Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As he lay there gasping it was his turn to feel a moment of despair, and he said: “It's all over,
Lionel. I'm finished. Leave me and let me die.” I encouraged him as best I could, and in a
minute or two he felt better.
The plea to be left behind, whether briefly expressed or played out in the full ex-
change of the later memoir, raises yet another question. In changing his story about
what Lachenal voiced after his terrible fall on June 3—from a demand to descend to
Camp II for injections, in
Annapurna,
to a demand to be left to die, in
L'Autre An-
napurna
—Herzog perhaps unconsciously projects his own moribund despair of June 5
onto Lachenal's plight two days earlier.
But in both versions, Herzog makes it clear that he is not snow-blind. “The weather
was perfect,” he writes in
Annapurna.
“The mountains were resplendent. Never had
I seen them look so beautiful.” Yet a few paragraphs later, he admits, “[Lachenal] was
the only one of the four of us who could see Camp II below.” If Herzog had escaped
snow-blindness, why couldn't he see Camp II as well?
For the second morning, the men struggle to put on their boots. This time Herzog's
have to be cut open before he can force his feet into them. Now, as the men prepare to
stagger on down the mountain, they disagree as to which direction to start out. Herzog
urges a leftward course, Lachenal a rightward.
Curiously, only Herzog's two versions mention anyone calling for help. In
An-
napurna,
at first the other three think Lachenal's shouts toward Camp II are the final
proof of his derangement. “Lachenal's frozen feet affected his nervous system. . . . Ob-
viously he didn't know what he was doing. . . . They were shrieks of despair, reminding
me tragically of some climbers lost in the Mont Blanc massif whom I had endeavored
to save.” Yet in the next moment, the others join in, hurling their feeble chorus of cries
into the thin air.
Then the men hear an answering cry. “Barely two hundred yards away,” Herzog
writes in
Annapurna,
“Marcel Schatz, waist-deep in snow, was coming slowly toward
us like a boat on the surface of the slope.” Terray puts their rescuer even closer: “Sud-
denly Schatz emerged from behind a serac fifty yards away.”
The four men, it turns out, had bivouacked in their crevasse only 200 yards from
Camp IVA, where Schatz and Couzy lay in their sleeping bags. In
Annapurna,
Schatz
and Herzog embrace, as Schatz murmurs, “It is wonderful—what you have done.” The
1998 memoir elaborates on this most emotional of reunions, turning it into a mystical
religious moment:
He clasped me in his arms, gave me a kiss of peace, breathed new life into me. Yes, in that
moment this man transmitted to me something of sacred value. I would have liked to pray:
