Deliverance - True Summit - page 71

something irredeemable, against which I was powerless. The consequences might be
most serious.”)
Instead, L'Autre Annapurna contained a long passage about searching through the
snow at the bottom of the crevasse, where the four men bivouacked through the night
of June 4-5, as Herzog looked for the boots that alone would ensure his and Lachenal's
survival, frantically raking the snow with his fingers:
My hands mattered little, if the boots could be recovered. . . . Each boot that I might recover
promised me the life of my comrade or myself. The price, alas, would be my frozen fingers.
Reading on in Herzog's 1998 memoir, I came across another passage that was at
odds with Annapurna. After Terray had glissaded to the rescue of the fallen Lachenal,
late on the afternoon of June 3, the pair struggled back up to the tents at Camp V. Now
Herzog recounted what Terray had said to him and Rébuffat on returning.
In broken phrases, Lionel told us that Louis, collapsed in the snow at the edge of a crevasse,
had refused to get up. He preferred to die nobly in the mountains in a rage rather than per-
ish in the midst of this army in full rout. Despite his protests, regardless of his delirium,
Lionel seized him with force and determination. Throwing caution to the winds, he dragged
him up to camp, without hesitating to resort to invectives and even violence.
This version of Lachenal's behavior after the fall cannot be reconciled with the accounts
in both Annapurna and Terray's Conquistadors (which has Lachenal wildly demand-
ing an immediate descent to Camp II to save his toes). It is even further afield from
Lachenal's own account, which attributes his frenzy to descend to a quite rational fear
that the storm would wipe out the men's tracks and leave them lost on the mountain.
(Indeed, this is precisely what happened on June 4.)
In his office, Herzog mused on the difference between his two books. “At one point
we had the idea of each of us writing a chapter of the expedition book, each on his spe-
cialty,” Herzog told me. “Oudot on medicine, Ichac on cinematography. . . . If we had
done that, the topic would not have been so interesting. It would have sold maybe one
thousand copies.
“Why did it sell fifteen million copies? Annapurna is a sort of novel. It's a novel,
but a true novel.
“It was easy to dictate it in the hospital. It came straight from my heart. I have a
good memory. There were times when I was crying for myself as I dictated it, like at
the bottom of the crevasse. As for the dialogue, sometimes I paraphrased, but I knew
my comrades well. I could imagine them speaking. Even when I wasn't there, I slipped
in some dialogue.”