Conquistadors of the Useless
Read Conquistadors of the Useless Online
Authors: Geoffrey Sutton Lionel Terray David Roberts
From the Alps to Annapurna
Lionel Terray
Translated by Geoffrey Sutton
To my friends killed climbing.
Chapter Five
The North Face of the Eiger
Chapter Six
Guide to the Great Climbs
Appendix One
The Ascent of Mount Huntington
Appendix Two
Lionel Terray's Climbs and Expeditions, and other Achievements
In this book, Geoffrey Sutton's stylish translation of Lionel Terray's famous autobiography is republished after a long break. Terray's engaging personal story of how he became a mountaineer precedes the accounts of the second ascent of the Eigerwand and the first ascents of Annapurna, Makalu, Chacraraju and Fitzroy to form one of the most important of all climbing narratives.
Terray's death in the Vercors in 1965 brought to a premature end the career of one of the most active expeditioners of the century. His later expeditions displayed constant innovation and a fascination with new problems on lesser known peaks that offered a real challenge. Had he lived he would certainly have been heavily involved in the developments of the subsequent years â the big wall period in the Himalaya and even (given his tremendous strength and vitality) its following âalpine style' phase. The steady development on the big rock towers of Patagonia and the frigid mountaineering challenges of Alaska would also have attracted his attention.
This âNew World' focus was already apparent in Terray's activities, so it is particularly fitting that David Roberts, a leading American climber, greatly influenced by Terray, should contribute a foreword for this new edition. Roberts's fine book
Mountain of my Fear
describes the gripping second ascent of Mount Huntington (by a new route) that was directly inspired by Terray's example.
Terray's first ascent account of the Huntington climb (originally published in
Mountain World
) has been added as an appendix together with a tabulation of his remarkable climbing record. A variety of new photographs have also been incorporated to enhance the text. The publishers wish to thank Marianne Terray, Claude Deck, Anne Sauvy, John Wilkinson, Michel Guérin, Jacques Soubis, Sue Harper, Florence Giry (Editions Gallimard), Frances Wollen (Orion Publishing), Guy Lee, Brian Hall, Rab Carrington, John Brailsford, Maggie Body, Michael Chessler, R.J.Secor and David Roberts for editorial and production advice and help with this book. Photographers who have contributed new pictures to enhance those from the Terray archive are credited in the text.
by David Roberts
Of the four great French mountaineers who were in the vanguard of the legendary first ascent of Annapurna in 1950, three would never go on another expedition. Maimed by frostbite, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal would find returning to the mountains a painful challenge. Lachenal, haunted by the loss of his matchless grace, threw himself back at the world with reckless abandon, and died in 1955 when he skied unroped into a crevasse on the Vallée Blanche. Gaston Rébuffat would continue to perfect his craft in the Alps, winning the status of the most famous guide in Europe, yet he never returned to the great ranges.
The fourth Annapurna stalwart, however, became, in my view, the greatest expeditionary mountaineer of all time. Others â most notably Reinhold Messner â might lay fair claim to that honour. Messner, like some of his rivals in the 1980s, emerged as a specialist in oxygenless ascents of 8,000-meter peaks. For Lionel Terray, nicknamed âthe strong sahib' by the Sherpas, what mattered most was seeking out the hardest, most beautiful mountains in the Andes, the Himalaya, and Alaska, and throwing all his energy and daring at their first ascents. From FitzRoy in 1952 to Mount Huntington in 1964, Terray succeeded on nine of the most stunning mountains on earth.
Almost always, Terray led not only as titular chief of the expedition, but on the sharp end of the rope as well: not once did a summit party fail to include him, even, as on Huntington, when he was crippled by a dislocated elbow suffered in a near-fatal fall.
One day in 1963, a college friend lent me a copy of
Conquistadors of the Useless
. Terray I knew from Herzog's Annapurna, but only as the man who had given up his own chance for the summit to carry loads to high camps in support of his teammates. In his own autobiography, however, Terray sprang forth as a fully rounded character, gruff, impetuous, visionary; he climbed like a bull, but wrote with a unique, homespun lyricism. What moved me most of all was Terray's account of the magical partnership he had forged with Lachenal culminating in their second ascent of the Eiger Nordwand in 1947.
Don Jensen and I were both so transported by the book that we began to identify with that great cordée. On our own Alaskan expeditions, we got so carried away as to address each other as âLouis' and âLionel.' Stocky and strong, Don âwas' Terray; skinnier, more impatient and mercurial, I became Lachenal. In 1974, in a critique of climbing memoirs I wrote for
Ascent
, I argued that
Conquistadors
was the finest example of the genre ever written. More than a quarter of a century later, I see no reason to revise that judgment. Terray's book has its faults, but it conveys more of the truth of mountaineering than any other climber's autobiography I know of. Two years ago, then, it came as a shock to be told by several French experts that Terray had not, in fact, written the book â it had been ghostwritten by Roger Nimier, his editor at Gallimard. The wife of one of his climbing partners seemed to confirm this. âHe was a bit of a country bumpkin,' she claimed. âHis writing, even in letters, was only semi-literate.' While researching for my own book about Annapurna
[1]
, my French editor, Michel Guerin, asked Marianne Terray for the key to the family home, a hillside chateau in Grenoble. In 1965, Terray had been using a room there as a study. It was from here that he set out for that final climb in the Vercors with Marc Martinetti. Neither returned alive.
The key opened a creaky door on the third floor. Everything was covered with dust; the wallpaper hung peeling from the walls; old mirrors had grown cloudy and speckled. Michel had been given permission by Marianne to look for old letters. There were piles and piles of papers on tabletops, in closets, inside desk and bureau drawers. There was something claustrophobic and oppressive about the place. It was hard to imagine the blithe mountaineer living even temporarily in such squalor. We were about to go, when Michel, poking through another closet, found a bulging folder with a sheaf of loose pages.
âThat's Terray's handwriting,' he said, scanning the lines. I peered over his shoulder, as he leafed through the carefully written manuscript. A moment later, he let out a curse under his breath. âIt's the manuscript of
Les Conquérants
,' he said softly.
Later, back in Chamonix, we studied this lost relic carefully. It was word-for-word what Gallimard published. So much for Roger Nimier!
Among the many revelations of my research none was more gratifying than this chance find. The authorship of
Conquistadors of the Useless
belonged fully to the man who not only had performed those great deeds in the mountains, but had found, with no help from another, the right words to memorialize them. Thus it is a deep pleasure now to invite a whole new generation of readers to read
Conquistadors
and discover Terray's truth, which shines forth four decades later with all the dazzling brilliance of his finest climbs.
1.
True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna
by David Roberts (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2000)
[back]
Discovery
I have given my whole life to the mountains. Born at the foot of the Alps, I have been a ski champion, a professional guide, an amateur of the greatest climbs in the Alps, and a member of eight expeditions to the Andes and the Himalayas. If the word has any meaning at all, I am a mountaineer.
In apparent contradiction to this way of life, it so happens that I have had to give a great many lectures illustrated with slides. One evening, after one of these lectures, I was invited for a drink to the home of some local celebrity. A dark-suited professional man came up, looked me intently in the face, and said quietly:
âYou interested me very much, monsieur.'
As I muttered my thanks in some conventional phrase or other, he went on:
âBut what do you normally do for a living? An engineer, a teacher ⦠?'
The good man could not hide his surprise when I replied:
âNot at all, monsieur. I am a mountain guide pure and simple.' Later, in my bleak hotel room, trying with difficulty to sleep after the nervous excitement of two hours of intense concentration in front of an audience, the man's words came back to me. I began to realise that the rather story-book life I had led had made me into a person of unusual duality. I saw that for anyone seeing me for the first time, in collar and tie and lounge suit, giving a lecture on the human geography of the Himalayas, I bore no resemblance to the real man behind this worldly façade â the mountaineer, that figure which a conventional literature has fixed in everybody's mind as a rough, crude-mannered peasant. And so for the first time I appreciated the full strangeness of the fate which had turned a child born to a family of middle-class intellectuals into a conqueror of the highest and most difficult mountains in the world.
The story begins at Grenoble, in a sort of Chateau covered with virginia creeper, built on the side of a hill above the town. There I was born, and one of my first sights must have been the shining barrier of the snowy peaks of the Belledonne range opposite our large, comfortable family seat.
My parents came of what the world calls a good family, in other words comfortable bourgeois, magistrates, owners of businesses, and high-ranking officers. Actually the family hid under its bourgeois appearance rather more originality and imagination than one might have expected at first sight. My ancestors on both sides included a considerable number of unusual men, enterprising men of affairs, travellers in search of fortune and adventure, daring soldiers and politicians. Such forbears gave my parents a broader-minded outlook than is usual in their walk of life.
Tall, powerful, large-headed and heavy-jowled, his bright blue eyes almost hidden behind thick spectacle-lenses, my father was of definitely Nordic type. Though violent, passionate, ascetic and stubborn, he was also kindly and constantly bubbling with wit. Exceptionally gifted intellectually, his memory in particular was almost phenomenal. His life was nothing if not eventful: after qualifying brilliantly in chemical engineering, he set out to found a company in Brazil and had achieved assured success when suddenly the 1914 war broke out. Throwing up everything without hesitation, he went straight back to France to do his duty as a soldier. At the age of forty, fed up with business, he was not afraid to exchange industry for medicine, and after five years of study he qualified as a doctor. In his youth he had shown sporting interests of a kind unusual at that time, among them free ballooning and motor racing. In particular he was one of the first Frenchmen to take up skiing, and the very first to master the elegant telemark technique, the only method of turning known in those heroic times.
By contrast, my mother was Italian in style; small, with classical features, very dark eyes and hair the colour of jet. Of artistic temperament, she had studied painting She was an interested and active person, and showed a good deal of originality for her time, driving cars in 1913 and being the first Frenchwoman sufficiently daring to don trousers for skiing. The great passion of her youth had been riding, at which she excelled, especially at point-to-point. In Brazil she made journeys of several weeks on horseback, visiting wild areas where very few white women had ever been.
Although the adventurous and sporting instincts of my parents were quite strong they were never extreme, and particularly in the case of my father they never took an important place in his scheme of life. If it is true that my antecedents and education must have inclined me towards sport and the career of a man of action, it would be exaggerating to see in them auguries of a life completely devoted to adventure. One thing is certain: it was not from my parents that I derived any taste for climbing. Despite having passed the greater part of their lives among mountains, they had never mountaineered to any greater extent than tramping up one or two easy summits which required no climbing in the real sense. Indeed they disapproved of the sport and thought of it as madness. I remember quite well, one day when I was a little boy of seven or eight, my mother saying to me:
âI shall be very happy for you to go in for any sport except motorcycling and climbing.'
When I asked her the meaning of this last word, she added:
âIt's a stupid sport which consists of dragging yourself up rocks with your hands, feet and teeth!'
If my mother disapproved of climbing mainly out of lack of knowledge, my father, on the contrary, heaped sarcasm and contempt upon it. Sport, for him, was mainly a way of keeping oneself fit to do the work necessary to social and financial success, and perhaps to advance oneself directly in life into the bargain. To go in for an activity as exhausting, dangerous and unknown as mountaineering seemed to him the height of absurdity, and I heard him say a hundred times if I heard him once:
âA man must be completely crazy to wear himself out climbing a mountain, at the risk of breaking his neck, when there isn't even a hundred franc note to be picked up on the summit.'
One of my cousins who had been crippled as a result of a climbing accident was constantly held up to me as a living example of the wretched consequences of such madness. Sometimes, in the street, my father would point contemptuously to the German students who frequently made the headlines in our local papers with their mountain accidents, and would not miss the chance of pointing the moral at the same time.
âTake a good look at those idiots. A lot of good they'll have done themselves when they're walking on crutches like your cousin René!'
Family tradition has it that from the beginning I was a child of exceptional energy. I weighed about eleven pounds at birth, and the story runs that I had so much hair that they had to take me to the barber's at the age of four days. Those who know that at the age of twenty-one I was already as bald as a billiard ball can measure the injustice and irony of fate!
My character in childhood was, it seems, of almost unhealthy independence, and my exploits provide to this day an inexhaustible source of tales for winter evenings over the hearth. One of these seems to me worth relating. When I was four or five years old, my mother loved to dress me in elegant little black velvet costumes with white collars. Every time I was forced to wear one of these outfits, so ill adapted to my turbulent tastes, I used to get into a terrible temper. One day at the seaside, I refused completely to go in paddling. In the end my mother got bored, and ended up by dressing me again in one of these little Lord Fauntleroy suits which I so detested. No sooner was I dressed than I hurled myself with joy into the surf ⦠Some people may think I was not only independent, but had very bad manners.
I was three and a half when my father put me on skis for the first time. Family tradition is contradictory about the results. Some say I did brilliantly, others the reverse. Objectivity forces me to suppose that my beginnings were similar to those of most children of that age, in other words that they consisted of a few short slides punctuated by bumps and tears. Be that as it may, I quickly began to adore the sport, and up to the age of twenty it was to absorb the larger part of my time, my energy and dreams.
Our house was set in spacious grounds comprising, as well as vineyards and kitchen gardens, a thick woodland with thorny brakes, ruins, and rocks. This wild place formed a perfect world in which to realise the dreams of a child possessed with freedom and the wonders of nature. I grew there almost without constraint, running through the woods, clambering the rocks, trapping rabbits, foxes and rats, shooting blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows and sparrowhawks. Except in winter, when I passed every spare minute skiing, I used to spend more or less all my spare time from school in this park. For me there was little or no cinema-going, football, or afternoons at my friends'. Not only did I go there every Thursday and Sunday, whatever the weather, but also in the morning before school and when I got home in the evening. Sometimes even, in spring, when the air was warm and charged with a sense of excitement, I used to escape out there at night. Wandering through the fields and woods, I tried to penetrate the mysteries of their life when all nature was in shadow and silence. Hidden in the bushes I stayed motionless for hours together listening for the crack of twigs, the cries of owls, the blackbirds' clucking, the thousand almost inaudible sounds which revealed the intense activity of a nocturnal world. These years of boyhood passed in intimate contact with nature profoundly affected my physical and mental being.
Like almost all children, I adored playing at trappers or at cowboys and Indians. But unlike most others I had to hand not the trappings but the reality. I had no Stetsons, flamboyant shirts, coloured feathers or sheriff's star: but I had real guns, real hunting knives, a real forest containing wild animals. The house was full of weapons inherited from generations of hunters or brought back from Brazil, and with almost incredible carelessness my parents let me use most of them. From the age of nine I had my own rifle, for which I soon learnt how to make my own cartridges. One of my playmates and I invented a new game. The estate was infested with enormous rats which came out of the sewers of the nearby town, and we caught large quantities of them with the aid of special traps. Instead of just killing off the repugnant beasts in a simple way, we gave them one last chance. The trap was placed at one end of a sort of runway made of planks. One of us then opened the trap, and it was up to the other to get the rat with a bullet as he ran at top speed through the last two yards that led to freedom. The rats thus killed were then skinned and their hides dried in the sun until they were ready to be quickly tanned and sewn into picturesque costumes which, we hoped, resembled those of Attila s Huns, of whom we had read that they went clothed in ratskins!
This little savage's life had a disastrous effect on my school record. I was a very bad student. I had a normal respect for discipline and, without being very intelligent, showed no signs of unusual stupidity. No, the trouble came from a complete incapacity to concentrate: I was at the school physically, but my mind could not succeed in settling there. The same thing happened every day. With all the goodwill I could muster, I would listen for several minutes to the voice of my teacher. Then, as though by enchantment, the dreary world of blackboards, black desks, black aprons and black inkwells would fade away, and I would be madly flying down some endless snow slope, or tracking through a green wood full of whistling blackbirds, malicious squirrels and terrifying serpents.
My mother surrounded her two sons with the warmest affection, and if I had not been of such an independent nature I would have grown up in cotton wool. Her optimistic and easy-going nature did not seem too put out by my poor school reports. My father, on the other hand, much absorbed in his work and not normally giving too much attention to his children, could not help remembering with pride his own brilliant academic successes, and his vanity would have been greatly flattered to see me repeat them. Thus he was devoured with rage to find he had begotten such a dunce. In spite of outcries, spankings and extra classes, I continued to grow up between the bleak, black world of the school and that other, how much more thrilling, of our sunlit and mysterious park. I remained an immovable dunce and became a lively, robust boy, full of initiative and practical intelligence: at once enthusiastic and high-spirited, melancholy and secretive.
Most children instinctively like to climb trees, walls and rocks. Thus the little limestone crags around our grounds were a perfect playground for me, and thanks to them I learnt very early on the rudiments of the technique of rock climbing. Indeed I was only five years old when I had my first accident, which still remains the most serious I have had. While climbing some rocks in the park I fell, gashing my forehead deeply. Legend relates that I entered the house covered in blood but without a single tear â but we all know how these sort of legends grow up. To scramble around on a few little rocks, however, is not the same thing as mountaineering. If only by virtue of his size, a child cannot be expected to begin the sport before the age of eleven or twelve. My own interest in climbing mountains as such began to be aroused when I was about ten; but it should be noted that my physical development was exceptional and that, in spite of my mediocrity at school, my character was mature for my age. Far from putting me off, my parents' aversion for mountaineering, and the fact that they had forbidden it, made it particularly fascinating: as everyone knows, there is no fruit like forbidden fruit.
Odder still, the sheer violence of my father's repudiation of the sport struck against some hitherto hidden fibre in my heart to such a degree that, whenever he heaped his sarcasms on mountaineers, I felt a violent hatred rising in me. It seemed to me in a confused sort of way that such virulent hatred of an apparently rather unimportant activity implied more than the reaction of a balanced being to a silly game. It was rather the indignation of a man deeply attached to a particular view of the world face to face with a force which was in contradiction to his whole scheme of things. Today, with the passing of time, I realise that he abused certain forms of art, certain political and social ideals, with exactly the same kind of passion.