Deliverance - True Summit - page 78

to find a pair of boots; when he tried to put them on, he realized they were Rébuffat's.
Terray found his boots shortly after.
All sources agree that Rébuffat was the first to emerge from the crevasse. In An-
napurna, Terray calls up, “What's the weather like?”
“Can't see a thing,” answers Rébuffat. “It's blowing hard.”
Terray follows Rébuffat to the surface. Impatient as ever, Lachenal gives up the
search for his own boots and—in Herzog's words—“called frantically, hauled himself
up on the rope. . . . Terray from outside pulled as hard as he could.”
In Herzog's telling, “When [Lachenal] emerged from the opening he saw the sky
was clear and blue, and he began to run like a madman, shrieking, 'It's fine! It's fine!' ”
Thus the team realizes that, having taken off their goggles to navigate through the
previous day's storm, Rébuffat and Terray have become snow-blind. They confuse the
milky blur before their eyes with a continuing tempest. Only the sighted Lachenal can
see the blue sky that promises the men salvation.
Terray reinforces the image of Lachenal as madman: “No sooner was he up than he
started bellowing again: 'It's fine! It's fine! We're saved! We're saved!'—and ran off
toward the end of the trough in which our cave was situated.”
Lachenal's diary, however, tells a quite different story. Having failed to find his own
boots, he climbs to the surface, not hauled like a sack of potatoes by Terray, but under
his own power, by “planting the tips of my frozen feet in the snow.” In Annapurna,
only Terray and Rébuffat are snow-blind; according to Lachenal, Herzog is also. On
emerging from the crevasse, Lachenal confirms the fact that a storm still rages, with a
strong wind. There is no mad running in the snow, no screams of deliverance. Instead,
“Finally I see a corner of blue sky, then little by little all the sky clears. The weather is
good. We're saved if we have enough strength.”
Far below him, Lachenal sees Camp II. Hoping to attract someone's attention down
below, he waves his arms and shouts. Despite being snow-blind himself, Terray treats
his partner's actions as the folly of a deluded man. “Lachenal, now completely hyster-
ical, was shouting and semaphoring in the direction of Camp II, which he claimed he
could see at the bottom of the slope.”
What is the truth here? One can forgive Lachenal for his joyous shouts at the mo-
ment when the tide in the men's luck seems to have turned. One can imagine him
running across the snow as he urges his friends to get on with their descent. In all the
photos and diagrams of Annapurna, it looks eminently possible to see Camp II from
the top of the Sickle, some 3,300 feet above. Perhaps that was too large a gap for voices
to carry across, but who could blame a man for shouting? And once the weather had