Himalayan Victory

ANNAPURNA (316 pp.)--Maurice Herzog--Dutton ($5).

"How wonderful life would now become! What an inconceivable experience it is to attain one's ideal and, at the very same moment, to fulfill oneself. I was stirred to the depths of my being. Never had I felt happiness like this--so intense and yet so pure."

Had Frenchman Maurice Herzog just discovered a fabulous drug to ease human suffering? Or had the girl of his dreams finally said yes? It was nothing so commonplace as either: Herzog and a companion had just climbed a mountain.

It was no ordinary mountain, no well-worn Mont Blanc. Annapurna, in the Nepalese Himalayas, soars 26,493 ft., and when Herzog and his pal, Louis Lachenal, reached the summit, they had scaled the highest peak ever topped by man. In Annapurna, Herzog's story of the expedition in the spring of 1950, the victory becomes a literary anticlimax. What is vastly more exciting than the climb is the return trip, the harrowing ordeal-by-nature calculated to shiver the spirit of the toughest armchair explorer. Author Herzog--an engineer by profession, a mountain climber by religion--is no great shakes as a writer. His account of the trip to Nepal, the organization of the expedition, and the search for a route up the mountain sometimes reads like a boy camper's letter to a chum. It is a tribute to the pure terror of his experiences after victory that his writing then takes on the intensity of his subject.

Taking pictures on the peak, Herzog saw his only pair of gloves go rolling down the slope for good. Almost immediately his hands were numb. Hurrying down, the two met a pair of waiting colleagues at the 25,300-ft. level, and it seemed that the worst was over, when Lachenal slipped and fell 300 ft. to the ice below. Miraculously, he broke no bones, but he had suffered a concussion, and all four spent a dreadful, storm-whipped night in tiny tents. Going down the next morning, they lost their way. By then, both Herzog's and Lachenal's feet were frostbitten, and Herzog's hands were useless. That night, still at a mankilling height of more than 23,000 ft., they slept in a crevasse. The next day an avalanche smashed over them and threw Herzog 500 ft. By the time rescuers got to him, Herzog's hands were strips of flesh, and both he and Lachenal were close to madness.

But their real ordeal was yet to come. Throughout the trip to New Delhi, much of it on coolie back, the expedition doctor kept amputating. Without anesthetics and using large shears, he kept snipping until Lachenal had lost all his toes, Herzog all his toes and fingers. When Climber Herzog is asked: "Was it worth it?" he merely smiles. The last words of his book: "There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men."

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