Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
equally worn: his choice of one over the other is a flip-of-the-coin decision. Yet in the
last stanza,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
T
HROUGH THE NIGHT
of June 3-4, the four men at Camp V got almost no sleep. For the
first time, the storm showed no signs of abating toward dawn. For all the men knew,
the monsoon had arrived.
Wrote Herzog in
Annapurna,
As the night wore on the snow lay heavier on the tent, and once again I had the frightful
feeling of being slowly and silently asphyxiated. I tried, with all the strength of which I was
capable, to push off with both forearms the mass that was crushing me. These fearful exer-
tions left me gasping for breath and I fell back into the same exhausted state. It was much
worse than the previous night.
According to Terray, the wind was so violent that it threatened to tear the tents loose
from their anchors.
At last, in the wee hours, Herzog and Rébuffat drifted into an exhausted
sleep—only to be wakened by Terray, that demon of the early start. As Terray tried
to help Lachenal get dressed, he ran into a seemingly insoluble problem. Lachenal's
feet were too swollen to force back into his cut-open boots. There was no way the man
could descend the mountain in stocking feet and survive. But what could be done?
Suddenly the only possible answer dawned on Terray, bringing with it a gust of ter-
ror. His own boots were two sizes larger than Lachenal's. If he gave them to his part-
ner, then forced his own feet into Lachenal's inadequate boots . . . The exchange could
easily cost Terray his own feet. He hesitated, then performed an act of supreme self-
denial. As he later wrote,
To give way would be dishonor, a crime against the name of friendship. There was nothing
else for it, and with the feelings of a soldier going over the top I hauled off my second pair
of stockings and stuffed my feet into these new instruments of torture.
