Annapurna: The First Conquest of an 8000-Metre Peak

by Maurice Herzog

They are to him, as they have become for me, sources of wonder, of life-enhancing moments when the borders between living and dying seem to overlap, when the past and the future cease to exist and you are free.

The mountains often provide life-changing experiences, unforgettable in the vivid lucidity with which they are later recalled, sometimes crushing in the agony and grief they can impose. Perhaps the most vivid moments in this book occur when on the summit Herzog thinks to himself, ‘How wonderful life would now become! What an inconceivable experience it is to attain one’s ideal and, at the very same moment, to fulfil oneself. I was stirred to the depths of my being. Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure.’ Within an hour of starting the descent he was to be plunged into despair as he watched his gloves tumble out of his reach. ‘The movement of those gloves was engraved in my sight as something ineluctable, irremediable, against which I was powerless.’ Mountains have a stunning beauty, a coldly savage addictive quality that is difficult to resist and dangerous to ignore.

In overstepping our limitations, in touching the extreme boundaries of man’s world, we have come to know something of its true splendour. In my worst moments of anguish I seemed to discover the deep significance of existence of which till then I had been unaware. I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong.

Climbing is a means of self-expression. Its justification lies in the men it develops, its heroes and its saints.

Man overcomes himself, affirms himself, and realizes himself in the struggle towards the summit, towards the absolute.

In the extreme tension of the struggle, on the frontier of death, the universe disappears and drops away beneath us. Space, time, fear, suffering, no longer exist. Everything then becomes quite simple. As on the crest of a wave, or in the heart of a cyclone, we are strangely calm – not the calm of emptiness, but the heart of action itself. Then we know with absolute certainty that there is something indestructible in us, against which nothing shall prevail.

A flame so kindled can never be extinguished. When we have lost everything it is then we...

‘If ever you get as high as me …’ In this strange world where everything tends towards the vertical, one’s notion of balance is quite peculiar: all these vistas of chaos render one’s first impressions unreliable.

This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity – these were not the mountains I knew; they were the mountains of my dreams.

Our mission was accomplished. But at the same time we had accomplished something infinitely greater. How wonderful life would now become! What an inconceivable experience it is to attain one’s ideal and, at the very same moment, to fulfil oneself. I was stirred to the depths of my being. Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure. That brown rock, the highest of them all, that ridge of ice – were these the goals of a lifetime? Or were they, rather, the limits of man’s pride?

the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread. The mountains had bestowed on us their beauties, and we adored them with a child’s simplicity and revered them with a monk’s veneration of the divine. Annapurna, to which we had gone empty-handed, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days. With this realization we turn the page: a new life begins. There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.