Deliverance - True Summit - page 66

countered Schatz and Couzy, who had at last completed their assigned task of hauling
loads in support of the summit duo.
Throughout the expedition, it had been Terray who was the stickler for early starts.
In that respect, he was ahead of his time, often rousing his teammates at 3:00 or 4:00
A.M. , thereby boldly applying the Alpine gambit of the predawn start to the Himalaya,
a range where his predecessors had by and large been too discouraged by cold and alti-
tude to brave a launch in the dark.
Happily assuming the lead on June 3, Terray plowed through chest-deep snow as he
angled toward a notch in the Sickle. Higher up the soft snow gave way to ice, in which
Terray chopped steps for the teammates who followed him. The plan was for all four
Frenchmen and two Sherpas, Pansy and Aila, to carry to Camp V, then reassess the
situation in light of what they might find out there about Lachenal and Herzog.
Topping out above the Sickle, the climbers soon came to the solitary tent at Camp
IVA, where they found Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, who recounted in detail the establish-
ing of Camp V the day before. “They had frostbitten feet and seemed in poor shape,”
noted Terray. “Our own two Sherpas were also complaining about their feet and lost
no time scrambling into the tent to get warm.”
On the bare slope above the Sickle, the four Frenchmen took turns breaking trail,
the footsteps from the day before having drifted in during the storm in the night.
Pansy and Aila followed gamely in the track. All six men felt their feet go numb, and
their progress was slowed by the necessity of stopping to take off boots and rub their
toes back into feeling inside the protection of a pied d'éléphant —a half sleeping bag
normally used for bivouacs. Though the men had come to Nepal with the finest foot-
gear money could buy, the best leather boots in the world in 1950 were inadequate for
the cold and lack of oxygen above 8,000 meters. (It would not be until the invention of
plastic double boots in the 1980s that footgear equal to the task of preventing frostbite
at such altitudes would become available.) Bottled oxygen had been used on Everest as
early as 1922, but the French team had chosen to do without it. This purist decision
in turn contributed to the problem of cold feet, for a climber breathing supplemental
oxygen above 24,000 feet normally has far better circulation than one without.
With Terray doing the lion's share of the trail-breaking, the six men reached Camp
V around midday. There they found a single tent half buried in snow. There was no
note from Herzog or Lachenal. Laboring mightily, the men hacked out a second plat-
form and erected their tent. Terray chopped away with his axe in an efficient fury: “At
times I would force so much that a black veil began to form in front of my eyes and I
fell to my knees, panting like an overdriven beast.”