Deliverance - True Summit - page 77

So began one of the legendary bivouacs in Himalayan annals. The grotto was just
big enough to accommodate the four men, who broke off icicles and rearranged the
snow underneath them to make their huddled vigil marginally more comfortable. All
night, whenever any man moved, or jolted suddenly as a cramp seized his leg, he dis-
turbed the other three.
Terray pulled out his sleeping bag and slithered inside it, “carried away on a tide of
voluptuous bliss.” It was only now that he learned that Rébuffat and Herzog had neg-
lected to pack up their own sleeping bags. Sitting on their packs, the others shivered
stoically in silence. As Terray recalled, “I soon began to feel my disgusting egoism,
however, and after some contortions Herzog, Lachenal, and I all managed to squeeze
our lower portions into the providential bag.”
All four men had taken off their boots: to leave them on was to invite certain frost-
bite. Rébuffat rubbed his own feet, complaining out loud of the pain. Terray rubbed
Herzog's and Lachenal's feet for hours each.
In Annapurna, Herzog reveals that even in this wretched bivouac, the euphoric
trance that had seized him on the summit detached him from his surroundings.
I was astonished to feel no pain. Everything material about me seemed to have dropped
away. I seemed to be quite clear in my thoughts and yet I floated in a kind of peaceful happi-
ness.
In his next breath, however, Herzog admits that he had given himself up for dead. “All
was over, I thought. Wasn't this cavern the most beautiful grave I could hope for?”
Shortly before dawn, the men heard “a queer noise from a long way off . . . a sort of
prolonged hiss.” Suddenly they were inundated with powder snow. A small avalanche
had swept the slope above them, spilling loads of fine spindrift into the hole by which
they had entered the crevasse. By the time the avalanche stopped, the men were bur-
ied in powder. They struggled to free themselves, but now their belongings—including
their precious boots—lay lost beneath the new debris.
At this critical juncture in the men's survival ordeal, the various accounts diverge
once more. In Annapurna, someone breaks the silence: “Daylight!” To which Rébuffat
wearily answers, “Too early to start.”
Terray admits to having fallen asleep, despite the misery of the crevasse, only to be
awakened by the avalanche, which he places at first light. Lachenal alone records the
hour of the avalanche—4:30 A.M. , when it would still have been pitch dark.
With the “ghastly light” of dawn, the men struggle to find their belongings beneath
the piles of new snow about them. According to Terray, Rébuffat found his boots first,
put them on, and scrambled to the surface. In Herzog's account, Lachenal was the first