Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to rip the tent from the pitons and ice axes that anchored it to the 40 degree slope and
send the men hurtling down the mountain. Through long hours in the darkness, they
had clung to the tent poles, in Herzog's words, “as a drowning man clings to a plank,”
just to keep the fragile shelter from being torn apart by the wind.
The evening before, Herzog and Lachenal had brewed a few cups of tea for dinner,
but they had been too nauseated by the altitude to eat. In the morning, even making
tea proved too arduous a task. At the last minute, Herzog stuffed a tube of condensed
milk, some nougat, and a spare pair of socks into his pack.
It was June 3, 1950, and the monsoon would arrive any day, smothering the high
Himalaya in a seamless blanket of mist and falling snow, prohibiting human trespass.
For the past two months, the French expedition had wandered up one valley after an-
other, simply trying to find Annapurna. The maps were all wrong because no Western-
ers had ever before approached the slopes of the tenth-highest mountain in the world.
At last, in late May, with less than two weeks left before the monsoon, the team
had discovered the deep gorge formed by the torrential current of the Miristi Khola.
Having breached its defenses, they had emerged beneath the north face of Annapurna.
Racing up glacier-hung corridors, menaced at every hand by massive avalanches that
thundered over the cliffs, the team placed four camps in a leftward crescent that fol-
lowed a cunning line up the mountain. On June 2, Lachenal and Herzog, aided by
Sherpas Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, slipped through a notch in the ice cliff the team had
named the Sickle and crossed a steep, dangerous slope to pitch Camp V beside a broken
rock band. Herzog offered a place in the summit team to Ang-Tharkey, the sirdar or
head Sherpa, but the man, frightened by the cold that had already numbed his feet,
declined. The two Sherpas headed back to Camp IVA, leaving Lachenal and Herzog to
their windy ordeal.
Now the two men clumped slowly up the interminable slope, shrouded in silence.
Wrote Herzog later, “Each of us lived in a closed and private world of his own. I was
suspicious of my mental processes; my mind was working very slowly and I was per-
fectly aware of the low state of my intelligence.”
It did not take long for both men's feet to go numb. Abruptly Lachenal halted, took
off a boot, and tried to rub his stockinged foot back into feeling. “I don't want to be
like Lambert,” he muttered. The great Swiss climber Raymond Lambert—a friend of
Lachenal's—had lost all the toes on both feet to frostbite after being trapped in winter
on a traverse of the Aiguilles du Diable, near Chamonix, France.
The climbers emerged from the mountain's shadow into the sunlight, yet the iron
cold persisted. Again Lachenal stopped to take off a boot. “I can't feel anything,” he
groaned. “I think I'm beginning to get frostbite.”
