Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Herzog too was worried about his feet, but he convinced himself that wriggling his
toes as he walked would ward off frostbite. “I could not feel them,” he would write,
“but that was nothing new in the mountains.”
The men marched on, at a pitifully slow pace. Herzog's dreamy isolation reclaimed
him: “Lachenal appeared to me as a sort of specter—he was alone in his world, I in
mine.”
Suddenly Lachenal grabbed his companion. “If I go back, what will you do?” he
blurted out.
Unbidden, images of the party's two months of struggle flashed through Herzog's
mind: lowland trudges in the jungle heat, fierce rock-and-ice pitches climbed, loads
painfully hauled to higher camps. “Must we give up?” he asked himself. “Impossible!
My whole being revolted against the idea. I had made up my mind, irrevocably. Today
we were consecrating an ideal, and no sacrifice was too great.”
To Lachenal, he said, “I should go on by myself.”
Without hesitating, Lachenal responded, “Then I'll follow you.”
Herzog lapsed back into his private trance. “An astonishing happiness welled up in
me, but I could not define it,” he would later write. “Everything was so new, so utterly
unprecedented. . . . We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we
had no fear as we continued upward.”
T
HERE ARE FOURTEEN MOUNTAINS
in the world higher than 8,000 meters (about 26,240
feet)—all of them in the Himalaya. The first attempt to climb one came in 1895, when
Alfred Mummery, the finest British climber of his day, attacked Nanga Parbat. Rad-
ically underestimating the size and difficulty of the mountain, Mummery and two
Gurkha porters vanished during a reconnaissance of the west face. Their bodies were
never found.
By 1950, twenty-two different expeditions had tackled various 8,000-meter peaks,
yet not one had succeeded. The boldest efforts during the 1920s and 1930s, on Everest,
K2, Kanchenjunga, and Nanga Parbat, had been launched by British, American, and
German teams. Although France counted among its climbers some of the leading alpin-
ists of those decades, the country had made no great showing in the Himalaya, with
only a single expedition to Gasherbrum I to its credit. For fourteen years, the highest
summit reached anywhere in the world had remained that of 25,645-foot Nanda Devi
in India, climbed by an Anglo-American team in 1936. The Second World War had in-
terrupted the Himalayan campaigns, and it was not until 1949 that Europeans again
turned their attention toward the highest mountains in the world.
