Deliverance - True Summit - page 82

carried off one of the tents, by good luck none of the Sherpas was injured. Greeting
Lachenal, who took off his boots to rub his feet, Pansy tried to comfort him, telling
him the frostbite was nothing serious.
Both Herzog and Lachenal felt that the only hope to save their frozen digits was to
go all the way down to Camp II the same day. Herzog roped up with Sarki and Alia,
while Lachenal and even the snow-blind Rébuffat insisted on descending unroped.
Meanwhile Schatz, Ang-Tharkey, and Pansy climbed back up to IVA to persuade Ter-
ray to descend. While Terray deliberated, Schatz performed a courageous task, sliding
back into the crevasse of the bivouac to search for Herzog's camera, with its exposed
summit photos. After much pawing through the loose snow, he found the Foca camera
undamaged.
In the heat of the sun, after so much new snow had fallen, avalanches were breaking
loose everywhere, creating a near-constant din. Below Camp III, Herzog and his two
ropemates set off an avalanche and hurtled with it toward a 1,500-foot precipice. The
three men bounced from serac to serac, before the rope fortuitously snagged over a
crest of ice, suspending Herzog on one side—upside down, with the cord threatening
to strangle him—and Sarki and Aila on the other. Eventually the Sherpas were able to
pull Herzog back to safety.
Strung out all up and down the mountain, the team descended like the army in full
rout Lachenal would later conjure up. Lachenal, who had not been wearing goggles,
stopped to take a short nap; when he awoke, he found that he too was snow-blind. He
tried to proceed down the steep slope by feeling for holds, then thought better of it,
waiting instead until Couzy caught up and guided him the rest of the way down.
As he slid down a rope that had been fixed in place over an ice cliff, holding on with
bare hands, Herzog watched as pieces of skin were flayed from his fingers. At the bot-
tom, he wrapped his bleeding hands in a handkerchief—in order, he would say in 1998,
to avoid upsetting his teammates.
As the men severally approached Camp II, Sherpas came up to greet them and help
them down the last, seemingly interminable slope. It turned out that Ichac and Oudot
had indeed heard shouts that morning from up high. With binoculars, they had spot-
ted two men on a patch of ice near Camp IV, whom they took for Schatz and Couzy.
Deeply alarmed, Oudot had started to organize a rescue party, but the climbers had
descended faster than their would-be saviors could climb.
In Annapurna, Herzog offers his first words to Ichac, Oudot, and Noyelle at Camp
II: “We're back from Annapurna. We got to the top yesterday [actually the day before
yesterday], Lachenal and I.” Then, after a pause: “My feet and hands are frostbitten.”