Breakthrough - True Summit - page 54

Now Lachenal, hitherto so cranky and out-of-sorts, was seized with a fervent op-
timism. In his diary on May 22, with no rational reason to make such a sanguine
judgment, he wrote, “Finally today we sense that victory is very close—as long as the
weather stays good. . . . Life is beautiful.”
“An astonishing sight greeted me next morning,” wrote Herzog. “Lachenal and
Rébuffat were sitting outside on a dry rock, with their eyes riveted on Annapurna.
A sudden shout brought me out of my tent: 'I've found the route!' cried Lachenal.”
As Herzog watched and listened, Lachenal linked features on the icy face above,
which glittered in the sun, while Rébuffat—ever the skeptic on this expedition—raised
doubts and problems that Lachenal brushed aside. The debate ended on an upbeat note.
“A hundred to nothing! Those are the odds on our success!” pealed the genius-mad-
man of Herzog's portrait. Of the route Lachenal had sketched in the air, even the dubi-
ous Rébuffat conceded, “It's the least difficult proposition and the most reasonable.”
So began what Terray would call the “fantastic up-and-down ballet” of establishing
a series of camps on Annapurna and hauling gear and food to them. During the week
that followed, the strongest team member was Terray. A close second, however, was
Herzog himself. There is no reason to doubt the leader's own self-appraisal in this mat-
ter in Annapurna. When it came to taking the lead and plowing through deep snow
up avalanche-prone slopes, getting the tents pitched at a new campsite, and maintain-
ing the high morale needed to counter the team's setbacks, even the accounts of his
teammates confirm that Herzog was a paragon. A sample entry in Lachenal's diary,
from May 28: “Couzy and I descended once more to Camp II. There we found Momo
[Herzog] in great form.” Terray recorded a discussion with Herzog on the day before,
in which the leader bemoaned his teammates' low spirits: “His own form at around
twenty-three thousand feet, by contrast, was very hopeful, and he still felt confident
of victory as long as the daily snowfalls did not exceed six to eight inches.”
A T 31 the eldest of the six principal climbers on Annapurna, Maurice Herzog had
grown up in Lyon. His father was an engineer and a casual alpinist who had served in
the French Foreign Legion in World War I. Wounded in battle, he had been repatriated
to Toulouse, where he met Herzog's mother. The couple eventually had eight children,
of whom Maurice was the first. In a telling phrase embedded in the memoir he pub-
lished in 1998, Herzog reflected, “As the eldest, I felt myself invested with the mission
of guardian of order.”
That memoir, titled L'Autre Annapurna ( The Other Annapurna ), appearing in
Herzog's eightieth year, represents only the second personal narrative to flow from the
pen of France's most famous mountaineer. During the intervening years, Herzog had