Conquistadors of the Useless (46 page)

Presently we found our companions sitting in the sun at the top of an impossible three-thousand-foot drop. Lachenal, now completely hysterical, was shouting and semaphoring in the direction of Camp Two, which he claimed he could see at the bottom of the slope. I handed him his boots and crampons, then tried to fit on my own single one, but as I could hardly see I naturally fumbled a good deal. Gaston and I tried to put on Herzog's boots with much the same sort of results, while Lachenal, instead of helping us, lost control of himself even further, screaming: ‘Quick, quick, hurry up, we're saved.' It took half an hour to get Maurice equipped, and it was only done thanks to the discovery of a knife which enabled us to cut up the boots still more than they were already.

An interrogation of those who could still see produced the result that Lachenal said we should now head to the right, Maurice to the left, without either of them showing much conviction. What was one to do? Were we really to die in full view of our powerless friends at Camp Two? Obviously we were still far from saved. Maurice and Louis were frostbitten and exhausted, Gaston and I had lost our sight. In such circumstances there was little we could hope to do, and the fine weather had been nothing but a cruel deceiver. Why could we not just have been buried once and for all in the crevasse? The situation came home to me in all its dramatic intensity.

And just as in an old-fashioned film script, this was the precise moment at which the miracle occurred. From somewhere apparently not far away on our left came sounds, though at first none of us dared to believe the evidence of our senses. But there was no getting away from it, help was on its way. Suddenly Schatz emerged from behind a sérac fifty yards away: I could just make out a dark patch moving against the whiteness of the snow. As we were thus plunged back into the world of the living I realised that I had not felt anything in my hands or feet for several hours. What on earth would I do if they had to be amputated? Nothing really mattered to me beyond my work – I must save myself while there was still time. I ran off along Schatz s track like a madman and threw myself into the tent at Camp Four B just as Couzy had finished getting ready. I asked that the others should be taken down right away and that someone should return for me when possible, the next day if necessary.

The sound of the descending parties gradually faded away and I was left alone in the oppressive silence of great altitudes. I rubbed and beat my hands and feet for hours. Probably they were not as bad as I had feared. After a time the circulation came back and their rather greeny whiteness gave place to a fine healthy pink, but the pain was so great that I could not restrain myself from groaning out loud. Time went by without my realising it and I was too absorbed to reflect that I was alone, a minute speck on the immensity of the mountain, and that I was utterly dependent on those who had promised to return for me. If one of the avalanches I kept hearing should sweep them away my fate would be a slow death from starvation which, in my blind state, I could do nothing to avoid.

But presently there came a sound of words and of feet crunching the snow, and I heard the friendly voice of Schatz railing:

‘It's all right, Lionel. Don't worry. Angtharkay and I are coming.'

Despite my raging thirst I was ready to start down at once, but Marcel did not want to until he had made the heroic effort of searching in our crevasse for the camera and films we had left there. He was so long away that Angtharkay had time to melt me several billies of snow, and I began to get seriously worried in case he had fallen into a crevasse himself. At last he returned, however, triumphantly brandishing part of the films, and we started on down without any further delay.

From now on we were withdrawing our necks which had been stuck out so far, at times, that they had been in danger of getting broken. We had to push our luck once or twice more, but it stayed with us right to the end. Not the least of its miracles was our safe return down these slopes of thick new snow, surrounded on all sides by avalanches. Camp Four was carried away the exact moment that two Sherpas had left it. Herzog, Panzy and Aïla were actually caught in one and only saved because a snow bridge broke under Herzog, so that he fell into the underlying crevasse and the rope held over the edge.

And so, as the dream faded, we returned to earth in a fearful mix-up of pain and joy, heroism and cowardice, grandeur and meanness. In time we came to the first main road and its traffic. I was weighed down with sadness that it should all be over. Now we should have to face the world again.

In the epilogue to his book
Annapurna
, Maurice Herzog expresses something of the underlying meaning of such an adventure:

‘Men often talk of an ideal,' he says, ‘as an end which is never attained. But we did attain Annapurna. Our youthful minds did not go astray among the fictional prospects conjured up for the imagination of young people. For us the mountains formed a natural background where we played on the frontiers of life and death, and in doing so found the freedom we had sought without knowing it, one of the ultimate needs of our natures. As a mystic might worship an ideal of the divine we looked up to the beauties of the mountains. The Annapurna we approached in spiritual poverty is now the treasure on which we live; a different life opens before us. There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.'

Eleven years have gone by since 3rd June 1950, when our combined efforts rose momentarily to the height of our ideal. Looking back, it is interesting to ask which of us have in fact found other Annapurnas.

It seemed only too probable that Herzog would survive as a mere shadow of the brilliant athlete and intellectual he had been. His constitution was permanently weakened, and he was forced to undergo serious amputations. Though he will never be able to climb again, in the old way, he has surmounted all his ordeals and redirected his energies into new fields. His inborn instinct for men and affairs has enabled him to become not only a director of industry but a highly active president of the Club Alpin Français. Quite recently he has become a leading reorganiser of the various national institutions governing sport and youth services.

Lachenal, by tragic contrast, died before finding any compensating fulfilment. Would he have found one in time?

In five years he had to submit to no fewer than sixteen operations, an ordeal he faced with astonishing courage. In the end he recovered sufficiently to work as a mountaineering instructor, but he could never recover his genius. This curtailment profoundly changed his character. Once he had seemed magically immune from the ordinary clumsiness and weight of humankind, and the contrast was like wearing a ball and chain. This slower kind of mountaineering no longer gave him the old feeling of moving in a fourth dimension, of dancing on the impossible, and he sought desperately to rediscover it elsewhere.

His driving soon became a legend (though, like all legends, it was much exaggerated) and every day his audacity and sense of timing would enable him to perform incredible feats. Once behind the wheel he seemed possessed, and would push any engine to the limit of its possibilities. I have driven with quite a number of notorious drivers, and if some of them perhaps showed more judgement I have never known one to equal him for daring and natural skill. Obviously he ran terrific risks, but once again his sphere of being seemed to be at the very edge of the technically possible. That he survived four years of this kind of thing has always seemed a miracle to me.

Many people naturally and rightly criticised his behaviour, but those who saw in it a taste for exhibitionism were quite mistaken. Lachenal's passion for speed bore no relation to vanity. It was a drug to some imperious inner need of his nature. I have often seen him about to set out in his Dyna, and asked: ‘Where are you off to?' He would reply: Nowhere. Just a drive'. Nobody ever heard of most of his exploits, which he indulged in for the sheer joy of the thing.

It has been written that driving became a sort of outlet for his ‘frenzy for life'. This judgement is at least half true, but I think the word ‘frenzy' is too strong, and I knew him perhaps as well as anyone. Certainly his bubbling vitality could sometimes burst its banks like a mountain torrent, but he was very far from being one of those restless personalities who never know a moment of calm. Most of the time he was a peaceable, jovial character, fully sensitive to the harm and the poetry of life. What he really sought in the intoxication of speed was escape from the human condition which he now felt so heavily. Once he had poised over the fall of cliffs with the lightness of a bird, and it hurt him to be transformed into a blundering animal like the rest of us. Behind the wheel of his car he seemed to recapture those instants of heavenly grace.

As a mountaineer Lachenal was a genius. The mountains had given him a field of action for his extraordinary gifts, and, as Alain de Chatellus has remarked: ‘Few professions are big enough for a man like that.' Outside the mountain world he was like an eagle with clipped wings, ill-adapted to the humdrum life of society. He was a person who could turn his hand to any trade, yet who never mastered a technique apart from climbing; who was intelligent, but insufficiently educated to become an intellectual; who was exceptionally clever with his hands (indeed he was cobbler, tailor, carpenter, mechanic, architect and mason all rolled into one), yet not really a craftsman. Ill-prepared, therefore, for struggles other than those of the mountains, it is difficult to see where he would have found a way of life in which his character could grow to its full richness. He realised this in a confused way, and it hurt him. Its outer manifestations were his eccentricity and bitter wit.

Yet wisdom seemed to be coming with the years. Already he was driving less madly, and it had begun to look as though he would soon resign himself to being a man like any other. The affectionate father he had always been was getting the better of the panther of the snows. All the signs pointed to his ending up as a comfortable, well-known local citizen, looked on by all with affection and respect. Fate, however, had decided otherwise. One autumn morning when the air was cool off the mountains and the sun shining on the snow, he went and dragged a companion out of bed, carrying all before him as in the great days. Up on a glacier where thousands of skiers glide unharmed every season he let himself go, revelling in the thrill of speed and the plumes of powder snow kicked up by his skis in passing. Suddenly a hidden crevasse opened under him, and in an instant the man who had defied death so often that he seemed immune was no more than a broken bundle of bone and flesh.

In a section bulletin of the Club Alpin I wrote an obituary which I will reproduce here, conscious that it repeats a good deal that I have already said, because it seems to me to sum up his climbing life:

‘How can I hope to conjure up in words his frank, piercing gaze, which was yet liable to flame up at any moment into an expression of perfect, if sometimes slightly malicious, joy? How can ink and paper reanimate one who was life itself? Lachenal was born at Annecy, where he passed a somewhat disorderly youth but showed early signs of the sharp intelligence, subtle humour, inventive mind and passionate taste for physical exercise which were the most obvious marks of his character. He was attracted to mountaineering from the very beginning, and quickly showed his exceptional talent. He joined “Jeunesse et Montagne” in 1941, and it was not long before he was promoted to be an instructor in skiing and mountaineering. After the Liberation he became a guide and instructor in the Chamonix valley, and it was here that we met for the first time. We were attracted to one another by our common passion for the great climbs, and before long we formed a team of unusual unanimity. For the next five years every instant of spare time from our work as guides was spent on some big ascent, despite the accumulated fatigue which weighed on our shoulders.

‘The list of climbs we achieved together is too long to be enumerated here, but the most important were the fourth ascent of the north spur of Les Droites, the fourth ascent of the Walker spur of the Grandes Jorasses, the second ascent of the Eigerwand, and the seventh of the north-east face of the Piz Badile. Although Lachenal did most of his big climbs in my company he also did a number with other companions, and a few with clients. Among these was the third ascent of the north face of the Triolet with the guide André Contamine. Lachenal was by far the most talented climber I have ever met, and I would go so far as to say that at the height of his career his quality amounted to genius. If a few have equalled and even surpassed him in the field of pure rock climbing, and also, though more rarely, of pure ice climbing, no one has ever equalled him on the overall complex of them both, which makes up the terrain of greater mountaineering, and especially the great north faces.

‘His virtuosity is shown not only by his list of climbs but by the fabulously rapid times in which he did them. I could go on for pages about the ascents he did in half or even a third of the previously best time. Perhaps the most astonishing of all are the Badile, climbed in seven and a half hours as opposed to nineteen hitherto; the north face direct of the Aiguille du Midi in five and a half hours from the Gare des Glaciers to the actual summit, despite the fact that I had to beg thirty minutes rest in the middle of the climb to eat and get my breath back; and finally his extraordinary double ascent of the east ridges of the Dent du Caiman and Dent du Crocodile, both in one morning, which he did with André Contamine. They completed this almost unimaginable feat by returning to Montenvers by the beginning of the afternoon.
[15]

‘It would be a great mistake to imagine that Lachenal broke records with the actual object of doing so. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It was just something that happened naturally, almost against his will, because he climbed like lightning, because he was more dextrous than anyone at rope management, and because he had a sort of hypnotic effect on his companions which made them surpass themselves. Above all, perhaps, the records fell because he loved the feeling of etherealisation, of liberation from the laws of gravity, which a perfect mastery of climbing technique can bring. Perfectionism was almost an obsession with him: he liked everything done in a quietly impeccable way, and of course, in the case of mountains, this meant climbing them in the minimum time.