Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“My God, I want so much to be a man, but I remain your infant.” . . . With an infinite gen-
tleness, my friend supported me and helped me take my first steps.
Lost in the persistent characterizing of Lachenal in extremis as a madman is the fact
that, once again, on the morning of June 5, he had a better notion of what to do than
the others did. Calling for help, far from a shriek of despair, was a pragmatic choice,
and it brought, with Schatz's answering cry, the escape the men so dearly needed.
I
N THE TELLING AND RETELLING
of the Annapurna story, Schatz's discovery of the four
stranded men has always been treated as the capstone of a miraculous series of close
calls resolved by heroic deeds. Yet one need not be an iconoclast to ponder the circum-
stances leading up to that moment.
By the afternoon of June 4, in full blizzard, Schatz and Couzy would have known
that the four men above them were in trouble. They would have guessed that, had they
not already come to grief, the quartet would be descending in a desperate search for
Camp IVA, and that the storm had wiped out the track. To go out and look for the men
might have been impossible: it might well have caused Schatz and Couzy to lose their
own way. But most climbers would at least have stood outside the tent and shouted, in
hopes their friends would hear them and so be guided to the elusive camp. (On Everest
in 1924, above Camp VI, Noel Odell whistled and yodeled for the better part of an hour
in the vain hope of signaling his lost friends Mallory and Irvine.)
There is no evidence that Schatz or Couzy did anything on June 4 other than lie
in their tent and wait. As Françoise Rébuffat bitterly complained in 1999, “What were
they doing, Couzy and Schatz, sleeping in their tent like a couple of schoolboys, in-
stead of going out to look?”
Indeed, as the four exhausted men followed Schatz back to Camp IVA, they found
Couzy still in his sleeping bag. By now Terray was preoccupied with his own terror of
frostbite. He asked his friends to leave him at IVA so he could massage his frozen feet;
they might return the next morning, he urged, to fetch him in case his snow-blindness
had not improved. Herzog quotes Terray as saying, “I want to be whole, or dead!”
In the tent, Terray attacked his own feet, rubbing and beating them for hours.
“After a time,” he later wrote, “the circulation came back and their rather greeny
whiteness gave way to a fine healthy pink, but the pain was so great that I could not
restrain myself from groaning out loud.”
As the other five men climbed down the Sickle, they set loose a slab of snow that
gathered into an avalanche, thundering down and engulfing Camp IV below, where
the four Sherpas who had gone high on Annapurna awaited. Although the avalanche
