True Summit by David Roberts

preserved.
    On April 11, Lachenal witnessed an eerie rite:
    I am going to attend the burial of a young girl who was carried on a stretcher. A hole is dug near the river, the girl put inside it, and after a little ceremony, covered with stones. The body will becarried away by the floodwaters to fertilize the plains of Nepal. [Suppressed]
    Lachenal’s record has the virtues of a true diary, in that it notes the homely, quotidian verities by which the party measured out its progress. From Herzog alone, for instance, the reader would little guess how constantly beset the team was with annoying ailments and illnesses.
    18 April. Everybody has been sick, except Schatz and Noyelle [the liaison officer]. Tonight Lionel [Terray] had really bad indigestion with diarrhea. I woke up feeling fine. I ate and then I took off. En route the urge to vomit and diarrhea made me stop several times. . . . Today was for me the most terrible since we started.
    23 April. Lionel was sick all night, with constant stomachache.
    25 April.  . . . Always I have a bit of diarrhea. This morning I shat in my pants—not pleasant.
    29 April.  . . . I have a boil that started on my sternum. I just hope it’s the only one.
    30 April.  . . . My boil only gets bigger, and I already have some ganglions under my arms.
    (All these passages were suppressed, as if to admit to developing a boil on one’s chest were unworthy of the crème de la crème of French mountaineering.)
    Likewise Lachenal’s candid observations of the native Nepalis the team passed daily. “The women seem to have very small breasts—even, if I’m not mistaken, not to have breasts at all.” (The second half of the sentence was suppressed.)
    If in Herzog’s text, the nine climbers blur together, all hearty team players, all knights of the sky, the occasional passages in Lachenal’s diary hinting at interpersonal conflict or quirks of character bring his comrades to individual life. “The night was pretty short, because in our tent Lionel held forth at length on his youth,his love life, and a bit about his career as a skier. We had to go to sleep at last at 1:00 A.M. ” “I took two sleeping pills to try to sleep, which gave me very funny dreams: I caught Thivierge [a fellow Chamonix guide] and Momo [Herzog] stealing cans of food!” (Both passages suppressed.)
    One of the most interesting entries in Lachenal’s diary hints at a serious argument between Rébuffat and himself. “With Gaston, discussions take on a macabre character,” he wrote, softening the conflict with an edge of irony. “It’s important not to have them too often, because they engender a certain melancholy, a nostalgia for our return, which puts a bad aspect on the adventure.” Referring to their dispute, he writes, “We talked again about the business on the central spur of the Grandes Jorasses with the College. Gaston stuck to his position. He’s wrong.”
    With typical bluntness, Lachenal thus brought up a painful episode in the men’s shared past. In 1947, Lachenal and Rébuffat had led a group of five aspirant guides from the Collège des Praz, an elite guides’ school near Chamonix, on a climb of the central spur on the great north face of the Grandes Jorasses—a route only marginally less serious than the Walker to its left, of which Rébuffat had made the second ascent two years before. On the descent, the team bivouacked just below the summit on the south side of the mountain. Just as the team settled in to sleep on their ledge, a huge block of rock came loose thirty feet above. Rébuffat and the aspirant Georges Michel were knocked from their perch. Michel plunged 1,500 feet to his death. In mid-fall, Rébuffat miraculously jammed himself into a chimney thirty feet below, saving his life at the cost of a broken foot, kneecap, and rib.
    In Starlight and Storm,