True Summit by David Roberts Page A

rational reason to make such a sanguine judgment, he wrote, “Finally today we sense that victory is very close—as long as the weather stays good. . . . Life is beautiful.”
    â€œAn astonishing sight greeted me next morning,” wrote Herzog. “Lachenal and Rébuffat were sitting outside on a dry rock, with their eyes riveted on Annapurna. A sudden shout brought me out of my tent: ‘I’ve found the route!’ cried Lachenal.” As Herzog watched and listened, Lachenal linked features on the icy face above, which glittered in the sun, while Rébuffat—ever the skeptic on this expedition—raised doubts and problems that Lachenal brushed aside. The debate ended on an upbeat note. “A hundred to nothing! Those are the odds on our success!” pealed the genius-madman of Herzog’s portrait. Of the route Lachenal had sketched in the air, even the dubious Rébuffat conceded, “It’s the least difficult proposition and the most reasonable.”
    So began what Terray would call the “fantastic up-and-down ballet” of establishing a series of camps on Annapurna and hauling gear and food to them. During the week that followed, the strongest team member was Terray. A close second, however, was Herzog himself. There is no reason to doubt the leader’s own self-appraisal in this matter in Annapurna. When it came to taking the lead and plowing through deep snow up avalanche-prone slopes, getting the tents pitched at a new campsite, and maintaining the high morale needed to counter the team’s setbacks, even the accounts of his teammates confirm that Herzog was a paragon. A sample entry in Lachenal’s diary, from May 28: “Couzy and I descended once more to Camp II. There we found Momo [Herzog] in great form.” Terray recorded a discussion with Herzog on the day before, in which the leader bemoaned his teammates’low spirits: “His own form at around twenty-three thousand feet, by contrast, was very hopeful, and he still felt confident of victory as long as the daily snowfalls did not exceed six to eight inches.”
    A T 31 the eldest of the six principal climbers on Annapurna, Maurice Herzog had grown up in Lyon. His father was an engineer and a casual alpinist who had served in the French Foreign Legion in World War I. Wounded in battle, he had been repatriated to Toulouse, where he met Herzog’s mother. The couple eventually had eight children, of whom Maurice was the first. In a telling phrase embedded in the memoir he published in 1998, Herzog reflected, “As the eldest, I felt myself invested with the mission of guardian of order.”
    That memoir, titled L’Autre Annapurna ( The Other Annapurna ), appearing in Herzog’s eightieth year, represents only the second personal narrative to flow from the pen of France’s most famous mountaineer. During the intervening years, Herzog had co-authored a picture book with Marcel Ichac about the expedition, called Regards vers l’Annapurna ( Looking at Annapurna ) and issued a historical tract titled Les Grandes Aventures de l’Himalaya ( The Great Adventures of the Himalaya ). There are some passages of considerable power in the memoir, particularly those recounting with fresh detail the agony of Herzog’s retreat from the mountain and his convalescence in the hospital.
    In sum, however, L’Autre Annapurna is a feeble performance, riddled with parables of character-building and self-congratulation, marred by an unfortunate predilection for name-dropping. Nonetheless, L’Autre Annapurna stands as the primary source for Herzog’s youth and early adulthood. In his full celebrity, the leader of the 1950 expedition would blossom as a man of consummate charm and personality. Women found him irresistible: his looks were often likened to Clark Gable’s. It is interesting, then, to learn that at eighteen, Herzog thought himself not only