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ravine and forest. Jacques Oudot, the expedition doctor, gave them agonizing daily abdominal injections of novocaine in the femoral and brachial arteries. It was thought at the time that the drug could dilate the arteries and, by improving the flow of blood, forestall the ravages of frostbite; today, the procedure is known to be worthless. As their digits turned gangrenous, Oudot resorted to amputations in the field. Eventually Lachenal lost all his toes, Herzog all his toes and fingers.
    The team members arrived at Orly airport in Paris on July 17, where a huge crowd hailed them as heroes. Paris-Match, which owned exclusive periodical rights to the story, rushed into print a special issue, with a cover photo of Herzog hoisting the Tricolor on the summit, that broke all the magazine’s sales records.
    As he recuperated in the American hospital at Neuilly, Herzog, who had never before written a book, dictated his account of the expedition. Published the next year by Arthaud as Annapurna: Premier 8,000, the book at once became a classic. The story Herzog had brought back from the mountain was a stirring saga of teamwork, self-sacrifice, and—in the two-week push to the summit—brilliant mountaineering against long odds. The descent and retreat from Annapurna figured as a tragic yet heroic coda, which Herzog narrated in a peroration saluting the highest ideals of loyalty and courage.
    What moved readers beyond all else in Annapurna, however, was the transcendental optimism of the book. The euphoric trance that had seized Herzog on the summit persisted through all his convalescent tribulations. With only stumps left where he had once had fingers, for the rest of his life Herzog would find the simplest tasks—tying his shoelaces, buttoning his shirt—almost beyond him. Yet not a trace of bitterness or self-pity emerged in the pages of his book.
    Quite the opposite. In the foreword, he wrote of his ordeal, “I was saved and had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shallnever lose, has given me the assurance and serenity of a man who has fulfilled himself. . . . A new and splendid life has opened out before me.” Of his brave teammates, he wrote, “My fervent wish is that the nine of us who were united in face of death should remain fraternally united through life.” And in the book’s last pages: “Annapurna, to which we had gone emptyhanded, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days.”
    The book closes with a line as resounding and memorable as any in the literature of adventure: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.”
    Fifty years later, Annapurna remains one of the canonic works in exploration literature. Published in forty languages, it has sold more than 11 million copies, making it the best-selling mountaineering book of all time. Though he would never again do any serious climbing, Herzog went on to become mayor of Chamonix and Minister of Youth and Sport under Charles de Gaulle. Today, at age eighty-one, he is the only surviving climber from Annapurna 1950 (the liaison officer, Francis de Noyelle, who never got above Camp II, also survives). In France, Herzog remains a household name, one of the country’s eternal heroes of sport and exploration, in a league with the late Jacques Cousteau or Jean-Claude Killy. In contrast, as one mountaineering journalist estimates, only about five to seven percent of the French public has ever heard of Rébuffat, Terray, or Lachenal.
    As for Herzog, the sense that despite—even because of—his personal tragedy, a marvelous new life had thereby opened to him seems to have tided him well into old age. In 1998, he published a memoir called L’Autre Annapurna ( The Other Annapurna ). In its opening pages, Herzog declared that nearly half a century after his “rebirth,” the sense of having discovered a new life still infused him with an “indescribable happiness.”