Annapurna-Conquest of the First 8000 Metre Peak

Adventure

Annapurna-Conquest of the First 8000 Metre Peak

Maurice Herzog

A friend of mine, an avid mountaineer and who has summited Mount Everest in 2011, was once relating to me his experience of climbing Everest. When I repeatedly expressed my awe of people who have climbed Everest, he brushed aside my sense of amazement saying that there was not much adventure left in climbing Everest these days. He said climbing Everest has now become a highly organised tourism industry (for the host country i.e. Nepal). Before the beginning of climbing season, Sherpas fix ropes all along the route, right till the peak. Climbing gear, including oxygen equipment, has improved much since the days of Mallory. All one needs is money, reasonable fitness and training in mountaineering. Rush of climbers on Everest, he said in an exasperated voice, further increasing my incredulity, is so menacing that at times there is a literal queue of mountaineers holding on to the ropes, clinging to the steep, ice-faced slopes, at heights above eight thousand metres, waiting for the climbers ahead to hurry up or climb down.

In 1952, the year Maurice Herzog and his teammate Louis Lachenal climbed Annapurna, things were different. Most of the Himalayan peaks lay unexplored. No peak above 8000 metres had been climbed, though some men had reached heights above 8000 metres while attempting K2 and Everest. Maps available locally were grossly inaccurate, there was no information about the route for the climb on the mountains and the climbing equipment was bulky and inadequate, oxygen had yet not been used for climbing. In this scenario Maurice and his team’s achievement seems stellar. They left France with an objective of climbing a peak above 8000 metres and were in favour of Dhaulagiri. But the tiresome and lengthy reconnaissance of the terrain revealed that this peak was not approachable by any route. They next surveyed Annapurna from many approaches and decided that it could be scaled. These explorations had exhausted much of their time, about two months, and when they started the actual climb the dreaded monsoon was upon their heels.

Herzog has provided a detailed narrative of their adventure in this book. Audacity of his teammates, their grit, perseverance, their unfathomable capacity to bear hardships and the nerve-racking drama of final moments of the climb, especially the avalanche during descent when monsoon finally caught up with the unfortunate climbers, all these have been chronicled faithfully. But the book just misses being a great adventure epic. I think it is because every adventurer doesn’t have the skills of narration like those of F Scott or the prose style of John Krakauer. Original book is in French and I have read an English translation. I am aware of many great works of literature reduced to a piece of ordinary writing because of shoddy translation. Whatever the reason, the book makes for tedious reading at many places and the prose repeatedly fails to live up to the heart-stopping adventure being recounted. A fan of Himalayas and mountaineering will however have to read this book, if only for the grandiloquence of the feat achieved by Herzog and his team in 1952.