Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The day had deteriorated into a gathering storm. Even before the second tent was
pitched, Terray sent Pansy and Aila down to Camp IV, counting on their being able to
follow the trail before wind and snow could fill the steps again. At last Rébuffat and
Terray crawled into one tent, Couzy and Schatz into the other.
It seemed obvious that Lachenal and Herzog must be making their summit bid, des-
pite the storm. “Time went by without our seeing anything,” recalled Terray. “Out-
side the furies of the storm were in full cry, and we began to get seriously worried.”
As the afternoon waned, it became apparent that it would soon be too late for anyone
to go down to Camp IV. With the return of Lachenal and Herzog, there would be six
men crammed into two two-man tents—an intolerable prospect in a storm. Couzy and
Schatz, both altitude-sick, offered to head down to IVA. As soon as they had parted,
Terray moved to the empty tent and started melting snow to brew up malt drinks for
his teammates. “As time went by we became more and more anxious,” he later wrote.
“I kept on sticking my head out of the tent to see if I could see anything, but there was
nothing but the pitiless blizzard.”
At last, toward the end of the afternoon, Terray heard the crunching of footsteps
in the snow. He thrust himself outside the tent and saw Herzog, alone, his beard and
clothing coated with rime. “We've made it,” the expedition leader said. “We're back
from Annapurna.”
What happened next appears in both
Annapurna
and
Conquistadors of the Useless,
in passages that strikingly agree. Wrote Herzog,
Terray, who was speechless with delight, wrung my hands. Then the smile vanished from
his face: “Maurice—your hands!” There was an uneasy silence. I had forgotten that I had
lost my gloves: my fingers were violet and white and hard as wood. The other two stared at
them in dismay—they realized the full seriousness of the injury.
In Terray's telling:
I seized him by the hand, only to find to my horror that I was shaking an icicle. What had
been a hand was like metal. I cried out: “Momo, your hand is frostbitten!” He looked at it
indifferently, and replied: “That's nothing, it'll come back.”
“What about Biscante?” Terray anxiously asked, using Lachenal's nickname.
“He won't be long,” Herzog answered. “He was just in front of me!”
Rébuffat got Herzog into his tent, while Terray started heating water on the stove.
Lachenal's failure to appear deeply troubled Terray. Once more, he thrust his head out-
side the tent to look for any sign of his friend in the deepening murk of the storm.
