Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Despite all the years that have since passed, this great interior adventure remains the
major event of my life. A second birth, more true in my eyes than the first—is that not a
sacred mystery?
In
L'Autre Annapurna,
Herzog makes it clear that the vision of Lété was no mere
feverish delirium. It constituted a genuine passage from one world to another. When
I interviewed Herzog in Paris in 1999, he elaborated on this theme: “Annapurna
changed my life. The man I became was very different from the man I had been. I had
been given a second life. The American edition of
L'Autre Annapurna
will be titled
Born Twice.
” From behind his desk, Herzog held the stumps of his fingers out toward
me. “You can see what is lost, but inside, I feel what I have gained.”
Some years after the expedition, Rébuffat, in an acerbic comment to the mayor of
Marseille, who was presenting him with the Legion of Honor, remarked that he had
had often to resist Herzog's “exhibition of his hands.” His erstwhile teammate may
thus have been the first to hint at the implied analogy that I felt Herzog was making,
in that uncomfortable moment in his office, as he held out for me to see the mutilated
evidence of his martyrdom, like Christ's stigmata.
The allegory played out in the Lété passage in
L'Autre Annapurna
—with the fu-
neral procession passing by the tomb, the hands laying hold of his body and caress-
ing his face, the wakening unto a new life, redeemed by his suffering—is clearly that
of Herzog as Christ. Yet the fact that Herzog, in so remembering the ordeal of An-
napurna, has invested it with such religious import is not necessarily a sign of gran-
diosity so much as proof of the man's genuinely mystical character. To the mystic, all
experience partakes of the gods.
M
EANWHILE
, the down-to-earth Lachenal cursed the delay in Lété. All his frustration
and suffering are packed into an extraordinary sentence he wrote in his diary on June
20.
My feet give me a lot of trouble and I have truly had enough of this, of the noise of the Kali
[Gandaki, the river the caravan followed], always the same, of listening constantly to people
around me talking in a shrill language that I don't understand, of suffering, of being dirty,
of being hot, of being injected by idiots, of not sleeping, of not being able to move around,
of being surrounded by no one who is kind to me, of passing whole days alone on my
stretcher with at best one Sherpa as companion, with no sahibs, knowing full well that noth-
ing will get done, not even ordinary tasks, without my having to ask many times and then
to wait a long, long time.
