At Camp II Terray gradually recovered. He felt that the final attack was imminent and set about his preparations with his usual meticulous care. Ribuffat was busy writing. Early in the afternoon sleet began to fall.

"Hello, everybody!"

The white ghost who had just come in was Ichac!

"The others are coming up."

Oudot and Noyelle then appeared, shaking the snow off inside the tent with the cheerful carelessness of people coming from outside. It was five-thirty.

"What, it's you!" exclaimed Ichac."We were expecting to see Schatz and Couzy."

"No  it's only us."

And Terray went on to explain how they had had to retrace their steps the day before without having been able to establish Camp V because of Ribuffat's feet showing signs of frostbite.

"We'll be off again tomorrow morning," said Terray.

Outside the sleet had turned to snow. Oudot was impatient to find out to what extent oxygen would be of use. Displaying his usual authority, he insisted upon our liaison officer Noyelle going around with a mask on. His face became a snout connected by a tube to cylinders of duralumin full of compressed oxygen. He might have been exploring the moon! Poor Noyelle, with his ridiculous hat pulled down over his nose and ears  he was the only one unable to appreciate the comic figure he cut.

After the tests everyone collected in the tent and Ichac took some flashlight photographs.

"Right now I'm going to establish a record for the highest flashlight shot."

As a matter of fact this camp was not far off 20,000 feet high, and it was unlikely that many flashlights had been taken on Himalayan expeditions.

After dinner the sky cleared and the stars shone and the Great Barrier was clothed in a mantle of white, lit up by the moon. The latest news on the radio was alarming: the monsoon had reached the north of Bengal and, moreover, considerable disturbances were forecast from the west.

The following morning  June 2  the sky was brilliant, it was going to be a glorious day. As usual Lionel Terray had timed his departure for an early hour. He left camp with Ribuffat and two Sherpas at six o'clock, before the sun was up. (At Camp IV we were still sleeping soundly.) Ichac took some telephotos of them as they went up the avalanche cone.

Now, the whole mountain was inhabited, and as the hours went by activity increased. An onlooker would have seen an astonishing sight. At Camp II men were swarming round the settlement of tents. A little higher up Terray and Ribuffat with their two Sherpas, Pansy and Aila, were cutting fresh steps up the first slopes. Above, at Camp III, Schatz and Couzy, accompanied by Angawa and Foutharkey, were preparing to cross the great couloir. And finally Lachenal and myself, with Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, were once again ploughing through snow on the slope of the Sickle glacier.

During the afternoon clouds appeared along the bed of the Miristi Khola, and even on the plateau by Camp II. Through a rent in them Ichac was able to see, at the foot of the spear-shaped rib, a new black speck which he guessed must be Camp V. Would the final assault be made the following morning? That would be decided by the weather.

The mist grew thicker and calls for help were heard. Noyelle and Ichac went out to see who it was and found Angawa and Foutharkey wandering in the mist. Having only one tent at Camp IV  the other was at Camp V  Couzy and Schatz had had to send their two Sherpas down.

The rest of the equipment for Camp IV was to be brought up the following day by the Ribuffat-Terray party who would strike Camp III and take it up with them. And the group at Camp II would move up the day after and reestablish Camp III.

At Camp IV morale was good, Ribuffat and Terray had just arrived and everyone was in good form. Terray meditated upon the unpredictable nature of conditions in the Himalaya: four days ago he and Ribuffat had climbed to Camp III with the greatest difficulty, taking seven hours to crawl up. This time they had successfully carried out an ambitious program of which it would be hard to find the equivalent in the history of Himalayan climbing: leaving Camp II at dawn they had succeeded in reaching Camp III at about eleven o'clock in the morning; they had struck this camp and then carried everything on up to Camp IV, in this way gaining one precious day. Although there were only four of them they carried two high-altitude units as well as twenty-two pounds of food. Ribuffat, like Lachenal, had made a magnificent comeback.

There were two people who were mighty pleased to see them, and these were Couzy and Schatz. Otherwise, the next day these two would have had to carry up a complete camp themselves, and they had not found this prospect particularly attractive. Thanks to aspirin and sleeping tablets and thanks also to a sense of tremendous well-being caused partly by good physical condition and partly by the imminence of a happy outcome, everybody passed an excellent night.