Travel Reference
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jerked his foot away, whereupon Oudot scolded him, telling him to be more cooperat-
ive. Incredulous, Lachenal wrote in his diary that night, “I will remember this forever.”
The jocular tone of gallows humor bathes this nightmarish scene in the railway car
in
Annapurna.
Things had to be cleaned up now; the nauseating smell drove even the natives away. Sarki
and Foutharkey set to work, they opened the the door wide and with a sort of old broom
made of twigs, they pushed everything onto the floor. In the midst of a whole heap of rub-
bish rolled an amazing number of toes of all sizes which were then swept onto the platform
before the startled eyes of the natives.
In his diary, Lachenal wrote at the end of this wretched day, “I suffered something
truly horrible, but after all, so much the better. Is not memory proportional to suffer-
ing?”
In a 1999 documentary about Annapurna filmed by Bernard George, Herzog looks
back with a certain disdain on Lachenal's agonies. “He was obsessed with this story
of his feet,” says Herzog, in measured tones. “There was a kind of obsession that was
painful. It breathes in all his writings: 'My feet, my feet, my feet.' . . .
“In climbing, one must adapt. I lost both my feet and my hands, but it didn't ruin
my life.”
What was the cause of Oudot's haste in the railway car? Surprisingly, Herzog had
chosen to divide the party. He, Oudot, Ichac, and Noyelle would change trains at
Gorakhpur and ride to Kathmandu. Lachenal, Terray, Rébuffat, Schatz, and Couzy
would proceed to Delhi. The rationale for this separation, according to Herzog, was
that “I intended to make every effort possible to keep the promise I had given at the
start to visit the Maharajah of Nepal.”
It was no accident that Herzog took the expedition doctor with him. By now, on July
6, all the climbers wanted nothing but to get back to France as soon as possible. Not
only psychologically, but in terms of the worsening condition of Herzog's and Lachen-
al's feet and hands, the sooner the men could fly to France the better.
In the end, however, it would be eleven more days before the Annapurna team
boarded its airplane. Those eleven days of waiting drove Lachenal deeper into fury and
despair.
I
N THE CIRCUMSTANCES,
it is puzzling that Herzog would have delayed his whole team's
return to France for any ceremony, no matter how prestigious. In
Annapurna,
he de-
votes three and a half of the last ive pages of the topic to his audience with the Ma-
harajah, which unfolds as a pageant of jewel-encrusted uniforms, of Gurkha soldiers
