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pausing to wonder why Herzog and Lachenal suffered such appalling damage on a
single day's push above 26,000 feet. The boots of the British insulated considerably
better than those of the French, which had been designed for the Alps. Even so, back in
the 1920s and 1930s teams had come home from high altitude in the Himalaya without
serious frostbite.
On Everest in 1922, the British discovered that they could not afford to wear cram-
pons up high, because the straps that fixed them to the boots inevitably cut off circu-
lation. As long as footgear was made of pliable leather (as were the French boots), that
sinister tradeoff would manifest itself. By choosing to wear their crampons all the way
to the top, as indeed the terrain demanded, Lachenal and Herzog cut their margin of
safety from frostbite.
In 1922, 1924, and 1953, the Everest climbers used bottled oxygen. The French on
Annapurna eschewed it—one more factor possibly cutting thin that margin of safety.
A hypoxic climber is thought to be more likely to develop frostbite than one breathing
a steady flow of supplemental gas.
It seems unlikely that Lachenal and Herzog drank much, if anything, on the morn-
ing of June 3. Herzog says the pair could not face the chore of lighting the stove and
making tea. Dehydration further increases climbers' risk of frostbite.
Reading Annapurna, one gains little sense of what drugs and medicines the men
were taking, but Lachenal's unexpurgated diary makes clear that almost nightly the
French were swallowing sleeping pills. In 1950, doctors had not yet warned against
this practice, which can depress normal breathing and heighten the effects of oxygen
deprivation. On Annapurna, most of the Frenchmen and many of the Sherpas smoked
cigarettes daily. As a vasoconstrictor, nicotine makes frostbite more likely, though the
science of the day had not yet deduced this possibility. (On Everest in 1922, George
Finch, who performed as well as the unstoppable George Mallory, believed that cigar-
ette smoking actually aided the process of acclimatization.)
Finally, among the expedition's generous supply of pills was a stimulant called
Maxiton. In the 1950s, and even into the 1970s, climbers routinely took “uppers” such
as Dexedrine to push their weary bodies through unavoidable ordeals. Maxiton, later
users would learn, is a particularly dangerous drug, which even in small doses can pro-
duce, according to one source, “a kind of drunkenness, with a disturbance of one's sense
of equilibrium.” The drug “is a powerful stimulant that creates a sort of euphoria.”
Though the stimulant would not have directly contributed to the men's frostbite,
it might have induced the euphoria Herzog testified to on the summit, causing him
to linger far too long, and later carelessly to drop his gloves. (To this writer in 1999,
however, Herzog denied ever taking Maxiton. Yet one can read Annapurna without
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