tableau, which on the surface of it takes the chance of painting
the author and his fellow sluggard Rébuffat as not as tough or daring as the stalwart
cordée
of Lachenal and Terray, serves to build up a portrait of Lachenal that subtly ac-
cretes through the topic—of a genius-madman of ascent, unmatched at sheer ability
but nearly devoid of judgment, his impetuous rages driving him beyond reasonable
human limits.
M
ARCEL
S
CHATZ AND
J
EAN
C
OUZY
were a
cordée
as well, though a far less experienced
one than Terray and Lachenal. Only a couple of years younger than the three stellar
Chamonix guides, these two were “amateurs” like Herzog. Couzy, who hailed from the
Southwest of France, was a promising aeronautical engineer; Schatz, a Parisian, was a
physicist who earned his living as manager of one branch of his father's tailoring busi-
ness.
Schatz would quit mountaineering altogether less than a year after Annapurna.
After turning thirty, he returned to his research, which he performed so capably that
he eventually had a hand in the development of the French atom bomb.
Couzy, on the other hand, went on to become one of the greatest mountaineers of
his generation. On Makalu, the world's fifth-highest peak, in 1955, he was the “tiger,”
the climber whose will drove the whole party to success on the only other 8,000-meter
peak first climbed by Frenchmen.
In 1950 on Annapurna, however, these two alpinists played a largely supporting
role, accomplishing important reconnaissances (including the key penetration of the
