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uncensored commentaries, Michel told me, was to paint an utterly different picture of the 1950 expedition from Herzog’s. According to Lachenal and Rébuffat, the team had been frequently and rancorously divided; Herzog’s leadership had been capricious and at times inept; and the whole summit effort and desperate retreat lay shrouded in a central mystery.
    Herzog himself, now the father figure of French mountaineering, was about to undergo a scrutiny that would deeply trouble his old age. The grand fête of French celebration, so long anticipated, on June 3, 2000—the fiftieth anniversary of the summit—might turn instead into an agon of reappraisal. As the only survivor among the six principal climbers, Herzog would have every chance to get in the last word. But would his most eloquent protestations silence the posthumous oracles of Rébuffat and Lachenal?
    Among the cognoscenti of French mountaineering, Michel told me, there had long been murmurs and doubts about Annapurna; but few if any of these hints had leaked abroad. Certainly before this evening I had never heard a gainsaying word about Herzog’s Annapurna.
    Listening late into the night to Michel’s disquisition, I felt my shock and dismay transmute into something else. The true history of Annapurna, though far more murky and disturbing than Herzog’s golden fable, might in the long run prove to be an even more interesting tale—one fraught with moral complexity, withfundamental questions about the role of “sport” in national culture, perhaps even with deep veins of heroism quite different from those Herzog had celebrated.
    The revelations from the grave of Lachenal and Rébuffat, Michel suggested, might be only the tip of the iceberg. What really happened on Annapurna 1950—and everything that issued from that cardinal triumph of mountaineering—was a story that had never been told. As a narrative, it promised to bear a closer kinship to Melville’s Billy Budd than to the Hardy Boys. As we sat stirring our coffee in Morzine, I realized that Michel had led me to a story that, no matter how hard it might be to separate the “truth” from all the layers of ambiguity in which it lay cloaked, cried out for a chronicler to grasp and tell it whole.

TWO
Resistance

    W HY WAS M AURICE H ERZOG THE LEADER of the 1950 Annapurna expedition? His record of ascents in the Alps was strong, but not of the very highest rank. Among French alpinists a decade or more older than Herzog, two in particular—Pierre Allain, the driving force on the first ascent of the stern north face of the Petit Dru, and the superb Chamonix guide Armand Charlet—might have seemed more qualified for leadership. Among Herzog’s contemporaries, Lachenal, Terray, and Rébuffat had all made more and bolder climbs.
    The reasons for the choice of Herzog as leader were several, the consequences far-reaching. By 1950, there was already an established tradition of heading up Himalayan expeditions with menwhose expertise at overland travel or whose proven record of commanding others outstripped their abilities as technical climbers. In 1924, for instance, George Leigh Mallory was the sole man who had twice before attempted Everest and he was unquestionably Britain’s finest mountaineer. Yet Mallory was passed over for leadership of the fateful 1924 expedition, on which, with his young partner Andrew Irvine, he would vanish into the clouds above 28,000 feet. Instead, fifty-eight-year-old General Charles Bruce, whose main qualifications were an extensive knowledge of India and long service in the army, was put in charge. Even after a malarial attack forced Bruce to abandon the expedition, another climber, Colonel E. F. Norton, was designated leader ahead of Mallory.
    The choice of leader for a Himalayan expedition was usually made by some national advisory body of senior mountaineers and explorers. In Britain, that group was the