True Summit by David Roberts

“amateurs” like Herzog. Couzy, who hailed from the Southwest of France, was a promising aeronautical engineer; Schatz, a Parisian, was a physicist who earned his living as manager of one branch of his father’s tailoring business.
    Schatz would quit mountaineering altogether less than a year after Annapurna. After turning thirty, he returned to his research, which he performed so capably that he eventually had a hand in the development of the French atom bomb.
    Couzy, on the other hand, went on to become one of the greatest mountaineers of his generation. On Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak, in 1955, he was the “tiger,” the climber whose will drove the whole party to success on the only other 8,000-meter peak first climbed by Frenchmen.
    In 1950 on Annapurna, however, these two alpinists played a largely supporting role, accomplishing important reconnaissances (including the key penetration of the Miristi Khola), but leading virtually none of the pitches on the mountain itself. (They would, to be sure, participate in a heroic act of rescue on the descent.) Perhaps the pair were simply in awe of the three great guides; perhaps they were further intimidated by the strong personalities of their four elders. (Along with the others, moreover, they had sworn unflinching obedience to Herzog.) Couzy in particular never seemed fully to acclimatize. In all the accounts of the expedition, he lurks inthe background, a silent collaborator who gets along with his teammates by never thrusting his own character to the fore.
    Whether or not in recognition of Couzy’s poor form on the mountain, as the team at last came to grips with Annapurna, Herzog took the young engineer aside and said, “Couzy, you are going to have a thankless job.” He then ordered the twenty-seven-year-old to take charge of the grunt work of organizing the porters and Sherpas to carry their loads to a permanent Base Camp at the foot of the north face. The chore would take days, and Couzy would have to hump loads himself, while his five teammates soared across untrodden terrain above.
    In Annapurna, Couzy responds to this disheartening directive with staunch loyalty: “It certainly doesn’t sound much fun, but if the job’s really got to be done . . .”
    Herzog praises the self-sacrifice of this youngest knight of the sky:
    He did [his job] to perfection and without a single word of complaint, although he knew that, when the final attack was launched, he would not be sufficiently acclimatized and so would lose the chance of being on it. It is this admirable spirit of self-denial which determines the strength of a team.
    Couzy’s private thoughts on this matter have escaped the record. But in 1999, Couzy’s widow, Lise, told this writer, “It was Marcel [Schatz] and Jean who found the passage [up the Miristi Khola] in a very tight valley. Herzog later said, ‘ We decided. . . .’ But it was Marcel and Jean who found it.”
    Choosing her words cautiously, Lise Couzy added, “When you bring together men like this on an expedition, there are always problems and disagreements. Jean was correct with Herzog, but there was not an affinity between them. They did not have the same passions. Herzog was not an enemy, but he was not a great friend, either.”
    What with the loss of five days on the Northwest Spur, it was not until May 23 that the team established Camp I, at an altitude of16,750 feet—a discouraging 10,000 feet below the distant summit. Herzog had received a radio bulletin about the weather farther south, in India. In Annapurna, he gives voice to the hectic urgency the whole team now felt: “The arrival of the monsoon was announced for about June 5. We had just twelve days left. We’d have to move fast, very fast indeed.”
    Now Lachenal, hitherto so cranky and out-of-sorts, was seized with a fervent optimism. In his diary on May 22, with no