Deliverance - True Summit - page 76

ance. Lachenal had fallen a mere twelve to fifteen feet into the hole, checking up un-
hurt in a perfect nook for an emergency bivouac.
In Annapurna, Herzog renders the exchange between the two old friends at the mo-
ment of the crevasse plunge:
“Lachenal!” called Terray.
A voice, muffled by many thicknesses of ice and snow, came up to us. It was impossible
to make out what it was saying.
“Lachenal!”
Terray jerked the rope violently; this time we could hear.
“I'm here!”
“Anything broken?”
“No! It'll do for the night! Come along.”
Forty-eight years later, in L'Autre Annapurna, this dialogue has been revised to
make it sound more colloquial. Lachenal curses his friends on the surface as a “bunch
of babotsh ” (local slang for the inhabitants of the valley below Chamonix). Which
version better represents the “true novel” Herzog aimed at in Annapurna ? Both, no
doubt, are products of Herzog's memory. For that matter, Terray's Conquistadors is
equally a partial fiction—as, some would argue, are inevitably all memoir and bio-
graphy. Even Lachenal's diary is a construct at odds with the whole truth.
In that diary, Lachenal delivers his own I-told-you-so:
The whole day, we stirred up the snow without knowing where we were, climbing, descend-
ing, retracing our steps, only to come finally, at 6:30 P.M. , to a decision we should have made
long before: to find a crevasse in which to spend the night. We found one, into which I fell
by accident.
Self-congratulatory that diary account may be, but in its clear-headedness, it undercuts
the portrait of both of Herzog's books, and even, at times, of Terray's—of Biscante as
an impetuous climber operating on reckless instinct, having to be restrained, after his
fall, like a madman on a leash. If we can trust Lachenal's account—written, after all,
for himself, and not for publication—then it was he who most cogently summed up
the four men's plight on June 4 and sensed the way out of it.
In any event, one by one, Terray, Herzog, and Rébuffat dropped down what Herzog
called “a regular toboggan-slide” into the crevasse to join Lachenal. Terray says it was
a plunge of merely twelve to fifteen feet; Herzog measures it at thirty feet in An-
napurna, forty feet in his later memoir. (Terray's estimate is the more likely, for a
thirty-foot drop could easily have caused broken ankles.)