Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
With time heavy on his hands, Lachenal wrote lengthier entries in his diary than he
had earlier, when he had still been caught up in the daily tasks of the expedition. Fully
a third of the diary is given over to the retreat, and those passages abound in vivid de-
tail. In 1956, however, Lucien Devies and Gérard Herzog condensed thirty-four days'
worth of entries into a scant two and a half undated pages in the published
Carnets
du Vertige.
Those cobbled-together extracts disproportionately emphasize Lachenal's
occasional happy remarks, as when he notices a beautiful countryside or rejoices at
receiving letters from his wife brought by couriers from distant outposts. Virtually
all evidence of conflict, disgust, despair—or for that matter, morphine—has been ex-
punged.
Herzog himself was slipping into his own despair. Realizing that amputations were
inevitable, he wept in Terray's arms. “Life's not over,” Terray tried to reassure him.
“You'll see France again, and Chamonix.”
“Yes, Chamonix perhaps,” answered the invalid, “but I'll never be able to climb
again.”
The ordeal of being carried wore Herzog's forbearance thin as well as Lachenal's.
“The violent jerking caused me unbearable pain. To go on was madness, and, moreover,
I just didn't feel capable of standing another couple of hours of this torture.”
Herzog's patience snapped on June 15, when he thought his ice axe had been lost.
In
Annapurna,
he says merely, “I set great store by it; as Lachenal had lost his, it was
the only one to have been to the top of Annapurna. . . . I had intended to present the
axe to the French Alpine Club on my return.” (The tool was found two days later, in
the last porter's load.)
In
L'Autre Annapurna,
nonetheless, with its sifting of decades of retrospect, the loss
takes on heavy symbolic meaning. The ice axe is “my dear companion in combat”;
crafted to Herzog's specifications by the master artisan Claudius Simond, it is “a work
of art.” Herzog goes on to claim, “For the alpinist, his axe is his legionnaire's sword. It
is the extension of himself. . . . Should I add that an axe is also a cross?”
In this extravaganza, as in other key passages of Herzog's 1998 memoir, the author
reveals how the myth of himself that memory has spun over almost five decades has
transformed the events of Annapurna. Herzog was always adamant (
contra
Rébuffat)
that the lessons learned and the virtues inculcated in the war made victory on An-
napurna possible. Martial imagery mingles with Christian. As a child, Herzog had been
smitten by a visit to the Cistercian monastery of Lérins, near Cannes, where he saw a
vision of holy peace.
With all the references to communion, resurrection, the cross, the kiss of peace, and
so forth in
L'Autre Annapurna,
Herzog adumbrates an implicit metaphor: himself as
