Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Christ, martyred by his triumph, sacrificing his hands and feet so that his fellow men
might live. Later, that metaphor would become explicit.
B
Y
J
UNE
18, the ragtag caravan had left the mountains for good, entering the deep forest
of Lété, where gnarled trees interwove with giant rhododendrons. Still unable to walk
a step, Herzog and Lachenal were now carried on stretchers by four men each. It was
the season of the rice harvest in the lowlands, and porters kept deserting. The team's
progress was so sorely jeopardized that finally the sahibs, led by Noyelle, simply went
into the fields and recruited bearers by force.
On the 18th, in the forest, Oudot called a halt so that he could trim dead flesh from
the wounded men's limbs. Herzog felt little as Oudot's scissors snipped away at his
feet, “but my hands were so sensitive that the slightest touch made me cry out in
pain, and I broke down.” “It was horrible to watch,” noted Lachenal. Then it was his
turn. After the surgical snipping, Oudot proceeded with the hated abdominal injec-
tions. “These made me suffer horribly,” wrote Lachenal. “He had to jab me with the
needle a dozen times. Tonight, the morphine was necessary.”
Herzog had lapsed into a high fever, the thermometer at one point reaching 105
degrees Fahrenheit. By now, he writes in
Annapurna,
he had lost forty pounds. (In
L'Autre Annapurna,
the weight loss becomes sixty-five pounds.) Delirious, Herzog an-
ticipated the end: “Gathering together the last shreds of energy, in one last long prayer,
I implored death to come and deliver me. I had lost the will to live.”
In
Annapurna,
that nadir of surrender in the Lété woods passes with the feverish
night. In the 1998 memoir, however, it expands to lay the foundation for the central
notion of Herzog's whole life—that with Annapurna, he came back from the dead to
be born again. Lying on his mattress among the larch trees of Lété, he imagines him-
self already buried. “On the knoll where my tomb lay, a cross of wood had been erec-
ted—quite unprecedented among these Buddhist places, where our Christian crosses
mean nothing.” Herzog watches a long funerary procession—sahibs, Sherpas, port-
ers—“paying me a last homage as they pass by my tomb.”
Semiconscious once more, he feels life slipping away.
An ecstatic serenity enveloped me. . . . It had to do not with an end or with nothingness, but
with another existence. . . .
Then came the miracle. I crossed again the boundary between the visible and the invis-
ible. Once more, I saw the faces washed of all color, approaching me as if across an air
bubble.
No sound reached my ears, but already I felt hands placed on me, stroking my face.
