Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pitch, trying to find the way from his memory of the occasional landmark—a serac
here, a crevasse there.
By midday the wind had calmed almost to nothing, yet still the thick flakes of
snow fell and piled up alarmingly fast. Terray and Rébuffat now alternated in the lead,
breaking trail with painful slowness through first thigh-deep, then waist-deep powder.
The mountain around the men turned into a blurry, featureless universe of white.
“We kept colliding with hummocks which we had taken for hollows,” wrote Herzog.
A heavy despair settled over the quartet, as they recognized they were lost. Now and
then, Terray urged a halt so he could take off his boots and massage his feet. “Though
ready for death,” he later wrote, “I had no wish to survive mutilated.”
Herzog responded to the party's increasingly dire predicament by lapsing into a
kind of robotic apathy, following Rébuffat, as Terray put it, “without a murmur.”
Retracing their steps to try to find a landmark, crisscrossing the slopes almost ran-
domly, the men sought a way out of their maze. They sensed they had reached a point
somewhere near the great ice cliff of the Sickle, but could see no hint of it. Camp IVA
must lie somewhere hereabouts—a single tent in a miasma of white.
Even in these extreme circumstances, it would suit Herzog to perpetuate the notion
that informs
Annapurna
from start to finish—that his was the counsel of reason and
deliberation, trying to rein in the rash impulses of his teammates. “Terray, when his
turn came, charged madly ahead.” “Lachenal gave him considerable trouble. Perhaps
he was not quite in his right mind. He said it was no use going on; we must dig a
hole in the snow and wait for fine weather.” “Each in turn did the maddest things: Ter-
ray traversed the steep and avalanchy slopes with one crampon badly adjusted. He and
Rébuffat performed incredible feats of balance without the least slip.”
In hopes that they were in the vicinity of Camp IVA, and that Schatz and Couzy or
some of the Sherpas might be ensconced there, the men cried for help in unison. Only
the swish of softly falling snow answered their plaints.
The hours had passed almost unnoticed: night was approaching. The last-ditch sug-
gestion of Lachenal—according to Herzog the whim of a madman—loomed in fact as
the men's best hope: to dig a hole in which to bivouac, hoping to survive until the
weather changed. Recognizing this fact, Terray started to carve out a hollow with feck-
less swings of his axe.
As he did so, Lachenal suddenly let out a cry. Terray jerked around, but saw nothing
of his friend. Without realizing it, Lachenal had been standing on a thin snow bridge
over a hidden crevasse. The bridge had broken, plunging him into the depths of the
crevasse, unchecked by any belay. Yet the potential disaster turned out to be a deliver-
