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 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING
 
 Monument to De Saussikk at Chamokix.
 
 THE STORY OF 
 ALPINE CLIMBING 
 
 By FKANCIS GEIBBLE 
 
 LONDON : GEORGE NEWNES, LTD. 
 SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND 
 
 1904
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 MONUMENT TO DE SAUSSURE AT CHAMONIX 
 PILATUS, PANORAMA FROM TOMLISHORN 
 CHAMONIX — MONTANVERT .... 
 CHAMONIX — MER DE GLACE 
 MONT BLANC FROM LE JARDIN, CHAMONIX 
 DENT DU G^ANT FROM LE JARDIN, CHAMONIX 
 
 MONTE ROSA 
 
 THE GROSSGLOCKNER .... 
 KLEINGLOCKNER AND 8CHARTE 
 
 THE ORTLER 
 
 MONUMENT TO JOSEPH PICHLER, WHO 
 THE FIRST ASCENT OF THE ORTLER 
 ORINDELWALD AND THE WETTERHORN 
 THE EIGER AND MONCH . 
 INTERLAKEN AND JUNGFRAU . 
 ORINDELWALD — OBERER GLETSCHER . 
 AIGUILLE DU DRU AND MER DE GLACE 
 WENOERN, SCHEIDECK AND JUNGFRAU 
 THE WETTERHORN FROM GRINDELWALD 
 THE MATTERHORN .... 
 THE GRINDELWALD GLACIER 
 
 MADE 
 
 Fro 
 facin 
 
 8 

 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE 
 CLIMBING. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Alpine climbing is distinctly a modern enter- 
 pi'ise. As a sport it is usually dated from the 
 ascent of the Wetterhorn by Mr Justice Wills, 
 then Mr Alfred Wills of the junior bar, in 1854 ; 
 and the English Alpine Club — which was the 
 first of all the Alpine Clubs — was not formed 
 until three years later. Explorers and men of 
 science, however, had had adventures on the 
 mountains before the sportsmen repaired to them 
 for athletic exercise, so that the threads of the 
 story of the pastime have to be picked up from 
 somewhat further back. 
 
 First let us note that the attitude of our fore- 
 fathers towards the mountains was very different 
 from ours. The Hebrews, indeed, had a regard 
 for them, speaking with reverence of "high 
 places," and relating that the Table of the Law 
 was delivered to Moses upon one mountain, and 
 that the prophets of Baal were put to confusion 
 by Elijah upon another. Sinai and Carmel, 
 however, are quite minor eminences ; and the 
 Hebrew view was, in any case, exceptional. By 
 A 9
 
 10 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 ordinary mtu of other races mountains were 
 looked upon, at least until the end of the eigh- 
 teenth century, as obnoxious excrescences and 
 inconvenient barriers to commercial intercourse, 
 equally devoid of interest and of beauty. Dr 
 Johnson, when he returned from the Highlands 
 of Scotland, reported that " this uniformity of 
 barrenness can afford very little amusement to 
 the traveller." John Evelyn, the diarist, who 
 crossed the Siniplon in 1646, perceived only 
 "horrid and fearfull craggs and tracts." Bishop 
 Berkeley, on the Mont Cenis Pass, was " put 
 out of humour by the most horrible precipices." 
 "Every object that here presents itself is ex- 
 cessively miserable," is Richardson's typical 
 comment on Lans-le-bourg. Goldsmith com- 
 plains of hills that they " interrupt every 
 prospect " ; while Bishop Burnet was quite sure 
 that mountains " have neither form nor beauty," 
 but " are the vast ruins of the first world which 
 the Deluge broke into so many inequalities." 
 
 These petulant protests, however, are far sur- 
 passed by the violent outburst of Master John 
 de Bremble, a monk of Canterbury, who crossed 
 the Great Saint Bernard in 1188, and gave an 
 account of his experiences in a letter to his sub- 
 prior, quoted in Stubbs' " Lectures on Modern 
 and Mediaeval History." " I have been," he writes, 
 "on the mount of Jove; on the one hand look- 
 ing up to the heavens of the mountains, on the 
 other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feel- 
 ing myself so much nearer heaven that I was 
 sure that my prayer would be heard. 'Lord,' 
 I said, ' restore me to my brethren, that I may
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 11 
 
 tell them that they come not to this place of 
 torment.' Place of torment, indeed, where the 
 marble pavement of the ground is ice alone, and 
 you cannot set your foot safely ; where, strange 
 to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot 
 stand, the death into which there is every 
 facility for a fall is certain death." 
 
 So long as such opinions of mountains were 
 prevalent, ascents were naturally few. No man, 
 in those days, went out of his way to look for 
 mountains in order that he might climb them ; 
 and only an exceptional man here and there, 
 happening to find himself at the foot of a moun- 
 tain, was impelled by bravado or curiosity to try 
 to find a way to the top of it. The recorded 
 achievements of the kind are few enough to be 
 counted on the fingers. 
 
 1. Livy relates that Philip of Macedon made 
 an ascent of Hsemus, in the Balkans. He took 
 four days to climb it, and expected to obtain a 
 simultaneous view of the ^gean and Adriatic 
 seas from the summit, but did not succeed in 
 doing so. 
 
 2. Spartianus, the chronicler, records that the 
 Roman Emperor Hadrian ascended Etna to see 
 the sunrise from the summit, but he gives no 
 details of the ascent, which may be presumed to 
 have been uneventful. 
 
 3. At some uncertain date in the Dark Ages 
 there was an ascent of Roche Melon, then known 
 as Mons Romuleus, inaccurately believed to be 
 the highest mountain in Savoy. There was a 
 legend that " a certain monstrous and avaricious 
 King Romulus " had secreted treasure on the
 
 12 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 mountain, and the climbers, as may be read in 
 "The Chronicle of Novalesa," set out to look for 
 it. A fog descended upon them, however, and 
 they, " caught in the darkness of the mist, and 
 fumbling about them with their hands, with 
 difficulty made their escape through the gloom " ; 
 while "it seemed," they said, " that stones were 
 being showered upon them from above." A 
 second attempt was made by ecclesiastics, com- 
 missioned by a "very avaricious nobleman," but 
 with no better success: "They started carrying 
 a cross and holy water, and singing litanies and 
 Vexilla Regis, but before they got to the top they 
 were turned back ignominiously, just like their 
 predecessors." 
 
 3. The Chronicle of Fra Salimbene of Parma 
 speaks of an ascent of Pic Canigou in the Pyrenees, 
 by Peter III. of Arragon, who lived from 1236 to 
 1285. The height of that mountain is only 
 9135 feet, though it was then believed to be the 
 loftiest Pyrenean peak ; but the climber had 
 remarkable adventures. There was a thunder- 
 storm, and the king's companions were alarmed : 
 " They threw themselves upon the ground and 
 lay there, as it were lifeless, in their fear and 
 apprehension of the calamities that had overtaken 
 them." King Peter, therefore, went on alone : 
 " And when he was on the top of the mountain 
 he found a lake there ; and when he threw a 
 stone into the lake, a horrible dragon of enormous 
 size came out of it, and began to fly about in the 
 air, and to darken the air with its breath." So 
 Peter returned and told the story to his com- 
 panions. "It appears to me," says Fra Salim-
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 13 
 
 bene, " that this achievement of Peter of Arragon 
 may be compared with the achievements of 
 Alexander." 
 
 5. Petrarch, when living in retirement at 
 Vaucluse, in 1335, made an ascent of Mont 
 Ventoux in Provence, 6430 feet high, the 
 greatest mountain in the neighbourhood. He 
 described the expedition in a letter to his 
 confessor, Father Denis di Borgo San Sepucro. 
 A peasant, he says, tried to dissuade him 
 from his endeavour, "telling us that some 
 fifty years before, he had been invited to go to 
 the summit by the ardour of youth, that he had 
 got nothing by it but discouragement and fatigue, 
 and that his body as well as his cloak were torn 
 by the rocks and brambles." The poet, however, 
 persevered, and reached his goal. He admired 
 the view, and found the ascent an allegory of 
 human life. " I only wish," he wrote, " that I 
 may accomplish that journey of the soul, for 
 which I daily and nightly sigh, as well as I have 
 done this day's journey of the feet, after having 
 overcome so many difficulties. And I do not 
 know whether that pilgrimage, which is per 
 formed by an active and immortal soul in the 
 twinkling of an eye, without any local motion, 
 be not easier than that which is carried on in a 
 body worn out by the attacks of death and of 
 decay, and laden with the weight of heavy mem- 
 bers." And of his return, accomplished in silence, 
 he wrote : " At every step I thought, if it cost 
 so much sweat and toil to bring the body a little 
 nearer to heaven, great indeed must be the cross, 
 the dungeon, and the sting which should terrify
 
 14 THE STORT OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 the soul as it draws nigh unto God, and crush the 
 turgid height of insolence and the fate of man." 
 
 6. Leonardo da Vinci climbed, or to be 
 accurate, made a partial ascent of, a mountain 
 which he calls " Monboso," and wliich can be 
 almost certainly identified with Monte Rosa. 
 The passage in his literary works, translated by 
 Mrs R. C. Bell, which bears upon the subject, 
 runs as follows : — 
 
 "No mountain has its base at so great a 
 height as this, which lifts itself above almost all 
 the clouds ; and snow seldom falls there, but 
 only hail in the summer when the clouds are 
 highest. And this hail lies (unmelted) there, so 
 that if it were not for the absorption of the 
 rising and falling clouds, which does not happen 
 more than twice in an age, an enormous mass of 
 ice would be piled up there by the layers of 
 hail ; and in the middle of July I found it very 
 considerable, and I saw the sky above me quite 
 dark, and the sun as it fell on the mountain was 
 far brighter than here in the plains below, 
 because a smaller extent of atmosphere lay be- 
 tween the summit of the mountain and the sun." 
 
 7. Charles VII. of France, passing through 
 Dauphin^, was struck by the appearance of 
 Mont Aiguille, then called Mont Inaccessible. 
 It is a rock mountain of no great height, but 
 very difficult, draped nowadays with ropes, like 
 the Matterhorn. The king ordered his chamber- 
 lain, the Lord of Dompjulian and Beaupr6, to go 
 and climb it. The ascent was successfully 
 accomplished, and an account of it is preserved 
 in manuscript in the Grenoble Archives, and has
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 15 
 
 been printed in the Annuaire de la SocieU des 
 Touristes du Dauphind. "Subtle means and 
 engines " were employed, and Dompjulian " had 
 the mountain named in the name of the Father, 
 the Son, and the Holy Ghost," and had mass 
 said upon it, and caused three crosses to be set 
 up. "You have," he says, "to ascend half a 
 league by ladder, and a league by other ways," 
 and "it is the most horrible and frightful passage 
 that I or any of my company have ever seen." 
 He remained two days upon the summit, and 
 built a hut there. The Usher of the Grenoble 
 Parliament, sent to see how he was getting on, 
 came back reporting that "he was unwilling to 
 expose himself by reason of the danger that there 
 was of perishing there, and by reason of the im- 
 possibility of getting there, for fear lest he should 
 seem to tempt the Lord, since at the mere sight 
 of this mountain everyone was terrified." The 
 mountain was not climbed a second time until a 
 peasant got to the top in 1834. 
 
 1. An attempt to ascend the Pic du Midi in 
 the Pyrenees in 1588 is also interesting. The 
 hero of the adventure was Fran9ois de Foix, 
 Comte de Candale, and Bishop of Aire in 
 Gascony, the translator of the works of Euclid 
 into French. He made his excursion after 
 taking the waters at Eaux Bonnes, and the story 
 is to be found in the Chronicles of De Thou. 
 The narrative is in the shape of a report of M. de 
 Candale's table talk. 
 
 " M. de Candale told them," we read, " that 
 he resolved to climb to the top of the highest 
 mountain . . . that while he was making ready
 
 16 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 everything that he judged uecessary for the 
 accomplishment of his design, several gentlemen 
 and other young persons, wearing nothing over 
 their vests so as to be less encumbered, oflfered 
 to accompany him ; that he warned them that 
 the higher they got the colder they would feel — 
 a statement which only roused their mirth ; that 
 for his own part he had his fur coat carried by 
 peasants who knew the neighbourhood ; that 
 towards the middle of the month of May, at 
 about four o'clock in the morning, they got high 
 enough to see clouds under their feet ; that the 
 cold then gripped the young people who were in 
 so great a hurry, so that they could go no 
 further ; that as for himself he put on his coat, 
 and walked with precaution, accompanied by 
 those who had the courage to follow him ; that 
 he ascended as far as a place where he found the 
 lairs of wild goats . . . that up to that point 
 they had found marks blazed on the rocks by 
 people who had been up there before ; but that 
 then they saw no further path, and that, to 
 reach the summit, they still had to go a distance 
 equal to that which they had already covered; 
 that the cold and rarefied air which surrounded 
 them caused them sensations of giddiness which 
 made them fall down in their weakness, so that 
 they had to rest and take some food ; that after 
 having wrapped up his head he made his way by 
 a fresh route . . . ; that when the rocks resisted 
 their endeavours, they made use of ladders, 
 grapnels, and climbing irons ; that, by this 
 means, he got as far as a place where they no 
 longer saw any trace of wild beast or bird.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 17 
 
 though they saw birds flying about lower down ; 
 that, nevertheless, they were not yet at the top 
 of the mountain ; that in the end he got to it, 
 or within a very little distance of it, with the aid 
 of certain hooked sticks, which he had had made 
 after an extraordinary pattern." 
 
 It may be added that M. de Candale proceeded 
 to measure the mountain, and that, though his 
 methods are incomprehensible, his results are not 
 far removed from accuracy. 
 
 9. Finally, we may cross the Atlantic, and note 
 an early ascent in Mexico. By far the most re- 
 markable ascent of the period now under review 
 was that of the volcano Pupocatapetl (17,852 feet) 
 bv certain of the soldiers of Cortez. Cortez him- 
 self is our authority, and an extract from his 
 despatches may appropriately be given. 
 
 " In my former relation," he writes to the King 
 of Spain, " I informed your Majesty that near the 
 provinces of Tlascala and Guagocingo there is a 
 conical mountain of great height, from which 
 smoke issues almost continually, and mounts in a 
 straight column like an arrow. As the Indians 
 told us it was dangerous to ascend this mountain, 
 and fatal to those who made the attempt, I caused 
 several Spaniards to undertake it, and examine 
 the character of the summit. At the time they 
 went up so much smoke proceeded from it, accom- 
 panied by loud noises, that they were either unable 
 or afraid to reach its mouth. Afterwards I sent up 
 some other Spaniards, who made two attempts, 
 and finally reached the aperture of the mountain 
 whence the smoke issued, which was two bow- 
 shots wide, and about three-fourths of a league in
 
 18 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 circumference ; and they discovered some sulphur 
 around it, which the smoke deposited. During 
 one of their visits they heard a tremendous noise, 
 followed by smoke, when they made haste to 
 descend, but before they reached the middle of 
 the mountain there fell around them a heavy 
 shower of stones, from which they were in no 
 little danger. The Indians considered it a very 
 great undertaking to go where the Spaniards had 
 been." 
 
 Other accounts show that the party suffered 
 badly from mountain sickness, and the leader of 
 the successful ascent, Don Francisco Montano, 
 was lowered in a basket into the crater to a depth 
 of foiu' hundred feet to collect sulphur which the 
 army wanted for its gunpowder. He gathered suf- 
 ficient for immediate needs, but a judicious report 
 was sent home to the effect that it would on the 
 whole be more convenient to import gunpowder 
 ready made from Spain. 
 
 CHAPTER H. 
 
 So far our story has made no mention of the 
 Swiss Alps. Climbing in Switzerland was, in 
 fact, begun at about the time of the Reformation, 
 chiefly by divines and savants of the German- 
 speaking cantons. Its actual origin is lost in the 
 mists of obscurity, but we may begin by noting 
 an account of a picnic on the Stockhorn, near 
 Thun, written in Latin hexametres in 1536 by 
 one Johann Miiller, a Berne professor. I printed 
 both the Latin text and an English translation in
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 19 
 
 "The Early Mountaineers," and I may quote a 
 few lines of my rendering here. The passage 
 describing the banquet on the summit will serve 
 as well as any : — 
 
 Thus to deceive the tedious hours we tried^ 
 And then went up a ridge scarce three feet wide, 
 Thence over fields and pasture lands until, 
 Through rocks, and towering crags, we've climbed the hill, 
 And reach the Stockhorn's top. Whence, looking down, 
 Eastward we see lakes, marshes, and a town, 
 The torrents of the Simmenthal — to west 
 Mountains like billows on the sea's broad breast. 
 
 Our eyes are sated ; tis our stomach's turn. 
 Making a rock our table, we adjourn 
 To chamois' shoulder, wine, and bread and cheese — 
 Our rude forefathers lived on meats like these — 
 The elder Swiss, who craved nor foreign spice, 
 Nor foreign wars, but peace at any price. 
 
 The lines relating to the supper after the day's 
 work was done may perhaps be given too ; — 
 
 Again we reach the Erlenbachian mead, 
 And forthwith seek the shelter that we need, 
 And give our weary limbs a little rest. 
 When, lo, a banquet of the verj' best 
 Is spread, and we're invited to partake. 
 Though only one of us was wide awake — 
 To wit Pelorus — all the rest were " done" 
 By their exertions and the blazing sun. 
 'Twas nothing. Only we were grieved because 
 It forced a breach of hospitable laws, 
 And thanks could not be rendered to the toasts 
 Of welcome showered upon us by our hosts. . . . 
 
 Supper done 
 We rose and said good-bye to everyone, 
 Vowed that, so long as life stayed with us yet. 
 Their hospitality we'd ne'er forget. 
 Then once more started on the homeward track, 
 And some time the next day to Berne got back.
 
 20 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 This is quite in the modern spirit, but it stands 
 alone. We do not read of other picnics on the 
 Stockhorn. The only mountain, in fact, which 
 at this stage aroused a sustained interest, was 
 Pilatus ; and the interest in Pilatus was, in the 
 first instance, if not in the last resort, an interest 
 in a certain ancient legend. 
 
 Pontius Pilate, it was believed, was condemned 
 to death by the Emperor Tiberius, but committed 
 suicide while awaiting execution. His body, 
 weighted with a stone, was cast into the Tiber, 
 but was taken out again because the pollution 
 of the river resulted in thunderstorms. Then 
 it was cast into the Rhone at Vienne, and similar 
 disturbances ensued. Finally it was carried to 
 the little lake, now only a marsh, close to the 
 top of Pilatus, and allowed to remain there. 
 And the story ran that once a year Pilate was 
 suffered to leave his watery prison, and to sit, 
 clothed in scarlet, on a rock, and that anyone 
 who happened to see him sitting there would 
 die within ihe twelvemonth ; and that if stones 
 were at any time cast into the lake, Pilate would 
 assert himself and stir up "diabolical machina- 
 tions and ebullitions." The story frightened 
 the superstitious, but allured the curious, who 
 thought that the truth of it might as well be 
 tested by experiment. 
 
 In the Dark Ages, and even after the dawn 
 of civilisation, access to the mountain was, if 
 not actually forbidden, at all events jealously 
 restricted. No one was allowed to climb it with- 
 out the leave of the Municipality, which was only 
 accorded on condition that the climber should be
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 21 
 
 accompanied by a respectable burgher of Lucerne 
 to see that he did nothing calculated to provoke 
 the Evil Spirit. It is said that climbers were 
 sometimes put to death for violation of this rule, 
 and we have the text of the sentence of a Lucerne 
 Court condemning six clergymen to imprison- 
 ment for transgressing it. As time passed, how- 
 ever, permission for the ascent came to be more 
 easily accorded, and descriptions of several such 
 ascents have been preserved. In 1518, for 
 example, two parties reached the top. One of 
 the climbers was Duke Ulrich of Wurtemberg, 
 then living in exile, who, just like a modern 
 tripper, cut his initials on a rock. Another 
 was the scholar known as " Vadianus," though 
 his real name was Joachim von Watt. 
 
 Vadianus, after occupying a professorial chair 
 at Vienna, had set up as a doctor at Saint Gall. 
 The investigation of the legend seems to have 
 been the only object of the excursion. He 
 describes as " arrant nonsense " the belief that, 
 on the Wednesday next before Easter, Pilate 
 comes out of the water to sit upon a rock ; but 
 he finds the other half of the story more 
 credible. 
 
 " I cannot at present say," he writes, " whether 
 things are or are not as the common talk of the 
 inhabitants avers, for I was not allowed to make 
 experiments. . . . None the less I am moved to 
 accept the greater number of their stories in view 
 of the marvels of nature which are established by 
 the experience and authority of many observers, 
 and have received confirmation in almost every 
 quarter of the globe. Not to mention that the
 
 22 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 character of the place seemed to me to corre- 
 spond readily enough with the story that is told 
 about it." 
 
 After Vadianus comes Conrad Gesner, the 
 eminent naturalist of the University of Zurich. 
 He, first among those who climbed mountains, 
 had the temper of the mountaineer as well as of 
 the scholar. We have a letter of his in which he 
 announces his resolution " to climb mountains, 
 or at all events to climb one mountain every year 
 . . . partly for the sake of studying botany, and 
 partly for the delight of the mind and the proper 
 exercise of the body." He adds that, on the 
 mountain top, " the mind is strangely excited by 
 the amazing altitude, and carried away to the 
 contemplation of the great Architect of the 
 Universe." And he followed in the steps of 
 Vadianus, and climbed Pilatus in the year 1555. 
 
 His pamphlet on his ascent is an eloquent 
 eulogy on the pastime of climbing. Everything 
 pleases him : the views, the fragrant scent of the 
 flowers and grasses, the songs of the birds, the 
 " agreeable confections of milk," the purity of 
 the air "not infected with thick vapour as in the 
 plains, or foetid and laden with disease as in the 
 cities," the exercise, and even the hardship and 
 exposure. " You see," he writes, " there are no 
 bedsteads, no mattresses, no pillows. Feeble 
 and effeminate man. Hay shall serve you in 
 place of all of these. It is soft and fragrant, a 
 mixture of the most wholesome grasses and 
 flowers, and will make your breathing in the 
 night time more pleasant and restorative than 
 heretofore."
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 23 
 
 Then follows the description of the climb, 
 which was not quite so easy as it is nowadays : — 
 " We climbed for a long distance up a very 
 difficult hill, where there is no path, and in 
 places crawled up it, clutching at the turf." And 
 so the Lake of Pilate was reached, and as for the 
 Pilate legend, Conrad Gesuer does not believe a 
 word of it. " For my own part," he says, " I am 
 inclined to believe that Pilate has never been 
 here at all, and that even if he had he would not 
 have been accorded the power of either benefiting 
 or injuring human kind. ... If there is any 
 sorcery in the lake it is not the work of Nature 
 but of some evil spirit, whether you call that evil 
 spirit Pilate or by some other name." But he is 
 not, and he holds that no one should be, afraid of 
 evil spirits. For " if a man confront them in a 
 truly pious and believing frame of mind, relying 
 upon nothing but divine favour and support, 
 strong in his contempt for them, and firm in his 
 persuasion that the things which they do are the 
 work neither of God nor of Nature, that man will 
 assuredly remain tranquil of soul, and unharmed 
 in body and estate." Evil spectres and the like 
 " are quite powerless to harm the pious who wor- 
 ship the one celestial light, and Christ the Sun 
 of Justice." 
 
 It was a robust utterance which the spiiit of 
 the times sealed with its approval. The legend 
 which Conrad Gesner thus discussed with dis- 
 passionate scepticism was, thirty years later, 
 laughed out of existence. Pastor Johann Miiller 
 of Lucerne went up the mountain in 1585, 
 accompanied by his flock, and threw stone after
 
 24 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 stoue into the lake, challenging Pilate to do his 
 worst ; and as Pilate did not pick up the gauntlet 
 ilung down to him in the presence of so many 
 witnesses, the belief in his diabolical machina- 
 tions had necessarily to be abandoned. 
 
 So much for Conrad Gesner. If he cannot be 
 said to have founded a school of climbers, he may 
 at least be said to have been the pioneer of Alpine 
 writers. Several of his successors in the profes- 
 sorial chair at Zurich contributed important 
 works to this branch of literature. The most 
 notable names are those of Josias Simler and 
 Johann Jacob Scheuchzer. 
 
 Simler was the first author of a formal treatise 
 on snow-craft. His volume, "Concerning the 
 Difficulties of Alpine Travel and the Means by 
 which they may be Overcome," tells us a great 
 deal that is not yet out of date about the use of 
 alpenstocks and clampons and snow spectacles, 
 and the best means of crossing crevassed glaciers 
 and avoiding avalanches. Scheuchzer spent 
 several summers in the high Alps between 1702 
 and 1711, and wrote a large book, dedicated to 
 our own Royal Society, describing his observa- 
 tions and experiences. He is hardly to be spoken 
 of as a mountaineer. He was a good deal less of 
 a mountaineer than Conrad Gesner, seeing that 
 he stopped short of the top of Pilatus, " partly 
 because of bodily fatigue and partly because of 
 the distance remaining to be traversed," and re- 
 marked that " the climbing of mountains takes 
 one's breath away, though agreeable conversation 
 may diminish the unpleasantness." He was, 
 however, a conscientious observer and an original
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 25 
 
 thinker, the first man of science who put forward 
 a theory as to the causes of the movement of 
 glaciers, and the populariser of the belief that 
 the high Alps are the haunt of dragons. 
 
 Scheuchzer, it seems, was shown a so-called 
 " dragon-stone " in some collection of curiosities 
 at Lucerne ; a dragon-stone being a stone that 
 you can cut out of the head of a dragon if you 
 can catch the dragon asleep. It is a valuable 
 medicament for a long list of complaints, ranging 
 from bubonic plague to bleeding of the nose. 
 From the existence of dragons, Scheuchzer main- 
 tains, the existence of dragons may logically be 
 inferred. The next thing, therefore, was to find 
 the dragons, or if that were impossible, to find 
 people who had seen them ; and the Professor de- 
 voted himself earnestly to this task. He did not, 
 indeed, manage himself to meet a dragon, but he 
 met plenty of people who told him dragon stories. 
 Johann Tinner of Frumsen, for example, had 
 seen a dragon : — 
 
 " Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; 
 its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it 
 had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that 
 he smote and slew it with the assistance of his 
 brother Thomas. He added that before it was 
 killed, the people of the neighbourhood com- 
 plained that the milk was withdrawn from their 
 cows, and that they could never discover the 
 author of the mischief, but that the mischief 
 ceased after the dragon had been killed." 
 
 Then there was the dragon seen by Johann 
 Bueler of Sennwald. It was " an enormous black 
 beast," standing on four legs, and having a crest
 
 2G THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 six inches long on its head. Finally there was 
 yet another kind of dragon seen by Christopher 
 Schorer, Prefect of Lucerne, who reported as 
 follows : — 
 
 "In the year 1649, I was admiring the beauty 
 of the sky by night, when I saw a bright and 
 shining dragon issue from a large cave in the 
 mouQtain commonly called Pilatus, and fly about 
 with rapidly flapping wings. It was very big; 
 it had a long tail ; its neck was outstretched ; its 
 head ended with a serpent's serrated jaw. It 
 threw out sparks as it flew, like the red-hot 
 horse-shoe when the blacksmith hammers it. At 
 first I imagined that what I saw was a meteor, 
 but after observing it carefully, I perceived that 
 it was a dragon from the nature of its movements 
 and the structure of its limbs." 
 
 Such are a few representative dragon stories. 
 Anyone who can read Latin will find many other 
 stories like them in Scheuchzer's "Itinera 
 Alpina," where the narratives are supported by 
 pictures of convincing ghastliness. It is hard to 
 believe that they appeared only two hundred 
 years ago, in the enlightened age of Anne. But 
 that age was really a good deal less enlightened 
 than it is sometimes supposed to have been, and 
 the belief in dragons was not, after all, so irra- 
 tional as the belief in witchcraft which 
 intelligent men still held, and against which 
 the credulous Professor Scheuchzer protested 
 energetically.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 It was not until long after the minor ascents 
 mentioned in the previous chapters that the 
 climbing of the real snow-peaks began. 
 
 The first experience of snow-craft was acquired 
 by the crossing o f high passes in the way of 
 business. Josias Simler, as we have seen, knew 
 a great deal about it, though he does not tell us 
 whether he himself ever ventured on a glacier or 
 not ; and there is plenty of evidence that the 
 glacier passes were used long before Simler was 
 born. Roman coins of the reigns of Nerva, 
 Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian, Theodosius, and 
 other Emperors have been picked up at the top of 
 the Theodule, and it is not to be supposed that 
 they have been dropped there by modern collec- 
 tors. The top of the Breithorn being only an 
 easy walk from the top of the Theodule, it is 
 even credible that some ancient Roman may 
 have turned aside to make that popular ascent, 
 but we have no proof that any ancient Roman 
 actually did so. So far, in fact, as snow peaks 
 are concerned, the story of Alpine climbing 
 begins with the ascent of the Titlis by a monk of 
 Engelberg in 1739. Here again, however, we 
 are speaking of an isolated feat of which we 
 know no particulars, and which certainly gave 
 no stimulus to mountaineering, since there was 
 no second ascent of the Titlis until that of 
 Dr Freygrabend, about fifty years afterwards. 
 The continuous story of Alpine climbing only com- 
 mences with the discovery of Chamonix in 1741. 
 
 37
 
 28 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 To speak of the discovery of Chamonix as 
 having been made in 1741 is, of course, to speak 
 loosely. The place was known from a much 
 earlier date to the tax-gatherers, the bishops, and 
 even the geographers. Saint Francis de Sales 
 is known to have been there ; the name is 
 printed in an atlas of 1595 ; a French writer, 
 Ren6 Le Pays, dated a letter from " Chamony en 
 Fossigny " in 1669. From Geneva, however, no 
 one went there, the relations between Geneva 
 and Savoy having long been strained, and the 
 inns of Savoy being reputed dirty and uncom- 
 fortable. The place, consequently, was a terra 
 incognita, and travellers were hardly even aware 
 of the existence of Mont Blanc. Bishop Burnet, 
 the first English traveller to mention it, only 
 does so in the following vague sentence : — 
 
 " One hill not far from Geneva, called Maudit 
 or Cursed, of which one third is always covered 
 with snow, is two miles of perpendicular height, 
 according to the observation of that incomparable 
 Mathematician and Philosopher, Nicolas Fatio 
 Duilio, who at twenty -two years of age is already 
 one of the greatest men of his age, and seems to 
 be born to carry Learning some sizes beyond 
 what it has yet attained." 
 
 In 1741, however, there happened to be at 
 Geneva a considerable colony of young English- 
 men, of which the most notable members were 
 William Windham of Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk- 
 shire, and his tutor, Benjamin Stillingfleet, the 
 grandson of the great bishop of that name. 
 Windham was an active young athlete, known 
 after his return to London as " boxing
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 29 
 
 Windham." His life at Geneva seems to have 
 been rather lively, since the archives record that 
 he was fined for assault, and trespassing, and 
 other offences ; but a more important result of 
 his high spirits was that, when he heard vague 
 rumours of marvellous sights to be seen at 
 Chamonix, he made up his mind to organise a 
 party and go there. His party consisted of 
 himself and his tutor, Dr Pococke, the Oriental 
 traveller, Lord Haddington and his brother, Mr 
 Baillie, Mr Chetwynd, Mr Aldworth Neville, 
 and Mr Price of Foxley, an amateur artist of 
 some merit. He reached Chamonix without 
 difficulty, and on his return, he wrote, or perhaps 
 his tutor wrote for him, an account of the 
 excursion which, being first published in French 
 in the Journal RelvMiqne of Neuchatel, and 
 then in English, in London, first drew the 
 attention of the world to the remote mountain 
 valley. We need not trouble about his adven- 
 tures by the way, but some of the later portion 
 of his narrative should certainly be quoted. It 
 is printed at length in both " The Early Moun- 
 taineers " and " The Annals of Mont Blanc." 
 
 Let us begin with the arrival of the travellers 
 at their destination : — 
 
 "We continued our Journey," we read, "onto 
 Chanouny, where is a Village upon the North- 
 side of the Arve, in a Valley, where there is a 
 Priory belonging to the Chapter of Sallanches ; 
 here we encamped, and while our Dinner was 
 preparing, we enquired of the People of the Place 
 about the Glacieres. They showed us at first the 
 Ends of them, which reach into the Valley, and
 
 30 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 were to be seen from the Village ; these appeared 
 only like white Rocks, or rather like immense 
 Icicles, made by Water running down the 
 Mountain. This did not satisfy our Curiosity, 
 and we thought we were coming too far to be 
 contented wdth so small a Matter ; we therefore 
 strictly enquired of the Peasants whether we 
 could not by going up the Mountain discover 
 something more worthy our Notice. They told 
 us we might, but the greatest part of them repre- 
 sented the Thing as very difficult and laborious." 
 
 Labour and Difficulty, however, did not deter 
 the Party. They engaged Guides and Porters, 
 and set out for the Montanvert, making the 
 following rules for their comfort and safety : — 
 
 " That no one should go out of his Rank, that 
 he who led the Way should go a slow and even 
 Pace; that whoever found himself fatigued or 
 out of Breath might call for a Halt ; and lastly, 
 that whenever we found a Spring we should 
 drink some of our Wine, mixed with Water, and 
 fill up the Bottles we had emptied with Water, 
 to serve us at other Halts where we should find 
 none." 
 
 Then follows the description of the ascent : — 
 
 " We were quickly at the Foot of the Mount- 
 tain, and began to ascend through a very steep 
 Path through a Wood of Firs and Larch Trees. 
 . . . After we had passed the Wood, we came to 
 a kind of Meadow, full of large Stones, and 
 Pieces of Rocks, that were broken off, and had 
 fallen down from the Mountain ; the Ascent was 
 so steep that we were obliged sometimes to cling 
 to them with our Hands, and make use of Sticks
 
 ♦^
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 31 
 
 with sharp Irons at the Ends, to support our- 
 selves. Our Koad lay slantwise, and we had 
 several Places to cross where the Avalanches of 
 Snow were fallen and had made terrible Havock ; 
 there was nothing to be seen but Trees torn up 
 by the Eoots, and large Stones, which seemed to 
 lie without any Support ; every Step we set the 
 Ground gave way, the Snow which was mixed 
 up with it made us slip, and had it not been for 
 Staffs and our Hands, we must many times 
 have gone down the Precipice. We had an 
 interrupted view quite to the Bottom of 
 the Mountain, which we had the Pleasure of 
 beholding, and the Steepness of the Descent, 
 joined to the height where we were, made a 
 View terrible enough to make most People's 
 Heads turn. In short, after climbing with great 
 Labour for four Hours and three-quarters, we got 
 to the Top of the Mountain, from whence we had 
 the Pleasure of beholding Objects of an extra- 
 ordinary Nature." 
 
 As a description of an ascent of the Montan- 
 vert the passage may perhaps seem over sensa- 
 tional, but it is just to remember that the path 
 of those days was not like the path of the present 
 time, and that Windham was making the excur- 
 sion rather early in the season. He goes on to 
 describe the descent of the hill on to the 
 glacier : — 
 
 " As far as our Eyesight could reach, we saw 
 Nothing but this Valley ; the Height of the Rocks 
 which surrounded it made it impossible for the 
 Eye to judge exactly how wide it was ; but I 
 imagine it must be near three-quarters of a
 
 32 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 League. Our Curiosity did not stop here, we 
 were resolved to go down upon the Ice ; we had 
 about four hundred Yards to go down, the 
 Descent was excessively steep, and all of a dry 
 crumbling Earth, mixt with Gravel, and little 
 loose Stones which afforded us no firm Footing ; 
 so that we went down partly falling, and partly 
 sliding on our Hands and Knees. At length we 
 got upon the Ice, where our DiflBoulty ceased, for 
 that was extremely rough, and afforded us good 
 Footing; we found in it an infinite Number of 
 Cracks, some we could step over, others were 
 several Feet wide. These Cracks were so deep 
 that we could not even see the Bottom ; those 
 who go in search of Crystal are often lost in them, 
 but their Bodies are generally found again after 
 some Days, perfectly well preserved. All our 
 Guides assured us that these Cracks change con- 
 tinually, and that the whole Glaciere has a Kind 
 of Motion. In going up the Mountain we often 
 heard something like a Clap of Thunder, which, 
 as we were informed by our Guides, was caused 
 by fresh Cracks then making ; but as there were 
 none made while we were upon the Ice, we could 
 not determine whether it was that, or Avalanches 
 of Snow, or perhaps Eocks falling ;"i though since 
 Travellers observe that in Greenland the Ice 
 cracks with a Noise that resembles Thunder, it 
 might very well be what our Guides told us. 
 As in all Countries of Ignorance, People are 
 extremely superstitious ; they told us many 
 strange Stories of Witches, etc., who came to 
 play their Pranks upon the Glacieres, and dance 
 to the Sound of Instruments. . . .
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 33 
 
 " There is Water continually issuing out of the 
 Glacieres, which the People look on as so very- 
 wholesome that they say it may be drank of in 
 any Quantities without Danger, even when one 
 is hot with Exercise. 
 
 " The Sun shone very hot, and the Reverbera- 
 tion of the Ice, and circumjacent Rocks, caused a 
 great deal of thaw'd Water to lie in all the 
 Cavities of the Ice ; but I fancy it freezes there 
 constantly as soon as Night comes on. . . . We 
 found on the Edge of the Glaciere several pieces 
 of Ice, which we at first took for Rocks, being as 
 big as a House ; these were Pieces quite separate 
 from the Glaciere. It is difficult to conceive how 
 they came to be formed there. 
 
 " Having remained about half an Hour upon the 
 Glaciere, and having drank there in Ceremony 
 Admiral Vernon's Health, and Success to the 
 British Arms, we climbed to the Summit, from 
 whence we came with incredible Difficulty, the 
 Earth giving way at every Step we set. From 
 thence, after having rested ourselves a few 
 Minutes, we began to descend, and arrived at 
 Chamouny just about Sun-set, to the great 
 Astonishment of all the People of the Place, and 
 even of our Guides, who owned to us they 
 thought we should not have gone through with 
 our Undertaking." 
 
 Such is the earliest description, in English at 
 all events, of the Mer de Glace. Having visited 
 it, Windham went home, climbing the M61e 
 (6130 feet) upon his way. "We fancied," he 
 says, "that after the Glacieres, every Mountain 
 would be easy to us, however, it took us more
 
 34 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 than five Hours' hard Labour getting up, the 
 Ascent being extremely steep." The rest of his 
 paper is principally taken up with practical hints 
 to travellers who might care to follow in his 
 steps. He not only advises them to take ther- 
 mometers, barometers, a quadrant, and a tent, 
 but adds : " Although we met with Nothing 
 that had the appearance of Danger, never- 
 theless I would recommend going well armed; 
 'tis an easy Precaution, and on certain Occa- 
 sions very useful ; one is never the worse for 
 it, and oftentimes it helps a Man out of a 
 Scrape." 
 
 The first person who made use of the hints 
 was one Pierre Martel, an engineer of Geneva, 
 who afterwards came to London to teach mathe- 
 matics, but, not obtaining as many pupils as 
 he would have liked, ultimatelj'- emigrated to 
 Jamaica, where he died in 1761. His trip to 
 Chamonix took place in 1741, with four com- 
 panions: "a Goldsmith very well skilled in 
 Minerals, an Apothecary who was a very good 
 Chemist and Botanist," a Cutler, and a Grocer 
 reputed "to be very curious, which made us," he 
 considers, " a Company pretty well qualified for 
 this Undertaking, especially as each of them, 
 according to his particular Turn, contributed to 
 discover Something." 
 
 Martel was well equipped with scientific instru- 
 ments, and took a number of observations which 
 we will not dwell upon. Like Windham, he went 
 up the Montanvert, and descended thence on to 
 the ice. He also made a map of the glaciers, and 
 noticed many things of which there is no mention
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 35 
 
 in Windham's narrative. Of the movement of 
 the glaciers, for example, he writes : — 
 
 "It is to be observed that the Glaciers is not> 
 level, and all the Ice has a Motion from the 
 higher Parts towards the lower ; that is to say, 
 that it Slides continually towards the Outlets 
 into the Valley, which has been remarked by 
 many Circumstances. First, By great Stones 
 which have been carried quite into the Valley of 
 Chamouny ; they showed us one of a very large 
 Size, which several old People assured us that 
 they had seen upon the Ice." 
 
 He has something to say, too, about the 
 Aiguilles, and is the first writer who mentions 
 Mont Blanc by name : — 
 
 "I observed that the Mountains or Points 
 which we saw from the Mountain which we went 
 up are very high, and there are many of them. . . . 
 That which is towards, and which we first dis- 
 covered before us, is called L'Eguille du Dru ; 
 this Point looks very like an Obelisk, the Top of 
 which is lost in the Clouds, making a very acute 
 Angle at the Summit, and not much unlike a 
 great Gothic Tower, built of white and brown 
 Stone, the Parts of which are very rough. For 
 we must observe that the Pieces which fall off 
 break in a Perpendicular Direction, having here 
 and there little Parts by themselves, which make 
 the Mountain look as if it was composed of an 
 infinite Number of little Towers. . . . This Moun- 
 tain is too steep to have any Ice upon it, or indeed 
 much Snow. The two Points on the West Side 
 are L'Eguille du Montmallet, and Mont Blanc, 
 which is the farthest to the West. 'Tis this
 
 36 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 Point of Mont Blanc which is supposed to be the 
 highest in all the Glacieres, and perhaps of all 
 the Alps. Many Persons of the Country who 
 have travelled assured me that they had seen it 
 from Dijon, and others from Langres, which is 135 
 Miles distance. . . . This Mountain is entirely 
 covered with Ice, quite from the Top down to 
 the Bottom. . . . Upon this Mountain (Mont- 
 anvert) there rise four Points something like the 
 L'Eguille de Dru, which are called the Points of 
 Charmaux. All these Points are absolutely in- 
 accessible, some by reason of the Ice, which 
 covers their Surface almost entirely, and others 
 on account of their Steepness." 
 
 Martel's narrative, together with his map, was 
 printed in the same volume with Windham's ; 
 and the joint publication in 1744 may be said to 
 have paved the way for the opening up of 
 Chamonix as a tourist centre. A visit to 
 Chamonix gradually came to be recognised as a 
 proper mode of demonstrating curiosity and 
 enterprise. Dr John Moore, who made the 
 Grand Tour with the Duke of Hamilton tells us 
 that " One could hardly mention anything curious 
 or singular without being told by some of those 
 travellers with an air of cool contempt — 'Dear 
 sir, that is pretty well ; but, take my word for 
 it, it is nothing to the Glaciers of Savoy ! ' " The 
 Due de la Rochefoucauld thought it necessary to 
 go to the glaciers in order to prove that the 
 French were not less courageous than the English. 
 Of his ascent of the Montanvert he tells us that 
 " To avoid tripping, which the stones along the 
 path would have made dangerous, I was obliged
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 37 
 
 to hang on to the tail of my frock coat, which one 
 of the peasants carried slung over his shoulder." 
 But the visitor whose visit marked the beginning 
 of a new epoch was Horace Benedict de Saussure. 
 
 De Saussure was a descendant of an old French 
 family which had emigrated at a time when true 
 religion was held to consist mainly in the persecu- 
 tion of the Protestants. His father was known 
 as a writer on agricultural subjects, and he was 
 connected with the best families of Geneva. His 
 mother brought him up robustly. " She accus- 
 tomed him from his earliest years," says his 
 biographer, Senebier, "to the privations which 
 belong to the history of the human species ; she 
 hardened him to bear the ills resulting from 
 physical fatigue and the inclemency of the 
 seasons : she taught him to bear inconveniences 
 without complaining, and to sacrifice pleasure to 
 duty with a light heart." 
 
 It was inevitable that a Genevan so brought up 
 would go to see the glaciers at an early age. 
 De Saussure went there in 1760, at the age of 
 twenty, and his first thought on arriving there 
 was that Mont Blanc ought to be climbed. He 
 understood, however, that one could not set out 
 to climb Mont Blanc with as little preparation as 
 required for the climbing of the Montanvert. 
 The way had first to be found. He therefore 
 offered a reward to any person who would find 
 it, and he also promised to compensate for the loss 
 of his day's work any peasant who seriously but 
 unsuccessfully tried to find it. We shall see how, 
 after many fruitless attempts, the prize was ulti- 
 mately won by the famous Jacques Balmat.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 More than half a century was to pass before De 
 Saussure's reward for the discovery of a practicable 
 route to the summit of Mont Blanc was to be 
 claimed, but climbers were by no means idle in 
 the meantime. De Saussure himself, who had 
 been appointed to a professorship at the Geueva 
 University, andHlevoted his life to the study of 
 geology, travelled widely, and never missed an 
 opportunity of mountaineering. He ascended 
 Etna, for example, with Sir William Hamilton, 
 and visited the Jura, the Vosges, and the moun- 
 tain of Dauphin6, besides crossing eight Alpine 
 passes, and making sixteen other excursions to 
 Alpine centres. His letter in reply to his wife's 
 remonstrances against this habit is worth quoting 
 from : — 
 
 "In this valley, which I had not previously 
 visited," he writes, " I have made observations of 
 the greatest importance, surpassing my highest 
 hopes; but that is not what you care about. 
 You would sooner — God forgive me for saying 
 so — see me growing fat like a friar, and snoring 
 every day in the chimney corner, after a big 
 dinner, than that I should achieve immortal 
 fame by the most sublime discoveries, at the cost 
 of reducing my weight by a few ounces and 
 spending a few weeks away from you. If, then, 
 I continue to take these journeys in spite of the 
 annoyance they cause you, the reason is that I 
 feel myself pledged in honour to go on with 
 them, and that I think it necessary to extend my
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 39 
 
 knowledge on this subject, and make my works 
 as nearly perfect as possible. I say to myself: 
 ' Just as an officer goes out to assault the fortress 
 when the order is given, and just as a merchant 
 goes to market on market-day, so must I go to 
 the mountains when there are observations to be 
 made.' " 
 
 Nor was De Saussure alone in his interest in 
 the peaks and glaciers. From 1760 onwards 
 quite a group of earnest climbers existed at 
 Geneva. To name them all would be to fill the 
 page with a list of names, mostly unfamiliar to 
 the reader. Two of them, however — Marc- 
 Theodore Bourrit, and Jean-Andr6 de Luc — have 
 a special claim to honourable mention. 
 
 Bourrit was originally a miniature painter ; 
 but he began a new life from the day when some 
 friends took him for a picnic to the Voirons 
 whence he saw the snow peaks in all their 
 majesty. He went to Chamonix, was delighted, 
 and determined to devote as much of his life as 
 possible to the exploration of the Alps. An 
 appointment which he obtained as Precentor of 
 the Geneva Cathedral left him with abundant 
 leisure for the purpose. He lived to be eighty, 
 and continued climbing until old age overtook 
 him. It was his great grief that his liability to 
 mountain-sickness prevented him from climbing 
 Mont Blanc after the way up had been found ; 
 and he does seem, on the whole, to have been 
 more of an enthusiast than of an athlete. From 
 the strict mountaineering point of view his one 
 notable achievement was the discovery of the 
 passage over the Col du G^ant ; but his great
 
 40 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 merit is that he popularised the Alps. He was 
 the first systematic writer of Alpine books — a 
 branch of literature which earned him the title, 
 of which he was very proud, of the Historian of 
 the Alps. Above all, he insisted, even more 
 eloquently than Conrad Gesner, that a sojourn 
 among the mountains had an elevating influence 
 upon the human mind, and impressed men with 
 the littleness of their every-day pursuits. At 
 Chamonix he had seen persons who habitually 
 quarrelled over politics at Geneva " treating one 
 another with courtesy, and even walking about 
 together " ; and he concludes that : — 
 
 " It is, in fact, the mountains that many men 
 have to thank for their reconciliation with their 
 fellows, and with the human race ; and it is there 
 that the rulers of the world, the heads of the 
 nations, ought to hold their meetings. Raised 
 thus above the arena of passions and petty 
 interests, and placed more immediately under 
 the influence of Divine inspiration, one would 
 see them descend from these mountains, each 
 like a new Moses, bringing with them codes of 
 law based upon equity and justice." 
 
 In another passage he tells us how he assembled 
 the guides on the Montanvert, and addressed 
 them as to their duties and responsibilities, and 
 how all his listeners shared in his own intense 
 emotions. 
 
 " That," he adds, " is intelligible enough. Can 
 one imagine a more impressive temple, or one in 
 which more greatness is displayed 1 Is it not 
 there that man feels himself closest to his 
 Creator? Raised, so to say, above the head of
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 41 
 
 nature, he feels sensations which are perfectly 
 new to him; his soul is purified, and all his 
 thoughts are ennobled." 
 
 It should be added that Bourrit had no scientific 
 interest in the mountains. He cared little what 
 rocks they were made of, or what plants grew 
 on their slopes, or by what mechanism the glaciers 
 moved. His role was merely to climb, to admire, 
 and to enjoy — a fact which must win him the 
 sympathy of many modern climbers. He was, 
 too, one of the least envious of men. Many 
 of his contemporaries, though less persevering, 
 had better records to show, but he was never 
 jealous of them, and related their feats as 
 enthusiastically as his own. Even Koman 
 Catholic climbers were his brothers. Prior 
 Murith of the Great Saint Bernard was his good 
 friend, and he persuaded a Roman Catholic 
 Archbishop to dispense mountaineers from the 
 obligation of feasting in Lent. 
 
 Jean-Andre de Luc was a man of a very dif- 
 ferent type. The son of a watchmaker, born at 
 Geneva in 1727, he became a diplomatist, a 
 courtier, and a man of science, the inventor of the 
 hygrometer, a member of the Royal Societies of 
 London, Dublin, and Gottingen, and reader to 
 George III.'s Queen, Charlotte, who gave him 
 apartments at Windsor, where he died at the age 
 of ninety, in 1817. His objects in climbing were 
 almost exclusively scientific, his principal curi- 
 osity being to ascertain at what temperature 
 water would boil at various altitudes. But he 
 also made the first ascent of the Buet ; and that 
 is the first ascent of a permanent snow peak of 
 C
 
 42 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 which any proper record has been preserved. 
 The pamphlet in which it is related, "Eolation 
 de diflferents voyages dans les Alpes du Faucigny," 
 is one of the rarest and also one of the most 
 interesting of Alpine books. 
 
 The Buet must be known by sight to all 
 visitors to Chamonix. It is not very high 
 (10,201 feet), and it is not very difficult. Ball's 
 "Alpine Guide," in fact, speaks of it as "very 
 easy," and says that a single guide suffices for a 
 large party. Still, it is a conspicuous mountain, 
 and it is a snow mountain, with glaciers, afford- 
 ing a magnificent panorama from its summit. 
 Consequently it attracted the attention of the 
 early travellers ; and De Luc's account of his 
 ascent is brightly written, with a pretty vein of 
 sentiment. 
 
 His first attempt was made as early as 1765; 
 but having incompetent guides, he lost his way, 
 and smashed his thermometer, without arriving 
 anywhere near the top. On August 24, 1770, 
 he tried again, and with no better success. The 
 guide was a man of whom the party knew 
 nothing, except that they had found him in a 
 chalet making cheese, and they soon had proof 
 that he " was not the expert we required." He 
 first led them the wrong way, and then when 
 De Luc slipped, sat down on De Luc's feet, 
 and sprained his ankle, and then went off to 
 milk his cows, leaving De Luc and his friends 
 to find their way back as best they could. The 
 result was that they were benighted on the 
 hillside, and obliged to sleep in the open, with 
 nothing to protect them from the cold except
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 43 
 
 the cloth in which their provisions had been 
 carried. They woke up feeling very stiff, and 
 had great difficulty in getting back to Sixt. 
 
 They were not discouraged, however, but 
 resolved to try again; and when they had, 
 not without much difficulty, convinced the in- 
 habitants of the valley that they really wanted 
 to climb the mountain, and not to prospect 
 for gold mines, competent guides at last pre- 
 sented themselves, and they set out for the 
 second time on September 20th. After 
 they had spent a night in a chalet at Les 
 Fonds, bad weather drove them back to Sixt. 
 It cleared, however, and they retraced their 
 steps, passed another night in the chalet, and 
 commenced the ascent at a reasonably early 
 hour. The following are the most interesting 
 passages in De Luc's narrative : — 
 
 " So far we had ascended by the south face of 
 the mountain on a steep grass slope . . . but when 
 we turned to the west our view of the Alps was 
 interrupted, and we were too busily occupied with 
 climbing to care to look behind us. 
 
 "Then we came to the snow, and presently to 
 the ice. It was the foot of the Glacier of the 
 Buet, which covers the entire summit of the 
 mountain. There was snow on it. The previous 
 winter's snow was not entirely melted, and some 
 fresh snow was also lying. The surface of it was 
 very hard because there had been a frost during 
 the night, and the sun was not yet shining on it. 
 This we had foreseen, and we were provided with 
 woollen socks, with which, and with iron-tipped 
 staves, we expected to be easily able to walk.
 
 44 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 " For some time we were quite pleased with 
 our device, and ascended a fairly steep slope 
 without slipping. Then suddenly it became so 
 steep that, had it not been for my alpenstock 
 which held me up when I drove it into the 
 hard crust of snow, I might have slided all 
 the way back to Les Fonds. . . . As, however, 
 the slope became gradually less steep towards 
 its lower extremity, there was really nothing 
 to fear if one only retained a little presence 
 of mind. 
 
 " But for our guide's help we should never 
 have got to the top, as we were not shod for 
 such an adventure. He had, however, boots 
 with very thick soles, studded with nails, and 
 he kicked the snow hard, ascending slantwise, 
 thus making steps in the crust, which supported 
 him, and in which we followed him, holding our- 
 selves up with our sticks. This method, though 
 all right for ascending, would not have served 
 for the descent; and we should not have faced 
 the risk if we had not felt sure that the sun, 
 when it got round to the west, would soften the 
 surface of the snow. Reassured by the reflec- 
 tion that our retreat was secured, we felt our 
 minds relieved, and abandoned ourselves to our 
 impressions." 
 
 And the writer's impressions of the mountain 
 top are thus rendered : — 
 
 " It is hard to make oneself understood when 
 one's words do not recall sensations which one's 
 readers have experienced ; I do not flatter myself, 
 therefore, that I shall be able to make my readers 
 feel what we felt. The deepest silence reigned
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 45 
 
 around us. We felt that the place was not meant 
 for living creatures to frequent. It was, in fact, 
 as unfamiliar to our guide as to ourselves. The 
 chamois never go there, and consequently no 
 chamois-hunter had ever been there either. Yet 
 it was not absolutely without organic life. We 
 saw several flies there, and some bees too, though 
 these were all dead. . . . 
 
 " This feeling of solitude was one of the senti- 
 ments which we most easily distinguished ; but it 
 does not explain our state of mind. We found 
 ourselves on an immense expanse of snow of un- 
 varying whiteness. The rays of the sun, which 
 was beginning to rise, reflected from the surface 
 of the snow, showed how polished it was. We saw 
 absolutely nothing but the snow and the sky, the 
 former ending at the horizon in gently rounded 
 hillocks, resembling the beautiful silvery clouds 
 which sometimes float majestically in a pure atmo- 
 sphere. And that idea precisely describes our 
 own sensations. We actually seemed to be afloat 
 in the air, supported upon such a cloud. And 
 what an atmosphere it was. Never had we seen 
 the sky of such a colour, bright blue and dark 
 blue at the same time, producing an indescribable 
 impression of immensity. 
 
 " It was nearly mid-day when at last we 
 reached the summit, and suddenly lifting our 
 heads to overlook the curtain which had so long 
 veiled our horizon to the East, we had a view of 
 the great chain of the Alps, stretching for a 
 distance of more than fifty leagues. To the 
 West it was only limited by the density of the 
 air ; to the South- West it extended to the Mont
 
 46 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 Cenis ; to the North-East probably to the Saint 
 Gothard. Only a few of the peaks overlooked 
 us. 
 
 "The details, no less than the general effect, 
 would have stirred the most indifterent of men 
 to admiration, A single look at the vast 
 quantities of ice and snow that cover the Alps 
 suffices to set one's mind at ease as to the 
 permanence of the Rhone, the Rhine, the Po, 
 and the Danube. There, one feels, is their 
 reservoir, and it would hold out against several 
 seasons of drought. Their sources seemed to 
 us but tiny threads of water in comparison with 
 the valleys packed with ice from which they 
 issued. Mont Blanc, towering above the valleys, 
 seemed capable of supplying a river for ages to 
 come, so loaded was it with snow from base to 
 summit." 
 
 Such were the philosopher's reflections. They 
 were interrupted by the shock of the discovery 
 that the whole party was standing on a cornice. 
 
 A cornice, it should perhaps be explained, is 
 an unsupported crest of snow, projecting from a 
 clifi", and overhanging a precipice. It is apt, 
 when climbers tread upon it, to break away and 
 let them down. We shall have to speak 
 presently of fatal accidents due to this cause. 
 But Jean-Andr6 de Luc, having no experience 
 of cornices, was not alarmed. " Our first move- 
 ment," he says, " was a precipitate retreat, but 
 having gathered by reflection that the addition 
 of our own weight to this prodigious mass, 
 which had thus supported itself for ages, counted 
 for absolutely nothing, and could not possibly
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 47 
 
 break it loose, we laid aside our fears, and went 
 back to the terrible terrace." He adds that they 
 took it in turns to advance to the very edge of 
 the cornice and look over it, the man whose 
 turn it was to look being held up by the coat- 
 tails by his friends. As it happened, the 
 conditions were favourable, and the cornice bore 
 their weight, but it was, of course, the merest 
 chance that this famous ascent was not made 
 still more famous by an accident as awful as 
 that which, at a later date, befell Mr Whymper's 
 party on the Matterhorn. 
 
 Two years later, De Luc made a second ascent 
 of the same mountain by a different route. The 
 book in which he describes it is called "Lettres 
 physiques et morales sur la Montague et sur la 
 nature de la Terre et de I'Homme." It is 
 dedicated to Queen Charlotte, the philosopher 
 being engaged at the time when he wrote it in 
 acting as travelling companion to some ladies in 
 whom Her Majesty was interested. No accident 
 happened, except to the philosopher's ther- 
 mometer, which he knocked over and broke in the 
 chalet in which he spent the night before the 
 climb ; but the narrative is pervaded with a 
 delightful Arcadian sentiment, not to be found 
 in any modern Alpine book. The only trouble 
 was on the way down, when first darkness and 
 then a thunderstorm overtook the travellers. 
 After nearly sliding down a grass slope, which 
 terminated in a precipice, they had made up 
 their minds to spend the night upon the moun- 
 tain, when they bethought themselves of calling 
 for help to the people in the chalet below. A
 
 48 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 light was shown in answer to their cries. It 
 disappeared, and reappeared, seeming brighter 
 than at first. A search-party was on its way : 
 "Angels in the guise of mountaineers were 
 making their way to us through the darkness, in 
 spite of the rain, hail, and wind." A bonfire 
 was kindled to direct the lost travellers, and 
 torches were lighted at it. A peasant girl, 
 carrying one of them, "braved every danger in 
 order to come to our rescue." 
 
 The girl led the philosophers down, and the chalet 
 gave them shelter for a second night ; and the rest 
 must be told in De Luc's own language : — 
 
 " In the morning we proposed to pay our 
 hostesses. Ah, how I feel ashamed of myself. 
 , . . They flatly refused to accept anything. 
 However — I must confess it — having noticed 
 that one of them seemed to be less in the position 
 of an independent mistress than the other, I 
 approached her, withdrawing my hand from my 
 pocket. I do not tell this .story to her disgrace. 
 Your Majesty will understand if I explain what 
 I read clearly in her face. It was from motives 
 of humanity, and no others, that she had served 
 us. . . . The good deed had been its own reward. 
 . . . She had had no thought of money. Still a 
 whole crown. The sight of it brought out a 
 smile upon her face. . . . Yet the idea of taking 
 payment for such a service. . . . She looked 
 down. . . . Then she put out her hand and took 
 the coin, and grasping my hand shook it in that 
 friendly manner which is the mountaineer's only 
 manner of expressing his esteem. Not other- 
 wise would they shake hands with a queen.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 49 
 
 And yet my pleasure at the sight of this womau's 
 gratificatiou was not without alloy ; for thus is 
 human nature corrupted. At times I reproach 
 myself ; and I should reproach myself perpetually 
 if I thought there were any likelihood that 
 Anterne would become a popular resort of 
 travellers. Nor is this merely a passing reflec- 
 tion. It is a reflection which I have made again 
 and again when I have observed that this is how 
 one alters the character of the reward which good 
 people expect." 
 
 Thus Jean- Andre de Luc. Two other climbs 
 remain to be referred to before we pass on to 
 the great assault upon Mont Blanc. One of our 
 climbers is M. Clement, Cure of Champery. He 
 made, in 1784, the first ascent of the Dent du 
 Midi, but of that ascent we have no particulars. 
 The other climber is M. Murith, Prior of the 
 Great Saint Bernard. 
 
 M. Murith was born at Saint Branchier 
 (Valais) in 1752, and died at Martigny in 1818. 
 He was a botanist of some mark, the author of a 
 Botanical Handbook to the Valais, published at 
 Lausanne in 1810; and he regarded the moun- 
 tains very differently from that earlier ecclesiastic, 
 Master John de Bremble, who spoke of them as 
 a place of torment. The first ascent of the 
 Velan, in 1779, stands to his credit. 
 
 The Velan is higher than the Buet, its exact 
 altitude being 12,353 feet, and it appears that 
 some unsuccessful attempts to climb it had been 
 made before M. Murith came upon the scene, 
 though no record has been preserved of them. 
 He took with him " two hardy hunters " to carry
 
 50 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 provisions and scientific instruments. The hardy 
 hunters were frightened, but M. Murith ex- 
 horted them to courage. " Fear nothing," he 
 said, "wherever there is danger, I will go in 
 front." One of them followed him, while the 
 other went off to look for an easier path, lost his 
 way, and wandered about helplessly until M. 
 Murith found him again on his return. Their 
 principal difficulty was a steep slope of ice which 
 the remaining hunter vowed could not be 
 ascended, but M. Murith was equal to his task. 
 "He arms himself," says Bourrit, "with a pointed 
 hammer, knocks holes in the ice wall to thrust 
 his feet into and to clutch hold of with his hands, 
 and so ascends slowly and with difficulty, and at 
 last gets to the top of it." The rest was com- 
 paratively easy, though " the effect of the rarefied 
 air had dazed them, and their heads ached." 
 
 "Soon," the narrative continues, "there 
 remained nothing for them to do except to climb 
 the rock which forms the peak of the Velan. It 
 is steep and tolerably high, but hand hold and foot- 
 hold are given by its cracks and inequalities, and 
 it was not an obstacle that could stop them for a 
 moment after they had surmounted the others. 
 They scale it, and to their surprise, find them- 
 selves on a level with the flat surface which 
 forms the top of the mountain. ... A spectacle 
 not less astounding than magnificent presented 
 itself to the eyes. . . . An impressive stillness, a 
 solemn silence, produced an indescribable effect 
 upon their minds. The sound of the avalanches, 
 repeated by the echoes, alone seemed to mark 
 the march of time. . . . They saw the mountains
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 51 
 
 split asunder, and send the fragments rolling to 
 their feet, and the rivers taking their sources 
 beneath them in places where inert nature 
 appeared on the point of death." 
 
 And so forth ; for we need not give the whole 
 of the eloquent word painting. The mountain, 
 it may be remarked, was not climbed again until 
 1820, when, as we learn from a quaint anony- 
 mous work entitled " A Tour to Great Saint 
 Bernard's and round Mont Blanc," the ascent 
 was repeated by an Englishman. 
 
 And now the ground is clear, and we are free 
 to speak of the conquest of Mont Blanc. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Everyone who wants to know everything about 
 the early ascents of Mont Blanc must buy or 
 borrow "The Annals of Mont Blanc," by Mr C. 
 E. Mathews. Having discovered and obtained 
 possession of a manuscript diary kept by Dr 
 Paccard of Chamonix, medical practitioner and 
 mountaineer, the associate of Jacques Balmat in. 
 the first ascent, Mr Mathews has been able 
 materially to supplement the information given 
 by previous historians of the mountain, and this 
 chapter must necessarily be much indebted to 
 his pages. 
 
 We have seen that De Saussure, in 1760, 
 offered a prize to any peasant who would find a 
 practicable route to the top of the great moun- 
 tain. He repeated the offer in 1762, and in that 
 year one Pierre Simond tried to win the reward.
 
 52 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 He made two attempts, one by the Glacier du 
 G6ant and the other by the Glacier des Bossons, 
 but did not get very far, and concluded that the 
 complete ascent was impossible. His opinion 
 was generally accepted, and no one tried again 
 for thirteen years. In 1773, in fact, even the 
 enthusiast Bourrit wrote that " it is the greatest 
 mistake to suppose that it would not be im- 
 possible to ascend Mont Blanc." In 1775, how- 
 ever, four Chamonix men, Michel and Fran9ois 
 Paccard, Victor Tissay, and a youth whom 
 Bourrit describes as " the son of the respectable 
 Couteran," renewed the attack. They gained a 
 point which Mr Mathews believes to have been 
 "about midway between the Grands Mulets and 
 the Grand Plateau," when a fog came on and 
 drove them back. 
 
 Another interval, this time of eight years, 
 followed. Then a third attempt was made 
 by Jean - Marie Couttet, Lombard Meunier, 
 and Joseph Carrier. One of the party broke 
 down before they had got very far, wanted 
 to be allowed to lie down in the snow and 
 go to sleep, and consequently had to be 
 taken home. Next, in the course of the same 
 year, our friend Bourrit tried, but bad weather 
 compelled him to return. In his own narrative 
 he pictures himself " surrounded by horrible cre- 
 vasses and great frozen cliffs," but Dr Paccard, 
 who was of the party, declares that "M. Bourrit 
 did not dare to go on the ice." Whichever 
 version of the story be the correct one, Bourrit 
 was not deterred from making another effort in 
 1784:. Unhappily, he was overtaken by moun-
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 53 
 
 tain-sickness at a height of about 10,000 feet, and 
 found that the guides carrying the wine had gone 
 on ahead, and were out of earshot. He was 
 obliged, therefore, to abandon the enterprise, 
 though his companions went ou and attained an 
 altitude of 14,300 feet. Bourrit, as innocent of 
 jealousy as usual, wrote an enthusiastic letter to 
 De Saussure, who came to Chamonix to try the 
 ascent himself in September 1785. Bourrit and 
 his son set out with him. They took with them 
 not only food and scientific instruments, but 
 fifty pounds' weight of fuel, sheets, blankets, and 
 pillows, and a new roof for an old hut. Bourrit, 
 who seems always to have suffered from some- 
 thing, suffered on this occasion from a violent 
 indigestion. He persevered, however, until deep, 
 freshly-fallen snow made further progress impos- 
 sible. Dr Paccard's diary throws graphic light 
 upon the manner in which the travellers of those 
 days depended upon their guides : — 
 
 "M. de Saussure Avas tied like a prisoner in 
 coming down, with a rope under the arms, to 
 which Francois Folliguet was attached in front 
 and Pierre Balmat behind. Couttet was in front 
 to mark the steps. M. Bourrit was held by the 
 collar of his coat by Tournier, and was leaning 
 on the shoulder of Gervais. In the difficult 
 places a barrier was made by a baton, on which 
 M. de Saussure was able to lean, both going up 
 and descending. Young M. Bourrit, almost ill, 
 ascended by holding to Cuidet's coat." 
 
 It would seem, however, that the emoluments 
 of the guides were not, according to our modern 
 notions, in proportion to their services. "Each
 
 54 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 guide," we read, "had six francs a day, and 
 M. de Saussure, who paid everything, spent 
 15 louis (25 francs each)." He had come incognito 
 from Geneva, pretending that he was going to the 
 little Saint Bernard. 
 
 And now the time had come to introduce 
 Jacques Balmat, the ultimate conqueror of the 
 great white mountain. 
 
 Jacques Balmat, the younger of two brothers 
 of the name, was a peasant of the village of Les 
 Pel6rins. Born in January 1762, he was now 
 twenty-four years of age, a vigorous youth, with, 
 as he afterwards told Alexandre Dumas, "the 
 Devil's own calves and Hell's own stomach." 
 From his childhood he had looked forward to 
 climbing the " white molehill," as he called it. 
 He tells how, when he lost his way on the Buet, 
 with nothing to eat, he munched a little snow 
 and looked across at Mont Blanc, saying : " Say 
 what you like, my beauty, and do what you like, 
 some day I shall climb you." He had tried the 
 ascent with Jean-Marie Couttet, and got as far as 
 the Col du G^ant, and even a little further. After 
 taking a party across to Courmayeur in 1784, he 
 had made an attempt from that side. At last he 
 found the right way. 
 
 He had just spent two nights and a day in the 
 mountains, and was on his way home, when he 
 met three guides starting for the Montague de la 
 Cote. " Where are you going ? " he asked them. 
 "To look for crystals," was the reply. "Non- 
 sense," he said. "You are not equipped like 
 that to look for crystals. I shall come with you." 
 They did not want him, and they would not wait
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 55 
 
 for him. He went home, however, breakfasted, 
 dried his clothes, rested a little, changed his 
 socks, filled a bag with his favourite food — some 
 barley dumplings fried in linseed oil — set out 
 after the others, and overtook them. They were 
 jealous, and would hardly speak to him ; he, on 
 his part, was not anxious for them to share in 
 any discovery which he might make. The end 
 of it was, that they returned to Chamonix, leaving 
 him to pass the night on the mountain. 
 
 He was somewhere on the vast snowfields 
 beyond the Grand Plateau, and the way to the 
 summit lay straight before him. On his left was 
 a snow slope, and on his right was a precipice. 
 He stamped his feet and clapped his hands to 
 keep them warm, while a fall of fine powdery 
 snow whipped and stung his face. His description 
 of the scene, as reported by Dumas, is very 
 graphic : — 
 
 " At every instant," he says, " I heard the fall- 
 ing avalanches making a noise like thunder. The 
 glaciers split, and at every split I felt the moun- 
 tain move. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, 
 and I had an extraordinary headache, which took 
 me at the crown of the skull, and worked its way 
 down to the eyelids. All this time the mist never 
 lifted. My breath had frozen on my handker- 
 chief ; the snow had made my clothes wet ; I felt 
 as if I were quite naked. Then I redoubled the 
 rapidity of my movements, and began to sing in 
 order to drive away the foolish thoughts that 
 came into my head. My voice was lost in the 
 snow ; no echo answered me ; I held my tongue 
 and was afraid."
 
 56 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 The night passed, however, as nights, however 
 long and painful, will. The storm was over, and 
 Balmat considered whether he could not go on 
 and finish the ascent. He felt that he could not, 
 but must content himself with having found the 
 way. When M. de Saussure came again to 
 Chamonix he would be able to guide him. Now 
 he must go home to bed. So he went home to 
 bed, very tired and nearly blind, and slept the 
 clock round. 
 
 Waking, he resolved to keep his discovery 
 secret. To him alone should belong the honour. 
 No Couttet or Carrier should share it with him. 
 But here a difficulty arose. It would not suffice 
 to have climbed the mountain. He must also be 
 able to prove that he had climbed it. He could 
 not be sure that someone would be looking at 
 the summit through a telescope just when he 
 happened to be there. A witness, therefore, was 
 required ; and the witness must be a man able to 
 climb. Balmat bethought himself of Dr Gabriel 
 Michel Paccard, the author of the diary from 
 which we have given a few quotations. Dr 
 Paccard was willing, but proposed to make assur- 
 ance doubly sure by taking four or five of the 
 guides with them. " No, doctor," Balmat replied, 
 " you will come along with me without saying a 
 word to anyone, or you will not come at all." 
 The doctor accepted the condition, and the two 
 men set out together on the 7th of August 1786. 
 
 As to the details of the ascent and the relative 
 merits of the two ascensionists, there has been a 
 good deal of disputation, not entirely devoid of 
 acrimony. Paccard 's account of the climb has
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 57 
 
 been lost, and Balmat's account only reaches us 
 through the medium of Alexandre Dumas, who 
 notoriously held the doctrine that it is the duty 
 of every man to leave a story better than he finds 
 it. Paccard, however, himself told Lalande, the 
 astronomer, that it was Balmat who decided what 
 route should be taken, and that testimony seems 
 conclusive. For the rest, it seems best to follow 
 the Balmat version, always remembering, when 
 we find that it makes Paccard look a fool, that it 
 is the story of an egotist, transmuted in the 
 crucible of the imagination of a great romantic 
 writer. Dumas conceives Balmat as a garrulous 
 demi-god, and he needs a foil to him. With 
 this prefatory caution we will follow Balmat's 
 version. 
 
 The climbers set out secretly at five o'clock in 
 the morning, though not quite so secretly as 
 Balmat had intended. The doctor stopped on 
 the way to buy some syrup, and could not resist 
 the temptation to tell the lady who sold it to him 
 where he was going. They slept at the top of 
 the Montague de la Cote, and Balmat says that 
 he "carried a rug and used it to muffle the 
 doctor uj) like a baby." Then they got on to the 
 Glacier de Taconnay. Balmat proceeds : — 
 
 " The doctor's first steps on this sea, in the 
 midst of these immense crevasses, the depths of 
 which the eye fails to measure, and on the 
 bridges of ice Avhich you feel cracking beneath 
 you, and which, if they gave way, would carry 
 you to destruction, were somewhat uncertain. 
 Gradually, however, he was reassured by seeing 
 liow well I got on, and we got clear of the place, 
 D
 
 68 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 safe and sound. Then we began the ascent to 
 the Grands Mulets, which we soon left behind. 
 I showed the doctor where I had passed my first 
 night on the mountain. He made an expressive 
 grimace, and was silent for ten minutes." 
 
 A storm of wind came. The doctor's hat was 
 blown off, and they both had to lie down on their 
 stomachs : — 
 
 " The doctor was dismayed, but I thought only 
 of the woman whom we had told to look out for 
 us on the Dome du Gouter. At the first respite 
 I rose, but the doctor could only follow on all 
 fours, until we came to a point from which we 
 could see the village. . . . Self-respect now 
 caused the doctor to stand up, and we saw that 
 we were recognised. . . . They signalled to us 
 by waving their hats." 
 
 The doctor, however, according to Balmat, was 
 exhausted and could go no further. Balmat gave 
 him a bottle of wine, and went on by himself. 
 
 " From that moment onwards the track pre- 
 sented no great difficulty, but as I rose higher 
 and higher the air became more and more unfit 
 to breathe. Every few steps I had to stop like a 
 man in a consumption. I seemed to have no 
 lungs left, and my chest felt hollow. I folded 
 my handkerchief like a scarf, and tied it over my 
 mouth, and gained a little relief by breathing 
 through it. However, the cold laid hold of me more 
 and more, and it to,;,k me an hour to go a quarter 
 of a league. I walked with my head bent down ; 
 but finding myself at a point which I did not 
 recognise, I raised my eyes and saw that I was 
 at last on the summit of Mont Blanc."
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 59 
 
 Then, Balrnat tells us, he went back to look 
 for the doctor, found him half asleep, woke him 
 up, and took him to the top, and remained there 
 rather more than half an hour. He continues — 
 or rather Alexandre Dumas makes him continue 
 — thus : — 
 
 " It was seven in the evening ; there would be 
 only two and a half hours more of daylight, so 
 we had to go. I took Paccard's arm, and once 
 again waved my hat as a last signal to our friends 
 in the village, and began the descent. There was 
 no track to guide us ; the wind was so cold that 
 3ven the surface of the snow had not thawed, 
 and we could only see on the ice the little holes 
 made by the points of our alpenstocks. Paccard 
 was like a child, without energy or will power. 
 I had to guide him in the easy places and carry 
 him in the hard ones. Night was already over- 
 taking us when we crossed the crevasse. At the 
 foot of the Grand Plateau it was quite dark. 
 Every moment Paccard stopped, vowing that he 
 could go no further ; every time he did so I 
 obliged him to resume walking, not by persuasion, 
 which he could not understand, but by force. 
 At eleven we were clear of the ice, and set 
 foot upon terra firma ; the last of the Alpengluhe 
 had disappeared an hour before. Then I let 
 Paccard stop, and was preparing to wrap him 
 up again in his blanket when 1 noticed that 
 his hands were motionless. I drew his atten- 
 tion to this, and he replied that it was likely 
 enough, as he had lost all sensation in them. 
 I pulled his gloves off, and found his hands white, 
 as if dead, while I myself felt a certain numbness
 
 60 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 in the hand on which I had been wearing his 
 little glove instead of my own large one. I told 
 him we had three frost-bitten hands between us ; 
 but this seemed a matter of indifference to him ; 
 all that he wanted was to lie down and go to 
 sleep. He told me, however, to rub the hands 
 with snow, and that remedy was not far to seek. 
 I began by rubbing his hands, and then rubbed 
 my own. Soon the blood circulated again and 
 warmth returned, but accompanied by sharp 
 pain, as if every vein were being pricked with 
 needles. I wrapped my baby up in his rug, and 
 put him to bed under the shelter of a rock. We 
 ate and drank a little, squeezed as close together 
 as we could, and fell asleep. 
 
 " At six the next morning Paccard woke me. 
 
 '"It's curious, Balmat,' he said. '1 can hear 
 the birds singing, but I don't see the daylight. 
 I suppose I can't open my eyes.' 
 
 " But his eyes were wide open. I told him he 
 must be under a delusion, and could see quite 
 well. Then he asked me to give him a little 
 snow, melted it in the hollow of his hands, and 
 rubbed his eyes with it. Still he could see no 
 better than before. Only his eyes were more 
 painful. 
 
 '"Yes, it seems I am blind, Balmat,' he 
 continued. ' How am I to get down 1 ' 
 
 " ' Hold on to the strap of my knapsack, 
 and walk behind me. That's what you'll have 
 to do r " 
 
 In this way Balmat brought the doctor down, 
 leaving him, as soon as they got into the village, 
 to find his way home as best he could, feeling his
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 61 
 
 way with a stick, like a blind beggar. He went 
 on to his own house, and looked in the mirror. 
 
 " Then," he says, " I saw for the first time what 
 I looked like. I was unrecognisable. My eyes 
 were red, my face was black, my lips were blue. 
 Whenever I laughed or yawned the blood spouted 
 from my lips and cheek, and I could only see in 
 a dark room." 
 
 So runs the sparkling narrative. No doubt it 
 is true enough in the main, though one is bound 
 to be sceptical of some of the details. The way 
 to the top had been not only found, but followed. 
 Tairraz, the Chamonix innkeeper, at once sent off 
 his son with a letter to communicate the great 
 news to De Saussure, and the philosopher wrote 
 back, to request that preparations to facili- 
 tate liis own ascent should be made immediately. 
 Tairraz was to " send off five or six men at once 
 to level the route." Guides were to be engaged, 
 with Bilmat for chief guide. A "flat-sided" 
 ladder was to be provided for crossing crevasses, 
 and scaling rocks or cliffs of ice. Good wages and 
 a good " trinkgeld " were to be promised. But 
 De Saussure's name was not to be mentioned in 
 the matter. The commission was to be announced 
 as " on behalf of an Italian nobleman." 
 
 The weather broke, however, and the ascent 
 could not be made that year. Balraat was 
 instructed to watch and report. In July 1787 
 he reported that the conditions seemed favour- 
 able, and on the fifth day of that month the 
 philosopher set out, accompanied by eighteen 
 guides and a valet-de-chambre. We need not 
 follow his course step by step. It suffices to
 
 62 THE STORY OF AI;FINE CLIMBING. 
 
 say that he panted but persevered, and that 
 his mountain-sickness left him when he rested 
 on the summit. 
 
 " My arrival there," he says, " did not at first 
 give me as much pleasure as might have been 
 expected. My most lively and most agreeable 
 feeling was that I was at the end of my 
 anxieties. The length of the struggle, the 
 recollection, and the still acute sensation of the 
 pains which my victory had cost me, caused 
 me a kind of irritation. At the moment when 
 I attained the highest point of the cap of 
 .snow which crowns the summit, I tramped it 
 under foot with a sort of anger, rather than 
 with any sentiment of pleasure." 
 
 Philosophic tranquillity, however, returned to 
 him by degrees. His guides set up a tent for 
 him, and he spent three and a half hours making 
 scientific experiments upon the mountain top. 
 
 The achievement may be taken as the first great 
 landmark in climbing history. Before passing to 
 other branches of the subject we may pause briefly 
 to trace the careers of the three men whose names 
 are principally associated with it. 
 
 De Saussure was already forty-six, but he 
 continued climbing for some years longer. 
 Sometimes alone, and sometimes with the 
 indefatigable Bourrit, he made various Alpine 
 journeys, and even a few first ascents, includ- 
 ing that of the Petit Mont Cervin in the 
 Zermatt valley. He was, in fact, almost the 
 first civilised visitor to Zermatt, where he 
 reported that there was no inn, and that the 
 Care refused to sell him any provisions.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 63 
 
 Another great feat was to camp out for rather 
 more than a fortnight on the Col du Geant — 
 an enterprise of v/hich he wrote a record not 
 less poetical than precise. Finally, however, 
 he fell upon evil days. His health broke ; 
 his fortune was lost ; he was on the losing 
 side in the disturbances that followed upon the 
 French Revolution. After several paralytic 
 strokes, he died in 1799. 
 
 Dr Paccard continued to live, and presumably 
 to practise, at Chamonix. It is said that he wrote 
 a pamphlet, giving his own version of the ascent 
 with Balmat ; but no copy of it is known to exist 
 in any collection, whether public or private, and 
 none of the early Alpine writers quote from it. 
 Probably, therefore, it is a figment of some 
 bibliographer's imagination ; the controversy with 
 Balmat being in fact conducted in the corres- 
 pondence columns of the Journal de Lausanne. A 
 translation of the most interesting passages in the 
 letters, including a sworn declaration of Balmat, 
 who may or may not have understood what he was 
 signing, to the effect that the doctor got to the 
 top before him, will be found in Mr Whymper's 
 excellent " Guide to Chamonix and Mont Blanc." 
 For the rest we know from the doctor's diary 
 that he held friendly converse with most of 
 the early mountaineers who came to Chamonix, 
 generally lending them his barometer, which they 
 generally managed to break. He died just before 
 Dumas came to Chamonix, with the result that it 
 was Balmat's version of the story that was given 
 to the world. 
 
 Balmat became a mountain guide by profes-
 
 64 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 
 
 sion, made money, saved it, and then lost it. 
 The story is that, when he was going to Genevf 
 to invest his little nest egg, he met two strangerh 
 who told him that they were bankers, and that 
 if he cared to entrust his money to them, they 
 would pay him interest for it at the rate of five 
 per cent. Balmat accepted the offer, and naturally 
 never saw cither the money or the bankers 
 again. Then ho turned his attention to a fresh 
 enterprise, set out to prospect for a gold mine in 
 the midst of the glaciers, and met a tragic death 
 by falling into a crevasse. His biographer, 
 Michel Carrier, tells of the search for the body. 
 
 "Auguste Balmat, one of the great-nephews 
 of Balmat, well known among the guides for his 
 bravery, desired to be let down by a rope, and 
 began the descent by the side, slipping every 
 moment on the rotten schist, v/hich broke away 
 under his feet. He had not gone far in this 
 adventurous and daring enterprise, when he gave 
 the signal agreed upon to be drawn up, and was 
 received by his companions, and embraced by 
 them, as they knelt on the last edge of the 
 preci{)ice, as one does by an open grave. It was 
 m truth an eternal tomb, consecrated by the 
 fatal accident." 
 
 Jacques Balmat had four sons. Two of them 
 fell in the ISTapoleonic wars, one of them dis- 
 appearing without leaving any trace behind. 
 The others emigrated to the United States. His 
 great-nephew, above-mentioned, was the favourite 
 guide of jNIr Justice Wills, with whom he made 
 that ascent of the Wetterhorn referred to in thf 
 opening paragraph of this book.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 To a certain extent the ascents of Balmat and 
 — especially — of De Saussure set a fashion. The 
 climbing of mountains in general Avas still far, 
 indeed, from being a popular pastime ; but the 
 climbing of Mont Blanc in particular came to be 
 recognised as a fair)}' reasouable piece of bravado. 
 A list of the climbers who made the ascent in 
 pre-Victorian times will be here in its proper 
 place. 
 
 1787. Colonel Mark Beaufoy, of the Tower 
 Hamlets Jtlilitia. This was the first English 
 ascent, and took place about a week after that of 
 De Saussure. See Blackwood's Magazine for 
 April 1817. 
 
 1788. Mr AVoodley. Bourrit and a Dutchman 
 named Camper were with him, but only the 
 Englishman got to the top. See Bourrit's 
 "Description des Cols." 
 
 1802. M. Doorthesen and M. Forneret. The 
 former gentleman was German, and the latter 
 was Swiss. See Bourrit's "Description des Cols." 
 
 1809. Maria Paradis. The first ascent by a 
 woman. Jacques Balmat took her. "Come 
 with us," he said, "then visitors will come to 
 see you and give you money." That decided 
 her. She was practically hauled to the top like 
 a sack of coals. But she said, " Thanks to the 
 curiosity of the public, I have made a very nice 
 profit out of it, and that was what I reckoned on." 
 See M. Durier's "Le Mont Blanc." 
 
 1818. Count Matzewski. This was the first 
 
 65
 
 66 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 Polish ascent. The Count also made the first 
 asceut of the Aiguille du INIidi. See Blackwood's 
 Magazine for November 1818. 
 
 1819, Dr William Howard and Jeremiah van 
 Rensselaer. The first American ascent. See Dr 
 Howard's " Narrative of a Journey to the Summit 
 of Mont Blanc." Baltimore, 1821. 
 
 1819. Captain J. Uudrell, R.N. See "Annals 
 of Philosophy." 1821. 
 
 1822. Frederick Clissold. He was the first 
 climber who got up and down within 48 hours. 
 See " An Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc," 
 by Frederick Clissold. 1823. 
 
 1823. H. H. Jackson. He beat Clissold's 
 record, getting up and down within 36 hours. 
 See New Monthly Magazine for 1827. 
 
 1825. Dr Edmund Clark and Captain Mark- 
 ham Sherwill. Clark left on the top a glass 
 tube containing some olive branches "together 
 with the name of George IV. and his deservedly 
 popular minister, subjoining the names of some 
 of the most remarkable persons of the 'ige." He 
 also left behind him Dr Paccard's electrometer 
 which he had borrowed. See New Monthly 
 Magazine for 1826. 
 
 1826. William Hawes and Charles Fellows. 
 Both climbers wrote pamphlets on their expedi- 
 tion which were privately printed, and are now 
 very rare. It is noted that the excursion cost 
 nearly fifty pounds. 
 
 1827. John Auldjo. His ascent gained him 
 "the gold medal of civil merit from the late King of 
 Prussia, an autograph letter of approval from tlie 
 ex-King of Bavaria, and the gift of a valuable
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 67 
 
 diamond ring from the King of Sardinia." He 
 was for some time British Consul at Geneva. See 
 "Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc on the 
 8th and 9th of August 1827." London, 1828. 
 
 1830. The Honourable Edward Bootle Wil- 
 braham. See The Keepsake for 1832. 
 
 1834. Dr Martin Barry. He was President 
 of the Koyal Medical Society of Edinburgh. See 
 "Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc in 1834," 
 by Martin Barry, M.D., Edinburgh. 1836. 
 
 1834. Comte Henri de Tilly. The first French 
 ascent. See " Ascensions aux cimes de I'Etna et 
 du Mont Blanc," par le Comte Henri de Tilly. 
 Geneva, 1835. 
 
 That is as far as we need go for the present. 
 Two points may be noted : that English climbers 
 preponderated, and that several years often elapsed 
 between two ascents. Mont Blanc, in fact, Avas 
 not really popularised until Albert Smith not 
 only ascended it, but lectured on it at the 
 Egyptian Hall : a matter to which it will be 
 necessary to return. Harking back, we may note 
 that the Eevolutionary and Napoleonic wars 
 checked the progress of mountaineering, just 
 when it seemed in a fair way to establish itself 
 on a sound basis. The only Swiss climber of 
 any consequence of De Saussure's time who ac- 
 complished anything elsewhere than at Chamonix 
 was Father Placidus-a-Spescha. 
 
 Father Placidus, born in 1752, was brought up 
 as a monk at Disentis. His interest in the moun- 
 tains was derived partly from De Saussure's 
 scientific writings, and partly from Haller's poems. 
 He climbed in the Bundner Oberland, and a list
 
 68 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 
 
 of his first ascents will be found in an appendix. 
 His career, otherwise than as a climber, was not 
 prosperous. He spent eighteen months in Tyrol 
 as a prisoner of war, though he was allowed a 
 reasonable liberty, which he devoted to climbing. 
 On his return he was charged with heresy, de- 
 prived of his books and manuscripts, and forbidden 
 to climb any more. He did climb, however, 
 leaving the brotherhood to become a parish 
 priest, and lived to the age of eighty-two, assail- 
 ing the peaks of the Todi almost to the last. He 
 was still attempting them as late as 1824. His 
 life has been written in a monograph on the 
 Bundner Oberland by Dr Theobald of Chur, and 
 is the subject of an article by Mr Douglas Fresh- 
 field in one of the early numbers of the Alpine 
 Journal. 
 
 The exploration of the Pyrenees was also be- 
 ginning at about the same time as the exploration 
 oi Mont Blanc. 
 
 Of the Pyrenean ascents by Peter of /UTagon 
 and M. de Candale, Bishop of Aire in Gascony, 
 we have already spoken. The Bishop's mountain, 
 the Pic du Midi, seems to have been repeatedly 
 ascended for scientific purposes quite early in the 
 eighteenth century. An astronomer of Mont- 
 pellier, M. de Plantade, died suddenly upon that 
 mountain, presumably of heart failure, in 1741. 
 " Ah, how beautiful it all is ! " are said to have 
 been his last words. Pyrenean exploration w^as 
 also the subject of the first lecture delivered in 
 the French instead of the Latin language, before 
 the College de France, in 1775. Probably in 
 consequence of that discourse, various geologists,
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 69 
 
 mineralogists, and other scientific investigators 
 visited the mountains in the years immediately 
 succeeding ; and two physicists, Keboul and Vidal, 
 of the Toulouse Academy, built a hut at the top 
 of the Pic du Midi, and spent some days in it. 
 And then came Eamond de Carbonniere. 
 
 Eamond was of the University of Strasburg, 
 and had been private secretary to Cardinal Rohan, 
 whose name is notorious in connection with the 
 diamond necklace story. His concern with the 
 mountains dated from a walking tour in Switzer- 
 land, and the first expression of it was the trans- 
 lation of the Swiss travels of the Reverend 
 William Coxe. His Pyrenean journeys began in 
 1787. The Revolution and the Reign of Terror 
 interrupted them. He was imprisoned, and only 
 escaped the guillotine because the Committee of 
 Public Safety forgot all about him. After his 
 release, at the time of the fall of Robespierre, he 
 was for a while excluded from the mountains by 
 the operations of the Avar wdth Spain ; but he got 
 back to them as soon as he could, and in the end 
 managed to climb several of the most important 
 Pyrenean peaks. He writes with an enthusiasm 
 which we do not find in the works of any other 
 early climber. The influence of Rousseau was 
 upon him ; and the mountains seemed to him to 
 teach the new philosophies, and to breathe new 
 hopes of a perfected humanity and a regenerated 
 France. From his high eyrie he shouts his creed 
 that "the prosperity of an empire depends upon 
 the equity of the Social Compact, and upon the 
 simplicity of the laws"; that "it was an error 
 worthy of the barbarism of the Middle Ages that
 
 70 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 establislied so many civil and fiscal barriers be- 
 tween man and man " ; that " the interest of the 
 individual, enlightened by experience and guided 
 by competition, provides commerce with a better 
 code of laws than any statesman could decree." 
 And he speaks of the destiny of the Gauls. That 
 destiny, he believes, — 
 
 "Victorious at last, is about to regenerate 
 Fraiice. The fields and the flocks will be held 
 in the same high honour as of old ; the people 
 will recognise their importance and their dignity : 
 the great ones of the earth will need the support 
 and tlie suftrages of the nation in order to be 
 sure of their greatness. The Republic of the 
 Gauls will be born again under the sheltering 
 protection of a gentle authority which all accept ; 
 we shall have something better henceforward than 
 a State and the subjects of the State — to wit, a 
 Fathei'land and its citizens. . . . May the destiny 
 of the Gauls triumph. . . . May the most brilliant 
 of the nations, learning also to be the wisest and 
 the happiest, become the admiration of the world, 
 of which it has hitherto been the envy." 
 
 That, of course, was before the Eevolution. 
 We see the ferment working in the climber's 
 mind. The book from which the quotations 
 are taken came out in the year of the fall of 
 the Bastille, and naturally had but little sale. 
 The climber's philosophy and sentiment were 
 drowned in the blood-bath, but the passion for 
 climbing remained with him. It was not until 
 after the Revolution that he set foot on the 
 summit of Mont Perdu, which is the most diffi- 
 cult, though not the highest, of the Pyrenean
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 71 
 
 peaks. He wrote a technical paper about his 
 ascent, atid soon afterwards gave up climbing 
 to enter the public service, serving as a Prefect 
 under Napoleon, and as a financier under the 
 Bourbons. 
 
 Elsewhere it was only in Italy that mountain 
 climbing was, for the moment, making any 
 progress. The first ascent of the Gran' Sasso 
 d' Italia, or Great Rock of Italy, the loftiest 
 peak of the Apennines, was made by a certain 
 Orazio Delfico in 1794. The climber speaks in 
 very exaggerated language of "the horror of 
 the dangers," and of " terrifying precipices," 
 though, as anyone can see by referring to an 
 account of an ascent by Mr Douglas Frtr-shfield 
 in the Alpine Journal, there is no difficulty 
 about it worth speaking of, and absolutely no 
 occasion for terror. And, in fact, much more 
 notable work was accomplished at about the 
 same date on the Italian side of Monte Kosa. 
 
 Monte Rosa, as we have noticed, was almost 
 certainly the scene of the scrambles of Leonardo 
 da Vinci. It can also be identified as the Mons 
 Silvius of our friend Scheuchzer. Its actual 
 climbing history, however, begins with the visit 
 of De Saussure to Macugnaga in 1789. That 
 philosopher, as has been mentioned, made a 
 first ascent of the Pizzo Bianco (10,552 feet). 
 He furthermore heard and reported the follow- 
 ing strange story, which may as well be given in 
 his own words : — 
 
 " There is an old tradition in the country of a 
 valley, full of beautiful pasture lands, the access 
 to which is said to have been closed by the forma-
 
 r2 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 tion of fresh glaciers. Seven young persons from 
 Gressoney, encouraged by an aged priest, under- 
 took, six years ago, to look for it. The first day 
 they slept on the highest rocks, at the point 
 where the snow begins, and on the second day, 
 after six hours' Avalking on the snow, they reached 
 the head of the gorge. There, beneath their feet, 
 to the north, they saw a valley surrounded by 
 glaciers and fearful precipices, partially covered 
 with the debris of rocks, and traversed by a stream 
 which watered superb pastures, with green woods 
 in the depths of it, but without any sight of human 
 habitation or of the presence of domestic animals. 
 Convinced that this was the valley spoken of as 
 lost, they returner], very proud of their discovery, 
 talked a good deal about it, and even wrote about 
 it to the Court of Turin. To establish the truth, 
 however, they needed to effect an entrance to the 
 valley, and they tried to do this two years later. 
 Provided with climbing irons, ropes, and ladders, 
 they returned to the edge of their precipice, but 
 achieved no success, and came home declaring that 
 the cliffs were so prodigiously high that no ladder 
 could be of any help to them." 
 
 Trying to get at the rights of this story, De 
 Saussure failed to obtain any exact information. 
 Most of those whom he consulted declared it to 
 be a fable. He inclined to believe, however, that 
 it was based upon fact, and so it was. The story 
 had even been written down, though De Saussure 
 could not find it. A French translation of the 
 manuscript, communicated to Signor P. L. Vesco 
 by a descendant of the author, was published in 
 1884, in the Bollettino del Club Alpino.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 73 
 
 The leading spirit of the excursion was one 
 Jean-Joseph Beck, a domestic servant — the 
 only domestic servant whom we find taking an 
 honoured place among the early mountaineers. 
 He heard about the lost valley at Alagna, and 
 he also heard that some of the Alagna people 
 meant to go and look for it. Being himself 
 a Gressoney man, he determined that Gressoney 
 should have the honour of the discovery. A 
 party was organised and set out in August 
 1778, though the climbers started separately in 
 couples, concealing their destination. Reaching 
 their skeping-place at Lavetz at seven o'clock, 
 tbey started again at midnight. They roped 
 themselves properly, being careful to keep the 
 rope taut, and crossed the glacier. Mountain 
 sickness overtook them. "We encountered,' 
 says the narrator, "an atmosphere so rare, 
 that it gave us headaches, made us pant, and 
 compelled us to rest and take stimulants every 
 minute. Our stomachs, however, refused the 
 food. Only bread and onions could have revived 
 our strength. We fell into a melancholy con- 
 dition, and felt crushed." 
 
 They kept on, however, until they reached a 
 point from which they could look across from 
 Italy into the Valais. The point which they 
 had attained, called by them the Eock of 
 the Discovery, still bears that name. It is 
 on the Lys Joch, and is about 14,000 feet 
 above sea-level. The valley which they saw 
 from it was, in fact, the valley of Zermatt 
 They suspected as much, but could not be 
 sure, as they had never been to Zermatt. 
 E
 
 74 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 Unfortunately they could not continue their 
 investigations. 
 
 " We were strongly tempted," the narration 
 concludes, " to go further with our exploration 
 so as to be able to report more details about it. 
 But it was now two o'clock, so we resolved 
 to turn back that night might not overtake us 
 on the glacier. Without loss of time, therefore, 
 we began the descent, and got to Lavetz about 
 ten in the evening, twenty-two hours after the 
 start, done up with fatigue." 
 
 The climbers, there is no question, had really 
 done a big thing. If their story had been 
 published at the time, the popular interest 
 might very possibly have transferred itself from 
 Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa. As it is, the true 
 pioneers of that mountain are obscure heroes 
 who have never got their due meed of glory. 
 We find no recognition of their merits in the story 
 of Count Morozzo, who visited Monte Eosa a little 
 later, and wrote an account of his journeys for 
 the official publication of the Turin Academy. 
 
 The Count tried to ascend the mountain, but 
 did not get very far. "I confess," he wrote, 
 " that I did not expect the undertaking to be a? 
 difficult as I found it." And he adds that he 
 abandoned the enterprise on the advice of his 
 guides, who pronounced it to be impossible. 
 Assuredly he has no fair claim to be included 
 in the list of heroes of our story. His modest 
 scramble on "the first glacier from which the 
 Anza rises " is quite thrown into the shade by 
 the achievement of Dr Pictro Giordaiii of Alagna 
 in 1801
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 75 
 
 From " the top of the Alps " the doctor wrote 
 a relation of his ascent. It was known that his 
 letter had been printed somewhere ; but it 
 attracted no particular attention, the Italians 
 having other things besides mountains to occupy 
 them in 1801 ; and when peojjle began to be 
 interested in the subject, no one knew where to 
 look for it. Ultimately someone lighted upon 
 it by accident in an old copy of a forgotten 
 annual, published at Varallo by a notary of no 
 importance. It has since been reprinted in the 
 Bollettino del Club Alpino. 
 
 The doctor seems to have climbed alone — a 
 thing without precedent at that date, and a 
 further proof that the Monte Kosa men were 
 more adventurous, though less famous, than the 
 Mont Blanc men. The point which he reached 
 still bears his name. It is the Punta Giordani 
 (13,304 feet). It was there, with a rock for a 
 table, and a square block of ice for a seat, that 
 the climber penned his letter — quite a long letter 
 for a man to write in such a place. Much of it 
 is taken up with enthusiasm for the scenery ; 
 there are a few details about the flora ; but the 
 most interesting passage, from our point of view, 
 sets forth the doctor's conviction that the ascent 
 of the mountain, not actually accomplished until 
 fifty-four years later, was feasible by the route 
 which he had found. 
 
 "I saw," he writes, "no insurmountable 
 obstacle to hinder me from making the ascent of 
 the peak of Monte Rosa that was nearest to me. 
 Nothing but the lateness of the hour obliged me 
 to return, and my only trouble was in the
 
 76 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 tliouglit of the distance that, at such an hour of 
 the day, separated me from the nearest habita- 
 tion of man. ... I am more than recompensed for 
 my fatigue, both by the sights which I have seen, 
 and by the comforting reflection that I have found 
 out a way of climbing the great Colossus, Monte 
 Eosa, so that the physicist will for the future be 
 enabled to observe and study it without difficulty, 
 and to elicit the secrets of frozen nature — par- 
 ticularly from the point of view of the science of 
 meteorology. . . . My respiration is much troubled 
 by the rarity of the air, and my pulse is 110 to 
 the minute. 
 
 "I finish, therefore, in order that I may see 
 about my retreat from these lonely regions." 
 
 And there we may leave Monte Rosa for the 
 present. Our next centre of interest is Tyrol. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Climbing in Tyrol, where the leading "honour- 
 able peaks," as the Japanese call theiu, are tlio 
 Gross Glockner and the Ortler Spitz, began a 
 little more than a hundred years ago. Tlie 
 summer of 1900 saw, in fact, a local celebration of 
 the centenary of the first ascent of the former 
 mountain. Among the claims of the achieve- 
 ment on our attention is the fact that it is the 
 only first ascent of any consequence that was 
 ever accomplished by a bishop. Franz Altgraf 
 von Salm - Reifterscheid - Krantheim, Bishop of 
 Gurk, was the full style and title of this epis-
 
 
 
 The Grossglockner.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 77 
 
 copal mountaineer. It is usnal, and will obviously 
 be convenient, to speak of him as Salm. 
 
 Tiie mountain itself, strange as it may seem, 
 was absolutely unknown to the geographers until 
 long alter the Middle Ages. An atlas of 1580 
 boldly plants a forest on its site. The map- 
 makers of the seventeenth century mark it or 
 omit it, as the fancy lakes them. An important 
 Austrian manual of geography, published as late 
 as 1789, does not include it in the list of Austrian 
 mountains, though it is, as a matter of fact, the 
 highest of them. The Austrians, in short, only 
 realised the existence of their highest mountain 
 by degrees, and it is impossible to fix the precise 
 date at which they became aware of it. The first 
 writer who mentions it makes no claim to have 
 discovered it. 
 
 This pioneer was Balthazar Hacquet, a French- 
 man by birth, and an Austrian by adoption, v/ho 
 served as an army surgeon in the Seven Years' 
 War, and afterwards became a Professor of 
 Anatomy, and a botanist. At the cost of the 
 Emperor Joseph II., who encouraged botany, he 
 travelled on foot over almost the whole of the 
 Austrian Empire. Among other places be came to 
 theGross Glockner, and expressed the opinion that 
 it could probably be climbed by any energetic 
 man who cared to take the trouble, but that he him- 
 self was too old to try. That was in 1781. Some 
 ten years later, two other botanists — Sigismund 
 von Hohenwart, afterwards Bishop of Linz, and 
 Court-Chaplain Reiner — came the same way, and 
 formed precisely the opposite opinion. The ice 
 precipices, they reported, were " so terrible that
 
 78 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 the illustrious Do Saussurc himself would be 
 frightened by them." Yet Hohenv/art, at any 
 rate, was destined to stand upon the summit 
 before another decade had elapsed. 
 
 It was Bishop Salm, already mentioned, who 
 first made up his mind that the mountain not 
 only could but should be climbed. He was the 
 recognised leader of the "intellectuals" at 
 Klagenfurt, where he resided, though he was 
 younger than a good many of them ; he seems to 
 have been both scholar and sportsman, whereas 
 they were merely scholars. Unlike De Saussure, 
 he was not devoured by scientific cui-iosity ; but, 
 very much as Dickens' character exclaimed, 
 "Here's a church — let's have a wedding," so did 
 Bishop Salm exclaim, " Here's a mountain — let's 
 have a climb." If he was an unworthy disciple 
 of De Saussure and De Luc, he was a worthy 
 anticipator of Mr Justice Wills and Mr 
 Whymper. 
 
 The Bishop, however, did not propose to climb 
 alone. Mountaineering, as he figured it, was 
 not a desperate adventure, but a jovial picnic of 
 cultivated men. The episcopal set were invited 
 to accompany him, and they accepted the invita- 
 tion almost to a man. There was grey-haired 
 Wulfen, formerly a Jesuit, and now a Professor ; 
 there was our friend Hohenwart, who had ex- 
 pressed such alarm at the precipices ; and Court- 
 Chaplain Reiner ; and Mining-Director Dillinger ; 
 and Baron von Moll ; and ever so many more — 
 eleven amateurs, in fact, with nineteen guides 
 and porters. 
 
 The joyous prelate did his best to make things
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 79 
 
 comfortable for his friends. Among other things 
 he had a hut built for their accommodation — a 
 hut that was spacious, and as the estate agents 
 say, "-well appointed." Measuring twenty-four 
 feet by eighteen, it was divided into three 
 apartments in which the company slept ; while 
 a small outhouse served as a kitchen, of which 
 the chef from the episcopal palace at Klagenf urt 
 took charge. It might still be standing if it had 
 not been built on a moraine, which, in the course 
 of years, moved and upset it. 
 
 Hardly had the company settled down in the 
 hut than the weather broke, and for three days 
 they were weather-bound. The chef did his 
 best for them. Weeping over the miserable 
 situation, he served dinners of many courses, 
 quite comparable, says one of the enthusiasts 
 who partook of them, to the banquets provided 
 for them when they dined with the Bishop at 
 home. Finding their beds rather hard and un 
 comfortable, they sat up every night, drinking, 
 chatting, telling stories, and singing songs, as 
 long as ever they could keep their eyes open. 
 It was not, perhaps, the ideal manner of prepar- 
 ing for a stiff climb when the weather mended ; 
 but the company were hardy as well as jovial, 
 and their late hours and prolonged potations 
 do not seem to have " cut their legs," as the 
 Swiss guides say, to any extent worth speak- 
 ing of. 
 
 The route which they took is the route which 
 is still usually taken. We need not go into 
 technical or topographical details, but, with the 
 help of the narrative of Baron von Moll, may try
 
 80 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 to picture the party of thirty adventurers on 
 their way. 
 
 Fresh snow, it seems, lay thickly on the ice, 
 covering up most of the crevasses, so that it was 
 necessary to move with caution ; but the precau- 
 tions taken differed from those which we take 
 nowadays. The climbers did not apparently 
 understand the use of the rope, but they sent 
 two peasants on ahead with poles to sound the 
 snow and test the bridi^es ; then came the various 
 porters — men carrying a ladder, men carrying 
 ropes, men carrying provisions, a man carrying 
 a telescope, a man carrying a barometer, and a 
 man carrying an iron cross which the Bishop had 
 determined to plant upon the mountain top. 
 The unencumbered amateurs brought up the rear. 
 
 The first attempt was unsuccessful. Starting 
 too late in the day, they had to turn back for 
 fear of being benighted. Von Hohenwart fell 
 into a crevasse, though he was, hajjpily, more 
 frightened than hurt. A storm of wind whirled 
 the powdery snow into their faces and nearly 
 blinded them. Their hands were numbed so 
 that they could not use their fingers. But they 
 tried again, and striking a fine day, August 25th, 
 1799, succeeded. The snow on the summit was 
 promptly scraped away, and the cross was 
 erected there on a foundation of solid rock. It 
 bore the inscription : — 
 
 Eia, nunc, rara moles, exple finem, 
 
 Cniccin cxalta, cultum promove. Poauit 
 
 Franciscus autistes Gurcensis, 25 August, 1799. 
 
 Then the observers in the valley, who were
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 81 
 
 watching through a telescope, jBred a salute. The 
 climbers themselves opened the wine bottles, 
 proposed toasts, and drank them. The Pro- 
 fessors toasted the Bishop, and the Bishop 
 toasted the Professors ; the amateurs toasted 
 the guides, and the guides toasted the amateurs, 
 "after the convivial fashion of the Anstrians." 
 
 As it happened, however, this toasting was a 
 little premature. The Gross Glockner has two 
 summits, separated by a ridge, and the climbers 
 discovered, when it was too late, that they had 
 ascended, and set up their cross upon, the lower 
 peak. The setting right of this error, however, 
 formed the excuse for another lively picnic party 
 in the following year, and then a poet celebrated 
 the achievement in verse : — 
 
 The Glockiier's top is uow attained. 
 
 "Who would hav thought it could be gained, 
 
 Save by the birds and lightning ? 
 
 And so forth. There is no room for more. 
 Only one may pause to note that Bishop Salm 
 retained his interest in the Gross Glockner until 
 his dying day, visiting it, and sometimes climb- 
 ing it, now with Hohenwart, now with Hoppe the 
 botanist, and now with other savants from Klagen- 
 furt, in 1802, in 1806, in 1818, and probably in 
 other years as well. 
 
 Nor was he the only man of note who tried to 
 popularise the mountain. In 1804 came Dr 
 J. A. Schultes, travelling tutor to the Count of 
 Apponyi, and later a Professor at Cracow and 
 Innsbruck. He climbed the mountain for the 
 avowed purpose of writing a book about it — a
 
 82 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 purpose for which, as far as one kuows, no 
 mountain had ever been climbed before. His 
 desire was to draw the attention of his country- 
 men to the beauties of their native land — to 
 make the Glockner a second Mont Blanc, and 
 the village of Heiligenblut a second Chamonix ; 
 and he succeeded ultimately, though not immedi- 
 ately. When the Napoleonic wars were over the 
 tide of visitors began to flow. Between 1818 and 
 1860 it is computed that between five and six 
 thousand tourists came to Heiligenblut, and that 
 about seventy of them climbed the Glockner. 
 Most of them were Germans or English, but 
 Americans began to come in 1830, and there 
 are records of the visits of an Egyptian in 1849, 
 and of a Hindoo in 1853. Emperor Francis 
 Joseph even brought his Empress to look at the 
 mountain, and climbed the mountain to a certain 
 extent, though he stopped a good way short of 
 the top. 
 
 And now we may leave the Gross Glockner, 
 and turn to the Ortler Spitz. 
 
 The latter mountain was not touched by the 
 climbers who were so enthusiastic about the 
 former ; the reason doubtless being that it lies 
 at the other end of the Austrian Alps, and that 
 Austrian roads were even worse in those days 
 than they are now. It was first brought into 
 notice by Archduke John. 
 
 Archduke John, seventh son of Emperor 
 Leopold II., was a general who, like many other 
 Austrian generals, lost more battles than he won. 
 Moreau defeated him at Hohenlinden, and he 
 was mixed up in the peasant revolt of Andreas
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 83 
 
 Hofer. Among other posts he held that of 
 Director-General of Fortifications, and it was in 
 order to organise frontier defences that he first 
 traversed the Austrian highlands. The Ortler 
 thus attracted his attention. He looked it out 
 in an atlas, and found it was marked "the 
 highest mountain in all Tyrol," and he decided 
 that it must be climbed. He had no time to 
 climb it himself, so he commissioned Dr Gebhard 
 — a mining manager, not otherwise known to 
 fame — to climb it for him. Dr Gebhard was 
 instructed to report on the mineralogy and 
 botany of the neighbourhood, and on the habits 
 and industries of the inhabitants, and to draw a 
 map of the mountain ; but above all he was to 
 climb it. 
 
 Dr Gebhard accepted the assignment, and did 
 his best. With two guides, he arrived at Sulden 
 on August 28th, 1804, and Ijetween that date and 
 September 22nd made six unsuccessful attempts 
 to get to the top. Then on September 26th, 
 Joseph Pichler, chamois-hunter of Passeyr, intro- 
 duced himself. If Dr Gebhard's two guides might 
 come with him he thought he could find a way. 
 At all events he would like to try — always sup- 
 posing that there would be a reward for him if 
 he succeeded. The ofier was accepted ; the amount 
 of the reward was agreed ; and Pichler duly earned 
 it, making the ascent from Trafoi on September 
 28th. He had a cold, uncomfortable time of it, 
 on the mountain, as Ave gather from Dr Gebhard's 
 report to Archduke John. 
 
 "It was impossible for the gallant climbers 
 to remain more than four minutes at the
 
 84 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 summit. Even in that brief period Pichler 
 got his toes frost-bitten, and one of my people 
 came back with a finger numbed and swollen 
 with the cold. All three of them looked like 
 snow men. They were completely caked with 
 snow, and dejtrived of the power of speech, as 
 a strong \yind came on, whirling about the 
 loose snow. On the top, while they were 
 taking their measurements, they had to hold 
 each other up alternately, for fear lest the 
 wind should blow them over. The trusty 
 fellows really and seriously risked their lives." 
 
 Dr Gebhard adds that he is sure Pichler's 
 story is true, as ho "is known throughout 
 the neighbourhood as a very respectable man." 
 He dill not considf^r, however, that Pichler's 
 achievement discharged his own obligations, 
 and he returned to the attack in the follow- 
 ing summer. There was the more need for 
 him to do so, as people who did not know 
 Pichler were saying' that Pichler Avas a liar. 
 On August 30th, 1805, however, Gebhard and 
 Pichler, with various guides and a lioman Catholic 
 priest, drank the Archduke's health on the top 
 of the Ortler, and built a pyramid, thirty feet 
 high, as a proof of their presence there, which 
 should be visible from the valle3\ They had 
 better weather than Pichler, and were able to 
 remain a couple of hours. 
 
 Their admirable achievement, however, did 
 not make the Ortler popular like the Gross 
 Glockner — partly because they wrote no books, 
 but only told their story in learned periodicals. 
 At all events, twenty-one years elapsed before
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 85 
 
 the next ascent of the mountain in 1826 by 
 Herr Schebelka, an Austrian officer, who found 
 Dr Gebhard's pillar fallen. Subsequently there 
 were ascents in 1831 and 1857. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Tyrol handed on the torch to the Bernese Ober- 
 land. The conquest of the Ortler suggested the 
 assault upon the Jungfrau ; and the village of 
 Grindelwald achieved the destiny which Dr 
 Schultes had anticipated for the village of 
 Heiligenblut. Our next task, therefore, may 
 be to trace the growth of Grindelwald. 
 
 In a sense the history of the valley goes 
 well back into the Middle Ages. The subject 
 can be " worked up," as Mr Coolidge has 
 observed, from that learned publication, " Fontes 
 Rerum Bernensium." But the information to 
 be extracted therefrom does not amount to 
 much. Certain feudal lords gave the valley 
 its first inhabitants by settling their serfs there, 
 and then sold their rights over their serfs to 
 a monastic house at Interlaken. The monastery 
 was suppressed at the Reformation, and its juris- 
 diction was taken over by the Canton of Berne. 
 But these political changes meant very little to 
 the individual villagers. Under all the rulers 
 alike each one had his little bit of property — a 
 chalet, and perhaps a field or two — and a right 
 of grazing beasts and cutting wood upon the 
 common lands. The villagers had no history 
 of the sort that gets into the history books,
 
 86 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 and no visitors except, perhaps, priests and 
 tax-collectors, until the days when learned men 
 — mainly professors from the Universities of 
 Zurich and Berne, began to take an interest in 
 the glaciers. 
 
 It was, in fact, in the Oberland — at Grindel- 
 wald and on the Grimsel — that glaciers were 
 first intelligently observed. Whereas Chamonix 
 was not "discovered" until the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, most of the Swiss professors 
 of the seventeenth century went to Grindelwald. 
 Matthew Merian published a view of the place — 
 and a very quaint view, too — in 1642. Letters 
 about its glaciers appeared in the " Philosophical 
 Transactions of the Royal Society" in 1669, 
 1674, and 1708. Scheuchzer also went there; 
 and the various learned visitors formed and 
 expressed truly remarkable opinions as to the 
 nature and origin of the vast fields of ice which 
 they observed. Some of them declared that 
 glacier ice was the same thiug as crystal ; others 
 that it was the same thing as ordinary' ice " with 
 the water squeezed out of it "; while one philo- 
 sopher went so far as to give out that if the 
 glacier ice were powdered and mixed with wine 
 a valuable astringent medicine resulted. They 
 also formed theories as to the causes of glacier 
 motion; but of this branch of the subject we will 
 speak later. 
 
 After the professors who were curious about 
 glaciers came the professors who were interested 
 in topography. J. G. Altmann and Gottlieb 
 Sigmund Grnner of Berne were the most notable 
 of them. They both wrote books about the
 
 Grixdelwald and the Wettekhorn.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 87 
 
 Oberland, aud the latter's " Die Eisgebirge des 
 Schweizerlandes," published in 17 GO, is a rich 
 storehouse of information and legend from which 
 we learn what little there is to be learnt about 
 the early use of the glacier passes by the peasants. 
 We read, for example, of a shepherd who was 
 guided over the Lotsch-sattel by a ghost; and we 
 find this thrilling story : — 
 
 " During the civil war in 1 7 1 2, three inhabitants 
 of Grindelwald were taken to the Valais as 
 hostages ; their only way of escape was over the 
 glaciers, and their necessity taught them to scorn 
 the dangers of this unheard-of journey. On the 
 Valais side they got to the top of the mountain 
 without much difficulty ; but on the Grindelwald 
 side they encountered nothing but mountains of 
 ice. Every step they took they had to cut in the 
 ice, and they were obliged to labour day and 
 night that they might not die of cold. After 
 infinite difficulty and danger they arrived half- 
 dead at Grindelwald, and were presented by their 
 compatriots to the magistrates as men risen from 
 the dead." 
 
 The story has the air of truth, though exag- 
 gerated and distorted. Gruner, however, was not 
 moved by it to any high topographical expecta- 
 tions. He sums up the glacier region, in fact, 
 as "a chain of valleys of ice which is at present 
 unknown and probably will ever be so." Nor 
 was the opinion unreasonable at a time when, of 
 all the snow peaks of the Alps, only the Titlis 
 had been ascended. Nearly half a century was 
 to pass before it was dissipated. 
 
 Oberland climbing was, in fact, suggested by
 
 88 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 the ascents in Tyrol described in the last chapter. 
 Things were quieting down after the disturbances 
 engendered by the French Revolution, and there 
 sprang up a group of enthusiasts for the moun- 
 tains, whose combined activity almost anticipates 
 that of our own Alpine Club. The moving spirits 
 were Count Ulysses von Salis, and a certain 
 Stcinmiiller, pedagogue and pastor of Saint Gall. 
 At Winterthur they launched what must be 
 recognised as the earliest Alpine journal — 
 Alpina — and appealed for volunteers. "The 
 Glockner and the Ortler," wrote the editor, 
 " may serve as striking examples of our ignor- 
 ance until a few years since of the highest peaks 
 iu the Alpine regions. Excluding the Gotthard 
 and Mont Blanc and the surrounding summits, 
 there still remain more than a few marvellous 
 and colossal peaks which are not less worthy of 
 being made belter known." 
 
 Most of the stories of Oberland ascents told in 
 Alpina lack the stamp of veracity. The story of 
 "determined hunters," who reached the top of 
 the Silberhorn, found another hunter's knife 
 there, and brought it down with them as 
 evidence of their prowess, lacks it ; and so does 
 the story of the unnamed Englishman who went 
 up the Eiger, and "had persisted in attempting 
 to reach the highest point, had actually gained 
 it, and had liglited upon the summit, either as a 
 sign of his triumph or as a signal of distress, a 
 beacon fire, and had never been seen again by 
 human eyes." There is no wood on the top of 
 the Eiger, and a solitary climber would hardly 
 be likely to carry enough of it on his back to
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 89 
 
 make a bonfire. We may pass these stories by, 
 therefore, and proceed to the authentic ascents 
 by the brothers Meyer. 
 
 No less than three generations of the Meyers 
 had a notable connection with the Oberland 
 mountains. Johann Rudolf Mejer the First 
 drew maps of them, though the practical re- 
 searches on which his topography depended were 
 mostly done for him by a German, Heir Weiss 
 of Strasburg, who made the first passage of the 
 Oberaarjoch in 1795. "He and his companions," 
 it seem?, "were compelled io let themselves down 
 into the deep crevasses of the ice, and then to 
 find or make a way out again. They had to pass 
 the night in the hollows and clefts of the eternal 
 ice, and to use every combustible article they 
 had with them as firewood in order to hold 
 out against the benumbing cold." Then came 
 the first Meyer's sons, Johann Eudolf, and 
 Hieronymus. 
 
 By profession the brothers were the managers 
 of a ribbon factory at Aarau ; but they de&ired, 
 as they said, " to iearn the relations between the 
 various vast basins of eternal snow," and "to 
 ascertain whether the peaks which rise out of 
 them could be ascended." The desire particu- 
 larised itself as a desire to ascend the Jungfrau, 
 and on 3rd August 1811, they accomplished that 
 desire, though with great difficulty, taking four 
 hours to ascend six hundred feet. When they 
 returned and told their story, tbeir friends 
 refused to believe it. To silence the voice of 
 scepticism, they made a second ascent in the 
 following year, taking Johann Rudolf, son of 
 F
 
 90 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 Gottlieb, with them ; and then they went on and 
 accomplished a first ascent of the Finsteraarhorn. 
 Two somewhat doctored accounts of the climbs 
 were written up from their notes by a certain 
 Herr Zschokke, and the technical particulars are 
 lucidly summarised in a contribution to the 
 Alpine Journal by the late Mr Longman. 
 
 It was not the climbers, however, but the 
 tourists who were to make Grindelwald famous, 
 and Alpine history, in the strict sense, may fairly 
 be interrupted for a glance at these less adven- 
 turous pioneers. 
 
 Early English tourists, like Bishop Burnet and 
 Ludlow the Regicide, seldom got nearer to 
 Grindelwald than the terrace at Berne. Addison, 
 looking across thence at the Oberland peaks, 
 imagined that he was admiring "the country of 
 the Grisons." Gibbon tells us that the practice 
 of "reviewing the glaciers" grew up during the 
 period of his residence in Switzerland. The 
 first Guide to Grindelwald, written by a pastor, 
 appeared in 1777. Bourrit Avent there with De 
 Saussure, and complained of the churlish disposi- 
 tion of the innkeepers, and the comparative 
 inefficiency of the guides. Other visitors were 
 Bonstetten the Swiss philosopher, and Frederika 
 Brun the Danish artist, and Kamond de Carbon- 
 niere, and Professor jVIartyn the Cambridge 
 botanist, and the venerable Archdeacon Coxe, 
 and Ebel the guide-book man, and Escher the 
 engineer, who built the Linth canal. ' And there 
 were two other tourists of note, whose conflicting 
 estimates of the attractions of the place merit 
 quotation. One of them was General Guibert,
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 91 
 
 the first lover of Madame de Stael; the other 
 was Eyroii. Guibert's diary gives the extreme 
 Philistine point of view :— 
 
 "I have seen," he notes, "all the glaciers I 
 ever want to see. 1 will not tell you, as most 
 travellers do, that I ascended the glaciers with 
 difficulty and danger, that I repented a hundred 
 times of my rashness, that I had crevasses fifteen 
 hundred feet deep in front of me, and tliat I 
 heard subterranean noises like the rumbling of a 
 volcano. That is what you read in almost all 
 the books of travel, but you will not read it in 
 mine. All that I saw was the glacier quietly 
 melting, and the water trickling away drop by 
 drop. And I saw it quite at my ease, sitting on 
 a block of ice, as safe as if I had been in bed. 
 As for the aiguilles, the pyramids, the prisms, 
 the crevasses, the dazzling variety of the tints, 
 you can see all these phenomena on a small scale 
 in tlie first big .snow drift that you come upon in 
 a heavy winter." 
 
 Byron's jottings are of a very difierent 
 character : — 
 
 '•Arrived at Grindelwald," we read. "Dined, 
 mounted again, and rode to the higher gl;icier — 
 like a frozen hurricane. Starlight, beautiful, but 
 a devil of a path. Never mind, gut safe in; a 
 little lightning, but the whole of the day as tine 
 in point of weather as the day on which Paradise 
 was made. Passed whole woods of withered 
 pines, all withered ; trunks stripped and barkless, 
 branches lifeless ; done by a single winter — their 
 appearance reminded me of me and my family." 
 
 And so forth, most of the metaphors turning
 
 92 THE STORY OP ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 up again in " Manfred " — a drama to which the 
 rapid rise of Grindelvvald in popularity may no 
 doubt to some extent be traced. To follow its 
 history further would merely be to recite an 
 almost interminable list of well-known names. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Even after the ascents described in the last 
 chapter, climbing continued to be an unusual, and 
 to be regarded as an eccentric, pursuit. On that 
 point the early guide-books supply conclusive 
 evidence. Ebel's Guide warns the tourist that a 
 visit to the glaciers of Grindelwald " requires un- 
 daunted intrepidity," and should on no account 
 be undertaken without " several guides, provider! 
 with ropes, poles, and ladders." The first edition 
 of Murray, published at the beginning of the 
 reign of Queen Victoria, strikes the same note. 
 "The passion for climbing mountains, so ardent 
 in a young traveller," we there read, " soon cools, 
 and they who have surmounted the liigi and the 
 Faulhorn and the Dole may fairly consider any 
 further ascents a waste of time and labour." Con- 
 cerning the ascent of Mont Blanc, the editor 
 expresses himself still more strongly : — 
 
 "When Saussure," he says, "ascended to 
 make experiments at that height, the motive 
 was a worthy one ; but those who are 
 impelled by curiosity alone are not justified 
 in risking the lives of their guides. The 
 pay tempts these poor fellows to encounter 
 the danger; but their safety, devoted as they are
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 93 
 
 to their employers, is risked for a poor consider- 
 atioD. It is no excuse that the employer thinks 
 his own life worthless ; here he ought to think 
 of the safety of others." And then follows the 
 absolutely baseless statement that the majority 
 of those who have accomplished the ascent have 
 been of unsound mind. 
 
 Climbing, however, proceeded, though Bntish 
 tourists did not yet bear a hand in it, and the 
 climbers may be roughly divided into two groups. 
 One group attacked Monte Eosa, while the other 
 explored the Oberland. The last Monte Rosa 
 man whom we mentioned was Dr Giordani. 
 The other important dates in the history of the 
 mountain are as follows : — 
 
 1817. Dr Parrot, of the Russian University 
 of Dorpat, who also made the first ascent of 
 Ararat, ascended the Parrot Spitze (14,643 feet). 
 
 1819. J. N. Vincent, son of the Vincent con- 
 cerned in the quest for the lost valley in 1776, 
 ascended the Vincent Pyramide (13,829 feet). 
 
 1820. The same Vincent, with Herren Zum- 
 stein and Molinatti, ascended the Zumstein Spitze 
 (15,004 feet). 
 
 1822. Ludwig, Baron von Welden, ascended 
 the Ludwieshohe (14,259 feet). 
 
 1842. Signor Gnifetti, Cure of Alagna, as- 
 cended the Punta Gnifetti, also called the Signal 
 Kuppe (14,965 feet). 
 
 1847. JklM. Puiseux and Ordinaire ascended 
 the Silber Sattel (14,285 feet). 
 
 1848. Professor Melchior Ulrich's guides as- 
 cended the Grenzgipfel (15,194 foot). 
 
 1855. Messrs G. and C. Smyth, Hudson,
 
 94 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 Birkbeck, and Stephenson ascended the Hochste 
 Spitze (15,217 feet). 
 
 Two of the climbers engaged in these enter- 
 prises merit a word of further mention. Von 
 Welden was an Austrian officer who devoted 
 some years of his life to the study of Monte 
 Rosa. We have to thank him for an excellent 
 map and monograph of the mountain. Zumstein, 
 sometimes called by the equivalent French name 
 of Delapierre, was an inspector of forests. He 
 stuck to the mountain more strenuously than any 
 of the others, making no fewer than five serious 
 attempts to climb it, and on one occasion actually 
 spending the night in a crevasse at a height of 
 nearly 14,000 feet. He lived to be old, and to 
 become almost a public institution. A visit to 
 Gressoney was incomplete unless it included a 
 visit to Zumstein, of whom and of whose home 
 we have many graphic pictures in the works of 
 Alpine travel of the forties and the fifties. The 
 Reverend Samuel King, author of " Italian Valleys 
 of the Pennine Alps," not only called upon him, 
 but may almost be said to have interviewed him 
 in the modern sense : — 
 
 " We found the savant at home in his snug 
 little chalet, and just returned from marmot 
 shooting in the mountains. He welcomed us 
 heartily, and kept us there great part of the 
 afternoon, which we spent most pleasantl}', hear- 
 ing narratives of his ascents of Monte Eosa. . . . 
 On a bookshelf — which with guns, geological 
 hammer, instruments, and coloured engravings of 
 De Saussure's ascent of Alont Blanc , decorated tht- 
 wall— among a few choice volumes was a German
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 95 
 
 edition of Forbes. . . . The many little remem- 
 brances he possessed of the visits of such travellers 
 as Forbes, the Schlagintweits, then in the Hima- 
 layas under the auspices of Humboldt, Von 
 Welden, Brockedon, and many other well-known 
 names, were doubly interesting in this remote 
 valley, secluded, as it seemed, from the world, 
 and more than twenty miles from the nearest 
 char road." 
 
 Meanwhile, on the Swiss side, some savants, 
 better entitled to the name than Zumstein, 
 were also mountaineering with some diligence. 
 Schoolmaster Steinmiiller extended his activities 
 into this period, reviving Alpina as Neue 
 Alpina in 1819. He also wrote " Beschreibung 
 des schweizerischen Alpen." Only a little his 
 junior was Johann Hegetschweiler (1789-1839), 
 an army surgeon, also in general practice. He 
 wrote a book relating his travels in the Glarus 
 Alps, but died prematurely of a wound received 
 in a riot. Caspar Rohrdorf, Preparator at the 
 Berne Museum, made an ascent of the Jungfrau 
 in 1828. Fran9ois Joseph Hugi, at one time a 
 teacher in the commercial school at Soleure — a 
 post which he lost through his abjuration of 
 Roman Catholicism — and the founder of the 
 Botanical Gardens of that town, got within 200 
 feet of the top of the Finsteraarhorn in 1829, and 
 has a further title to fame as the pioneer of 
 winter climbing. He spent twelve days in the 
 Stieregg Chalet, above the Grindelwald Eissmeer, 
 and during that time he reached the Strahleegg 
 Pass, and tried the Mcinch-joch; while on his 
 return to Grindelwald, ho spent three days in
 
 96 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 the hut on the sutimit of the Faulhorn. "Ueber 
 das Wesen der Gletscher " is the book that tells 
 the story. Other interesting mimes belonging to 
 the period are those of Professor Melchior Ulrich, 
 who made the first ascent of Ulrichshorn, and 
 Professor Oswald Heer. 
 
 Heer was a great naturalist anrl palaeontologist. 
 One of his works on the primaeval world in 
 Switzerland has even been translated into 
 English, and published in a popular form with 
 startling pictures of antediluvian beasts. The 
 material for it had been gathered in the moun- 
 tains, where the Prof essor made severalfirst ascents, 
 notably those of the Piz Palu, and the Piz Linard, 
 in the Engadine ; and he Avas an ardent enthusiast 
 as well as a stalwart climber. His biographer 
 tells us that he was once asked to which of the 
 results of his Alpine journeys he attached the 
 greatest valu^. The answer was that, much as 
 he valued his dried plants and his fossils, and 
 his palfeontological discoveries, he was still more 
 grateful for the silences aryi the solitudes, and 
 their inspiring and exalting effect upon the 
 human mind. 
 
 Such are the chief names of this period. Other 
 names might easily be added. But they are 
 not well-known names, and the reader may be 
 left to pick them up from the Table of First 
 Ascents in the Appendix. Here it will suffice 
 to dwell upon the doings of the interesting group 
 of students and explorers which centred round 
 that eminent naturalist, Agassiz. 
 
 Louis Agassiz came from Orbe — a picturesque 
 walled town of some two thousand inhabitants,
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 97 
 
 lying at the foot of the Jura, with a view down 
 a broad valley to Yverdon at the extremity of 
 the Lake of Neuchatel. His father was a pastor 
 there, and afterwards at Motiers — the Jura town 
 with which the name of Kousseau is indis- 
 solubly linked. He was intended for a doctor, 
 and to that end was sent first to Zurich, and 
 afterwards to Heidelberg and Munich. But he 
 had other aims. He did not mind taking his 
 medical degree, but the trivial round of the 
 general practitioner revolted him. "I wish it 
 may be said of Louis Agassiz," he wrote to his 
 father, " that he was the first naturalist of his 
 time," and with this thought in his head he 
 decided to seek a professorship instead of a 
 practice. He had already done some valuable 
 work in ichthyology, and so won the interest 
 and regard of Cuvier and Humboldt. The 
 latter philosopher lent him money which he 
 never repaid. "I was pleased to remain a 
 debtor to Humboldt," we read in one of the 
 letters of his later life. His family also helped 
 him " at first," says his biographer, " with 
 pleasure, but afterwards with some reluctance." 
 
 He got his professorship, however, in 1832, at 
 the Lyceum of Neuchatel — a town which at that 
 date was a dependency of Prussia. The stipend 
 was ludicrously small— only eighty louis a year 
 to begin with— but he married on it. His 
 mother, in fact,- advised him to do so. " Catch 
 your blue butterfly," she wrote, "and metamor- 
 phose her into a loving housewife," believing 
 apparently that matrimony would drive the 
 student to settle down somewhere as a medical
 
 98 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 man. No such consequence ensued, howevtr, 
 and the union does not seem to have been a very 
 happy one. " The main difficulty that Mi's 
 Agassiz had to contend with," says the American 
 biographer, "was to obtain a regular supply of 
 money for daily household expenses." In- 
 directly, however, the discontent of Mrs Agassiz 
 was instrumental in diverting her husband's 
 attention from ichthyology to glaciers. 
 
 Mrs Agassiz was a German lady, and could 
 not endure the Swiss ladies. Another eminent 
 naturalist, M. Charpentier, director of the salt 
 mines at Bex, was also married to a German 
 wife. It occurred to Agassiz that the two 
 German ladies might like to cheer each other 
 up, and he therefore arranged to spend a summer 
 vacation at Bex ; and while the Germai\ ladies 
 talked about whatever German ladies do talk 
 about, the men of science talked about glaciers. 
 Their conversations, in fact, resulted in nothing 
 less than the discovery of the Xjlacial Epoch. 
 It came about in this way. 
 
 There are to be found, scattered about Switzer- 
 land, certain huge boulders, technically known 
 as " erratic blocks." Seeing that they could not 
 have grown there, and were of different geologi- 
 cal formation from the circumjacent rocks, it 
 naturally occurred to the curious to wonder 
 whence they had come, and how they had been 
 conveyed. The original theory was that they 
 were the residuum of the universal deluge. But 
 people were beginning to have their doubts 
 about that deluge, and a fresh theory was re- 
 quired. A chamois- hunter named Perrandier
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 99 
 
 then, though innocent of any scientific know- 
 ledge, invented a new theory out of his own 
 head. The blocks, he said, had been carried 
 down into the valleys on the backs of glaciers. 
 It was pointed out to him that the blocks were 
 often found in places from which glaciers were 
 many miles removed. He replied that, in that 
 case, glaciers must once have covered the whole 
 country, since the blocks could not have been 
 conveyed by any other means. 
 
 That was the rude beginning of the glacial 
 theory. The chamois -hunter unfolded it to 
 M. Venetz, an eminent civil engineer of the 
 Valais. Venetz was much impressed by the 
 hypothesis. It was confirmed by the condition 
 of certain rocks, which v/fre found to be polished 
 just as one would have expected them to be if 
 glaciers had rubbed up against them. In the end 
 he accepted the theory, and converted Charpen- 
 tier, who in his turn converted Agassiz. Antici- 
 pating Charpentier, who afterwards accused him 
 of stealing his ideas, he read a paper on the 
 subject, in 1837, before the Helvetic Society, 
 announcing his conviction that a great ice-period, 
 due to a temporary oscillation of the temperature 
 of the globe, had covered the surface of the earth 
 with a sheet of ice, extending at least from the 
 North Pole to Central Europe and Asia. "Siberian 
 winter," he said, " established itself for a while 
 over the world previously covered with a rich 
 vegetation, and peopled with large mammalia, 
 similar to those now inhabiting the warm regions 
 of India and Afri^n. Death enveloped all njiture 
 in a shroud, aud the cold having reached its
 
 100 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 highest degree, gave to this mass of ice, at the 
 maximum of tension, the greatest possible hard- 
 ness." The distribution of the erratic boulders 
 was " one of the accidents accompanying the vast 
 change occasioned by the fall of the temperature 
 of our globe before the commencement of our 
 epoch." 
 
 Naturally the audacious allegation was not 
 allowed to go unchall 'nged by the champions of 
 the old school ; and the contradiction encountered 
 stimulate d Agassiz to further and more systematic 
 observations. Pie made various Alpine journeys, 
 and finally established himself, with his friends 
 and supporters, in permanent summer quarters 
 on the medial moraine of the lower Aar glacier, 
 near the Griffisel Hospice. 
 
 It will be noticed that in the considerable liter- 
 ature relating to the adventures and experiments 
 amongst the glaciers, the talk is never of Agassiz 
 alone, but always of " Agassiz and his com- 
 panions " ; and the philosopher's relations with 
 his companions do, in truth, furnish one of the 
 most cuiiously interesting chapters of his life. 
 He needed companions for two reasons : first, 
 because he was of a genial and expansive disposi- 
 tion; secondly, because he always had more 
 projects in hand than he could attend to without 
 assistance. His enterprises, however, far from 
 being remunerative, involved heavy expenditure, 
 only occasionally recouped by grants in aid from 
 scientific societies and wealthy patrons, so that 
 he had no superfluous funds to disburse in salaries. 
 He could not, therefore, pick and choose hia as- 
 sistants, but had to take what assistants he could
 
 Aiguille »c Drc an-b Mek de Glace.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 101 
 
 get. The first to come, and also the most famous, 
 was Edouard Desor. 
 
 Desor was a law student of Heidelberg, and a 
 political refugee, living from hand to mouth as a 
 tutor and a translator, and absolutely ignorant of 
 natural science. He came, not as a scientific as- 
 sistant, but as a secretary, the airangement being 
 that Agassiz should pay for his board and lodg- 
 ing, and that when he wanted money h<^ should 
 ask for it, and that Agassiz would give him some 
 if he happened to have any at the time. He was, 
 however, a young man of ability who rose to the 
 occasion, getting up scientific questions as a lawyer 
 gf'ts up his brief, and plunging into scientific con- 
 troversies with as much ardour as though he had 
 been trying to upset a government. Most of 
 Agassiz' extravagances and disputes were due to 
 his excess of zeal. He had, moreover, a very 
 keen eye for reclame, and a bright and vigorous 
 prose style. "Agassiz and his companions" 
 figure in his narratives as a firm, or one might 
 almost say a Chartered Company, for the exploita- 
 tion of all kinds of scientific knowledge, with 
 Desor for managing director. He took care that 
 the managing director got his full share of the 
 credit for the work accomplished. 
 
 Aiiother of the " companions " was Karl Vogt, 
 who afterwards got a professorship at Geneva. 
 It is said that one of the grievances of Mrs 
 Agassiz, second only to her difficulty in obtaining 
 a regular supply of money for the household 
 expenses, related to the character of the stories 
 which Vogt and Desor used to tell at the phil- 
 osopher's dinner-table. A third " companion,"
 
 102 THE STORY OF ALl'INE CLIMBING. 
 
 Gressly, was distinguished for the fact that, 
 though he never had any money, he never wanted 
 any. During the Avinter he lived with Agassiz, 
 performing secretarial functions. The rest of the 
 year he spent tramping about the Jura studying 
 geology. He travelled, however, not as a tourist, 
 but as a tramp. Instead of making hotel expenses, 
 he used to walk up to a farmhouse and boldly 
 ask for a night's lodging : a favour which was 
 almost invariably accorded him, because he was 
 an entertaining companion, and particularly clever 
 at making cocked hats and l^oats out of old news- 
 papers to amuse the children. Ono day he set 
 out on his usual journey and did not return. 
 After long inquiry it was discovered that he had 
 gone mad in the middle of a walking tour, and 
 been locked up in an asylum. 
 
 Such were the principal member.^, of the com- 
 pany in the " Hotel des Neuchatelois," as they 
 called it. The original liotel Avas made by using 
 the shelter of a big boulder, and screening the 
 entrance with a blanket. Afterwords a rough 
 frame cabin, covered with cauvas, was substituted 
 for it. There was a sleeping-place for guides and 
 workmen, a bedroom for the investigators, and 
 another apartment serving as dining-room and 
 laboratory. "This outer apartment," says Mrs 
 Agassiz, " boasted a table and one or two benches ; 
 even a couple of chairs were kept as seats of 
 honour for occasional guests. A shelf against 
 the wall accommodated books, instruments, coats, 
 etc., and a plank floor on which to spread their 
 blankets at night was a good exchange for the 
 frozen surface of the irlacier."
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 103 
 
 Here Agassiz and his companions residsfl for 
 several summers, receiving the visits of distin- 
 guished strangers from all parts of the world, 
 climbing and making every experiment with the 
 glacier that their ingenuity could devise. They 
 drove lines of stakes across it to test the rate of 
 glacier motion ; they bored holes in the ice to 
 examine its internal structure ; and Agassiz him- 
 self was lowered into a glacier well. The 
 expirience seems to have been painful : — 
 
 " Wholly engrossed in watching the blue bands, 
 still visible in the glittering walls of ice, he was 
 only aroused to the presence of approaching 
 danger by the sudden plunge of his feet into 
 water. His first shout of distress was misunder- 
 stood, and his friends lowered him into the ice 
 cold gulf instead of raising him. The second cry 
 was effectual, and he was drawn up, though not 
 without great difficultj^, from a depth of one 
 hundred and twenty-five feet." 
 
 We need not go into the scientific results of the 
 A'^arious experiments conducted. The experiments 
 came to an end when Agassiz departed to America, 
 where a glacier is most appropriately called after 
 him. He got a professorship at Harvard, and, 
 his first wife having died, married an American 
 lady, who relieved the pressure of his pecuniary 
 embarrassments and obtained the necessary 
 regular supply of money for the daily household 
 expenses by opening an academy for young 
 ladies. Agassiz lectured to the young ladies, 
 but his intei'est in glaciers continued. He ob- 
 served traces of glasial action in Brazil, under 
 the patronage of the Emperor, and went to see
 
 104 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLLMBING. 
 
 the Andes, though he did not climb them ; but 
 the study of the Swiss glaciers was passed on to 
 others — not, indeed, to Desor, who, inheriting a 
 fortune, gave up science for politics, but to 
 ProfessorTyndall and M. Dollfus-Ausset. 
 
 Tyndall really belongs to the modern period. 
 He was Mr Whymper's principal competitor for 
 the honour of making the first ascent of the 
 Matterhorn, and he accomplished the first ascent 
 of the Weisshoru. But his first interest in the 
 Alps was scientific, and it was he who first worked 
 out the mechanics of glacier movement. Between 
 his work, however, and that of Agassiz, there was 
 an interval of some years. The link between the 
 two observers is supplied by the career of Dollfus- 
 Ausset. 
 
 Dollfiis-Ausset was an Alsatian of Miilhausen, 
 born in 1797. He divided his time, and even his 
 literary activity, between glaciers and scamped 
 velvets. The two books which stand to his credit 
 in the library catalogues are entitled respectively 
 "Materials for the "Study of the Glaciers," and 
 "Materials for the Dyeing of Stuffs." The 
 former is a large work in twelve volumes with 
 forty plates, and is the record of prolonged per- 
 sonal investigation. M. Dollfus built himself 
 observatories on the Aar Glacier, the Saint 
 Bernard, the Theodule, and elsewhere. He 
 made with Desor a first ascent of the Galen- 
 stock, and of one of the peaks of the Wetterhorn, 
 and he was jiopularly known by the alfectionate 
 sobriquet of " Papa Glttscher Dollfus."
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 The time has come to speak more particularly 
 of the exploits of the English climbers who 
 decided that mountaineering should take rank 
 ■with the athletic sports. 
 
 We have dealt at length with Windham's trip 
 to Chamonix, and have mentioned Dr John 
 Moore. The latter gentleman's account of the 
 attempt of his pupils to climb the Aiguille du 
 Dru is too entertaining not to be quoted. 
 
 " While we remained," he writes, " in contem- 
 plation of this scene, some of the company 
 observed that from the top of one of the Needles 
 the prospect would be still more magnificent, as 
 the eye would stretch over Breven, beyond 
 Geneva, all the way to Mount Jura, and compre- 
 hend the Pays de Vallais and many other moun- 
 tains and vallies. 
 
 " This excited the ambition of the D of 
 
 H . He sprung up and made towards the 
 
 Aiguille du Dru, which is the highest of the four 
 Needles. Though he bounded over the ice with 
 the elasticity of a young chamois, it was a con- 
 siderable time before he could arrive at the foot 
 of the Needle — for people are greatly deceived 
 as to distances in those snowy regions. 
 
 " ' Should he get near the top,' said Mr G , 
 
 looking after him with eagerness, ' he will swear 
 we have seen nothing. But I will try to mount 
 as high as he can ; I am not fond of seeing people 
 above me.' So saying, he sprung after him. 
 " In a short time we saw them both scramb
 
 106 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 ling up the rock : the D had gained a con- 
 siderable height, when he was suddenly stopped 
 by a part of the rock which was perfectly 
 impracticable (for his impetuosity had prevented 
 
 him from choosing the easiest way), so Mr G 
 
 overtook him. 
 
 " Here they had time to breathe and cool a 
 little. The one being determined not to be 
 surpassed, the other thought the exploit not 
 worth his while, since the honour must be 
 divided. So, like two rival powers who have 
 exhausted their strength by a useless contest, 
 they returned, fatigued and disappointed, to the 
 place from which they had set out." 
 
 Our Table of the first ascents of Mont Blanc 
 also contains the names of some early English 
 climbers, though most of them only climbed that 
 one mountain. One might add the names of 
 Messrs Yeats Brown and Fred Slade, who made 
 a serious, though unsuccessful, attempt to climb 
 the Jungfrau in 1828; and a few of the early 
 visitors to Zermatt are also worthy of mention. 
 The first of them was Mr George Cade of York, 
 who arrived there by way of the Theodule in 
 1800, and said that no one had crossed that 
 glacier pass since De Saussure. He says that the 
 people "addressed us in High Dutch, too high, 
 indeed, for our weak understandings." After- 
 wards came, among others, the Earl of Minto 
 and Sir John Herschel, who both made early 
 ascents of the Breithorn, and Brockedon, who 
 helped Murray with the early editions of his 
 Handbook. But the real pioneer among British 
 climbers was J. D. Forbes.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 107 
 
 Forbes was a Scotsman, and a glacier investi- 
 gator, contemporary with, but independent of, 
 Agassiz. His relations with Agassiz would 
 figure in any history of the quarrels of scientific 
 men, though we need not here trouble ourselves 
 about the rights and wrongs of the dispute. It 
 arose out of Forbes' visit to Agassiz at the Hotel 
 des Neuchatelois. Walking about on the glacier 
 of the Aar, the two observers tried to pump each 
 other, and the austere Gael was more successful 
 in the battle of wits than the expansive Switzer, 
 extracting more information than he imparted. 
 The row began when Forbes published the 
 results of his observations, and it was worked 
 up to a white heat by the combative Desor, until, 
 in the end, Agassiz refused to meet Forbes at 
 dinner at the house of a mutual friend at Paris. 
 Before that contretemps, however, Forbes and Mr 
 Heath of Cambridge had made with Agassiz and 
 Desor an interesting ascent of the Jungfran. 
 
 Nor was this Forbes' only interesting ascent. 
 He also travelled among the glaciers of Norway 
 and the Alps of Dauphin^, and made an impor- 
 tant journey through the less known valleys of 
 the Pennines. In particular he came over the 
 Col de Collon into the Evolena Valley, meeting 
 a gruesome sight upon the way — the dead body 
 of a peasant who had been lost upon the Pass : 
 " From the appearance of the body as it lay, it 
 might have been presumed to be recent; but 
 when it was raised the head and face were found 
 to be in a state of frightful decay, and covered 
 with blood, evidently arising from an incipient 
 thaw, after having remained for perhaps a twelve-
 
 108 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 month perfectly congealed. ... A very little 
 further on we found traces of another victim, 
 probably of an earlier date — some shreds of 
 clothes and fragments of a knapsack ; but the 
 body had disappeared. Still lower the remains 
 of the bones and skin of two chamois, and near 
 them the complete bones of a man." 
 
 From Evolena, Forbes made the first passage 
 (by an amateur) of the Col d'H^rens to Zermatt, 
 where he made an ascent of the familiar RifFel- 
 horn. It was supposed that the first ascent had 
 been made in 1841 by a party of English students, 
 but fresh light was thrown on the subject by a 
 letter sent to the Alpine Journal by the late 
 Mr Crawfurd Grove in 1874. 
 
 "The simple but exciting pastime," says Mr 
 Grove, " of rolling big stones from the top of 
 the Riffelhorn on to the glacier below was the 
 means last autumn of bringing a curious relic 
 to light. Two American travellers who were 
 enjoying this exhilarating sport last August 
 determined to signalise their visit by sending 
 down a bolt of unusual magnitude. Having 
 fixed upon a stone of such size that it was as 
 much as two men could do to move it, thej' 
 prized it with great difficulty from its bed, Avhen 
 to their surprise they found in the site thus laid 
 bare a javelin or spear head, which must have 
 been lying under the stone for time indefinite." 
 
 It follows that the Riff"elhorn is the only 
 mountain of which the first ascent can be attri- 
 buted, on impeachable evidence, to primitive 
 man ; but there is also another story of an 
 ascent prior to that by the English students
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 109 
 
 which has been told in the "Echo des Alpes." 
 It is the story of a shepherd who was driven 
 mad by the oppression of a solitary life. He 
 fled from human society, and whenever he saw 
 anyone coming withdrew to the top of the Riffel- 
 horn, which he reached by a perilous path known 
 to him alone, and threw stones down at his 
 fellow-creatures. Ultimately he became such a 
 nuisance that a chamois-hunter stalked and shot 
 him. 
 
 Next to Forbes in point of time comes 
 John Ball, the compiler of the well - known 
 "Alpine Guide." He was Colonial Under- 
 Secretary in Lord Palmerston's Administration, 
 and made the first passage of the Schwarz- 
 thor in 1845. Charles Hudson, Fred Walker, 
 Thomas Woodbine Hinchlitf, and the brothers 
 Smyth, are some of the more notable of those 
 who immediately succeeded him; and Mr 
 Justice Wills must on no account be over- 
 looked. But it will, on the whole, be more 
 conveniput to consider the popularising of the 
 Alps in connection with two outstanding 
 events : the ascent of Mont Blanc by Albert 
 Smith, and the formation of the Alpine Club. 
 
 Albert Smith was a medical student who 
 abandoned medicine for literature. One knows 
 him chiefly as a humorist, but about Mont 
 Blanc he was serious. He read a little book, 
 written for the nursery, entitled "The Peasants 
 of Chamonix," and ever afterwards the mountain 
 fascinated him. He first went to Chamonix at 
 the age of twenty-two, in 1838, and was so 
 anxious to make the ascent, that he was willing
 
 110 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 to act as porter if anyone vv'ould engage his 
 services in that capacity. The opportunity did 
 not occur, however, and as he had set out from 
 home with only twelve pounds in his pocket, 
 he could not afford to climb at his own expense. 
 He repeated the visit again and again, however, 
 and, later, when he had established a reputation 
 as a lecturer, it occurred to him that the ascent 
 of Mont Blanc would form an excellent subject 
 for a popular entertainment. He started once 
 more, therefore, for Chamonix, in 1851, accom- 
 panied by William Tieverley, the artist. There 
 he joined forces with some Oxford under- 
 graduates, who were delighted to climb with 
 him when they heard that this "INIr Smith of 
 London " was no other than " Mr Smith the 
 well-known comic author." 
 
 The members of the party, including guides 
 and porters, numbered twenty ; and the list 
 of the provisions that they took with them 
 almost suggests that they thought of opening 
 a hotel upon the mountain top. In addition 
 to beef, mutton, veal, and general groceries, 
 they conveyed forty-six fowls, twenty loaves, 
 ten cheeses, and not less than ninety -five 
 bottles of wine. One of the party suffered 
 from mountain-sickness, and was seen " lying 
 on the snow, vomiting frightfully with con- 
 siderable haemorrhage from the nose " ; while 
 Albert Smith expressed the opinion that " every 
 step we took was gained from the chance of a 
 horrible death." He was particularly appalled 
 when crossing a snow slope of the Montague 
 de la Cote — a passage which Mr Matthews
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. Ill 
 
 describes as "perfectly easy." "It is," Smith 
 writes, "an all but perpendicular iceberg. You 
 begin to ascend it obliquely ; there is nothing 
 below but a chasm in the ice, more frightful 
 than anything yet passed. Should the foot 
 slip or the baton give way there is no chance 
 for life. You would glide like lightning from 
 one frozen crag to another, and finally be 
 dashed to pieces, hundreds and hundi-eds of 
 feet btdow, in the horrible depths of the 
 glacier." It is much the same sort of language 
 that Master John de Bremble used on the 
 Great Saint Bernard, and the provocation for 
 it was not perceptibly greater. But it is almost 
 the last expression of such exaggerated terror, 
 and the rest of the narrative shows that it 
 was hardly called for. The party not only got 
 safely up and safely down again, but remained 
 sufficiently robust to eat all their provisions 
 and drink all their wine before descending. 
 
 The ascent made a good deal of noise, and was 
 the subject of a satirical article in the Daily 
 News. Albert Smith was therein compared 
 unfavourably with De Saussure. "Saussure's 
 observations and his reflections on Mont Blanc," 
 it was written, " live in his poetical philosophy ; 
 those of Mr Albert Smith will be most appro- 
 priately recorded in a tissue of indifferent puns 
 and stale fast witticisms, with an incessant 
 straining after smartness. The aimless scramble 
 of the four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc, 
 with the accompaniment of Sir Robert Peel's 
 orgies at the bottom, will not go far to redeem 
 the somewhat equivocal reputation of the herd
 
 112 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 of English tourists in Switzerland, for a mindless 
 and rather vulgar redundance of animal spirits." 
 
 A controversy followed, which naturally turned 
 the attention of enterprising men to Alpine climb- 
 ing ; and interest in the pastime was kept alive 
 by the lecture which Albert Smith gave at the 
 Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. He had already ac- 
 quired a reputation by his lecture on the " Over- 
 land Mail." The lecture on Mont Blanc, illustrated 
 from pictures drawn by Beverley, was infinitely 
 more popular. It went on almost without inter- 
 ruption for six years, was patronised by Queen 
 Victoria and the Prince Consort, and put thirty 
 thousand pounds into Albert Smith's pocket. 
 
 And while Albert Smith was lecturing, 
 Hinchliflf and E. S. Kennedy, and Charles 
 Hudson and Mr Justice Wills, and others, were 
 climbing. Hudson, in particular, distinguished 
 himself by making an ascent of Mont Blanc by a 
 new route, and without guides, while Mr Justice 
 Wills made that ascent of the Wetterhorn which 
 was mentioned in the first paragraph of this 
 book. The various climbers, after making one 
 another's acquaintance in Switzerland, naturally 
 liked to meet again in England to renew the 
 acquaintance, and talk "shop," The desire 
 naturally resulted in the foundation of the 
 Alpine Club. 
 
 The idea was first mooted in a letter written 
 by Mr William Mathews, who had lately left 
 Saint John's College, Cambridge, and had 
 ascended the V(^lan, and the Petit Combin, to 
 the Rev. J. A. Hort, subsequently Professor of 
 Divinity at Cambridge, in February 1854.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 113 
 
 "I want you," he wrote, "to consider whether 
 it would not be possible to establish an Alpine 
 Club, the members of which might dine together 
 once a year, say, in London, and give each other 
 what information they could. Each member at 
 the close of any Alpine tour in Switzerland or 
 elsewhere should be required to furnish to the 
 President a short account of all the undescribed 
 excursions he had made, with a view to the 
 publication of an annual or biennial volume. 
 We should thus get a great deal of useful infor- 
 mation in a form available to the members." 
 
 The project was further discussed in Switzer- 
 land, in the course of the same summer, and 
 crystallised at a dinner-party given at the house 
 of Mr "William Mathews, senior, the Leasowes, in 
 Worcestershire. The list of original members 
 included the names of E. T. Coleman, the Kev. 
 J. Llewellyn Davies, the Rev. J. F. Hardy, 
 F. Vaughan Hawkins, T. W. Hinchliff, the Rev. 
 F. J. A. Hort, E. S. Kennedy, William Longman, 
 William Mathews, B. St John Mathews, Albert 
 Smith, and Alfred Wills. John Ball and Sir 
 Leslie Stephen were among those elected shortly 
 afterwards. Kennedy was the first President, 
 and John Ball the second. The Club originally 
 met in Hinchliffs chambers, but soon acquired 
 premises of its own. The members first colla- 
 borated, under Ball's editorship, in the production 
 of that classical collection of narratives of Alpine 
 exploration, " Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers." 
 Subsequently it produced the Alpine Journal, of 
 which Mr Coolidge and Mr Douglas Freshfield 
 are ex-editors, and which is at present edited by
 
 114 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 Mr Yeld, well known for his study of the Grraian 
 Alps. 
 
 The Club and its publications naturally gave 
 a great stimulus to climbing. A reference 
 to the Appendix will show that most of the 
 important first ascents were made between 1854 
 and 1865, and that the majority of them were 
 made by Englishmen. Our list, in fact, which, 
 though necessarily not exhaustive, was compiled 
 without prejudice, shows twenty-nine English to 
 eleven foreign first ascents, while in one case the 
 nationality of the company was mixed. The 
 mountains conquered in the period include Monte 
 Rosa, the Monch, the Eiger, the Schreckhorn, the 
 Weisshorn, the Dent Blanche, the Zinal Roth- 
 horn, and the Ecrins. The climax is reached 
 with the conquest of the Matterhorn ; but the 
 IMatterhorn merits a separate chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 Zermatt was not absolutely the last of the great 
 climbing centres to be popularised; but, being 
 remote and difficult of access, it attracted atten- 
 tion a good deal later than Chamonix, Grindel- 
 wald, or Heiligenblut. 
 
 The early history of the valley has nothing to 
 do with mountaineering, unless one so classes the 
 legend that the Prince of Darkness carried a 
 cathedral bell over the Theodule on his broad 
 shoulders, in fulfilment of a compact with the 
 Bishop of Sion. The early documents that have 
 been published chiefly relate to the ownership or
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 115 
 
 overlordship of land. Theoretically, ihe feudal 
 lords rule 1 the serfs, the Bishop of Sion ruled 
 the feudal lords, and the Counts of Savoy ruled 
 the Bishop. Later, the Valais was for a while a 
 Republic. Napoleon incorporated it with his 
 Empire as the Department of the Simplon, and 
 in 1814 it joined the Swiss Confederation. 
 
 We have already mentioned such early visitors 
 to Zermatt as De Saussure and Mr George Cade 
 of York. A certain, though probably not a great, 
 quantity of trade seems to have passed at this 
 period over the Th^odule Glacier. According to 
 Cade, nine mules made the passage in a single 
 year, and iron was by this route exchanged for 
 Italian wines. The inaccuracies in Ebel's Guide 
 make it clear that he at least never went there ; 
 but Murray, in 1838, speaks of " an influx of 
 strangers," and says that "many mineralogists, 
 botanists, and entomologists come here to collect 
 rich harvests in the neighbourhood." Among 
 the visitors whom we know of are Brockedon 
 the artist, Elie de Beaumont the geologist, 
 Engelhardt, Desor, Studer, Agassiz, Charpentier, 
 Toppfer, J. D. Forbes, John Ball, and Ruskin. 
 
 As yet, however, there was no inn at Zermatt. 
 The first was started by the village doctor, wisely, 
 since he found that he was expected to entertain 
 the strangers whether he kept an inn or not. In 
 1854 he sold it to Alexander Seller, who was not 
 long in making a name as one of the greatest 
 hotel-keepers in the world. When he found that 
 one hotel was not enough he built more. Before 
 he died he had built half a dozen. Tourists 
 flocked to him, and first ascents succeeded one
 
 116 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 another with rapidity. Mr Whymper prints a 
 table of fifteen, beginning with the Strahlhoni in 
 1854, and ending with the Matterhorn in 1865. 
 For the moment we will speak only of the 
 Matterhorn. 
 
 Few mountains look more absolutely inacces- 
 sible than the Matterhorn. It stands up at the 
 head of the Zermatt valley like a prodigious 
 obelisk. The first impression is that one could 
 no more hope to climb it than to climb Cleopatra's 
 Needle. The early visitors accepted their first 
 impressions and did not try. The first attempt 
 that is known of was made by the Carrels, the 
 Abb4 Gorret, and Gabriel Maquignaz in 1858. 
 They only got to a height of about 12,650 feet. 
 The Messrs Parker of Liverpool, who tried in the 
 same year, did not get so far. Mr Vaughan 
 Hawkins and Professor Tyndall also tried in the 
 same year, and got a little further. A second 
 attempt hy the Parkers in 1861 was again unsuc- 
 cessful. Then Mr Whymper comes upon the 
 scene. 
 
 Mr Whymper, accompanied by an Oberland 
 guide, arrived at Breuil, on the Italian side of the 
 Matterhorn, in August 1861. Seeking a local 
 guide, he was introduced to Jean-Antoine Carrel ; 
 but he and Carrel could not come to terms. It 
 was a pity, for Carrel was the ordy man who 
 really believed from the first that the ascent was 
 feasible, and was also the best rock climber of the 
 day. Mr Whymper, however, set out without 
 him, and pitched a tent on the Col du Lion, a 
 ridge of perilous aspect, with a steep snow slope 
 on one side of it, and a precipice on the other.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 117 
 
 The nexc morning he proceeded to climb up the 
 rocks ; but the guide got frightened, and insisted 
 upon turning back. In the meantime the guide 
 Bennen had reported to Professor Tyndall that 
 the ascent was not to be thought of. 
 
 "Herr," he said, "I have examined the moun- 
 tain carefully, and find it more difficult and dan- 
 gerous than I had imagined. There is no place 
 upon it where we could well pass the night. We 
 might do so upon yonder Col in the snow, but 
 there we should be almost frozen to death, and 
 totally unfit for the work of the next day. On 
 the rocks there is no ledge or cranny which could 
 give us proper harbourage; and, starting from 
 Breuil, it is certainly impossible to reach the 
 summit in a single day." 
 
 Mr Whymper, however, was not deterred by 
 this report, but returned to the charge in 1862, 
 in which year he made no fewer than five attempts. 
 The first was defeated by a hurricane. " We 
 dared not attempt to stand upright, and remained 
 stationary, on all fours, glued, as it were, to the 
 rocks." In the second attempt one of the guides 
 was taken ill, and the other refused to go on 
 without him. The third attempt was made 
 without guides, and ended in an accident. Mr 
 Whymper was chipping his way along a snow 
 slope at the base of a cliff, when he slipped and 
 fell. His narrative is very graphic. 
 
 " The knapsack brought my head down first, 
 and I pitched into some rocks about a dozen feet 
 below ; they caught something, and tumbled me 
 off the edge, head over heels, into the gully. The 
 baton was dashed from my hands, and I whirled
 
 118 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 downwards in a series of bounds, each longer than 
 the last, now over rocks, now into ice, striking 
 my head four or five times, each time with in- 
 creased force. Tiie last bound sent me spinning 
 through the air, in a leap of fifty or sixty feet, 
 from one side of the gully to the other, and I 
 struck the rock, luckily with the whole of my 
 left side. They caught my clothes for a moment, 
 and I fell back into the snow with motion arrested. 
 My head, fortunately, came the right side up, 
 and a few frantic clutches brought me to a halt, 
 in the neck of the gully, and on the verge of the 
 precipice. ... I fell nearly 200 feet in seven or 
 eight bounds. Ten feet more would have taken 
 me in one gigantic leap of 800 feet on to the 
 glacier below." 
 
 That would have sufficed for most men. It did 
 not suffice for Mr Whymper. Only a few days 
 later he was on the mountain again, first with 
 Carrel, who insisted on turning back for some 
 reason not very clear, and then without Carrel, 
 when the mountain proved to be in an unfavour- 
 able condition for climbing. Bad weather baffled 
 the only attempt made in 1863, and there was no 
 attempt in 1864. By 1865 Mr Whymper had 
 decided that the route from Zermatt was to be 
 preferred to that from Breuil. 
 
 Christian Aimer, who was with him, did not 
 want to try the mountain. "Anything but 
 Matterhorn, dear sir," was his refrain. Mr 
 Whymper, therefore, went to Breuil to pick up 
 Carrel ; but Carrel could not come. He had, 
 in fact, engaged himself to make the attempt 
 from Breuil with Signor Sella. Then Lord
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 119 
 
 Francis Douglas happened to walk into the place 
 with young Peter Taugwalder. He also was think- 
 ing of climbing the Matterhorn from Zermatt, 
 and Peter's father had reported that he thought 
 it could be done. As Lord Francis was a brilliant 
 climber, who had just distinguished himself by a 
 first ascent of the Ober-Gabelhorn, the two parties 
 agreed to join, and crossed the Th6odule to Zer- 
 matt together. At Zermatt they picked up old 
 Peter, and meeting Michel Croz, who had often 
 climbed with Mr Whymper, engaged him to come 
 also. At dinner they met the Rev. Charles 
 Hudson, already mentioned as having climbed 
 Mont Blanc without guides. Hudson was invited 
 to join. He accepted, and introduced his friend, 
 Mr Hadow, as "a sufficiently good man to go 
 with us." Mr Hadow was admitted, and Peter 
 Taugwalder's second son was engaged as a 
 supplementary porter. 
 
 The party set off from Zermatt at half-past 
 five in the morning of July 13th, and pitched 
 their tent at a height of about 11,000 feet. 
 They slept well after supper and songs, and 
 started afresh as soon as it was light enough to 
 see. At first it was easy going. Then came 
 the difficult shoulder — the part that is nowadays 
 draped with ropes — and then, after the turning 
 of an awkward corner, an easy snow patch led 
 to the top. The victory was won, and the joy 
 of it was enhanced by the discovery that the 
 Italian party from Breuil bad tried and failed. 
 They could look down and see them — " mere 
 dots on the ridge, at a great distance below. . . ." 
 They hurled stones to draw their attention, and
 
 120 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 the Italians turned and fled. Arriving at Breuil 
 ttiey confirmed the truth of an old legend : "We 
 saw them ourselves — they hurled stones at us. 
 The old traditions are true — there are spirits on 
 the top of the Matterhorn." 
 
 And now we come to the appalling story of 
 the catastrophe. 
 
 The stay on the summit had lasted an hour. 
 Mr Whymper, suddenly remembering that he 
 had forgotten to put cards bearing the names of 
 the party in a bottle, remained a little longer. 
 They were all roped together, Croz leading, 
 Hadow second, Hudson third. Lord Francis 
 Douglas fourth, followed by old Peter, young 
 Peter, and Mr Whymper himself. All went 
 well until the steep part of the rock was reached. 
 This is Mr Whymper's graphic account of what 
 then happened: — 
 
 " Michel Croz had laid aside his axe, and, in 
 order to give Mr Hadow greater security, was 
 absolutely taking hold of his legs, and putting 
 his feet, one by one, into their proper positions. 
 So far as I know, no one was actually descending. 
 I cannot speak with certainty, because the two 
 leading men were partially hidden from my sight 
 by an intervening mass of rock, but it is my 
 belief, from the movements of their shoulders, 
 that Croz, having done as I have said, was in the 
 act of turning round, to go down a step or two 
 himself; at this moment Mr Hadow slipped, 
 fell against him, and knocked him over. I heard 
 one startled exclamation from Croz, then saw 
 him and Mr Hadow flying downwards ; in 
 another moment Hudson was dragged from his
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 121 
 
 steps, and Lord F. Douglas immediately after 
 him. All this was the work of a moment. Im- 
 mediately we heani Croz's exclamation, old 
 Peter and I planted ourselves as firmly as the 
 rocks would permit : the rope was taut between 
 us, and the jerk came on us both as one man. 
 We held ; but the rope broke rnidway between 
 Taugwalder and Lord Francis Douglas. For a 
 few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions 
 sliding downwards on their backs, and spreading 
 out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. 
 They passed from our sight uninjured, disap- 
 peared one by one, and then fell from precipice 
 to precipice on to the Matterhorngletscher below, 
 a distance of nearly 4000 feet in height." 
 
 The Taugwalders were unnerved. Mr 
 Whymper had all the difficulty in the world 
 to bring them down. " Several times," he 
 says, " old Peter turned with ashy face and 
 faltering limbs, and said, with terrible emphasis, 
 ' I cannot.' " At half-past nine they were not 
 yet off the mountain, and had to spend the 
 night on a narrow slab of rock. At daybreak 
 they ran down to Zerraatt, and set out to search 
 for the bodies of their comrades. 
 
 "By 8.30, we had got to the plateau at the 
 top of the glacier, and within sight of the corner 
 in which we knew my companions must be. As 
 we saw one weather-beaten man after another 
 raise the telescope, turn deadly pale, and pass it 
 on without a word to the next, we knew that all 
 hope was gone. We approached. They had 
 fallen below as they had fallen above — Croz a 
 little in advance, Hadow near him, and Hudson 
 U
 
 122 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 some distance behind ; but of Lord Francis 
 Douglas we could see nothing. We left them 
 where they fell : buried in snow at the base of 
 the grandest cliif of the most majestic mountain 
 of the Alps." 
 
 Such was the first of the Matterhorn accidents. 
 It was not by any means the last. In 1879 two 
 deaths occurred on the mountain in the course 
 of the same twenty-four hours. A guide named 
 Joseph Brantschen, being taken ill, was left 
 behind in the hut while his companions went 
 to seek help, and when they got back to him 
 they found him dead. Dr Moseley of Boston, 
 being unroped, and carelessly vaulting over a 
 rock, slipped and fell 2000 feet. In 1886 Mr 
 Borckhardt perished in circumstances similar to 
 those in which Brantschen was lost ; except 
 that it was not in the hut, but on the exposed 
 face of the mountain that he was abandoned. 
 In 1890 a whole party was lost under circum- 
 stances never quite understood. But the saddest 
 case of all was the death of J. A, Carrel. 
 
 Carrel, as has been said, was Mr Whymper's 
 rival for the honour of making the first ascent 
 of the Matterhorn. He had also been Mr 
 Whymper's companion in the Andes, and Mr 
 Whymper has recorded that he considered him 
 the best rock climber whom he had ever known. 
 He had begun his scrambles on the Matterhorn 
 as a man of thirty. It was still his profession 
 to climb the Matterhorn as a man of sixty. He 
 had saved no money and so could not afford to 
 retire ; and the sad day of his last climb came. 
 He and Gorret took Signer Sinigaglia up, and they
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 123 
 
 were snow-bound in the higher hut. The storm 
 lasted ; provisions began to fail ; storm or no 
 storm it was necessary to descend. Carrel was 
 obviously weak and worn out, but, says Signor 
 Sinigaglia, " he continued to direct the descent 
 with a coolness, energy and ability above all 
 praise. But for his guidance the party would 
 never have got down at all. He staggered a 
 little, but protested that nothing was the matter, 
 and went on, holding out until the dangerous 
 zone was passed, before he called out : ' Come up 
 and fetch me. I have no strength left.' They 
 carried him a little way, and gave him all the 
 brandy that remained, but all in vain. 
 
 " We tried to lift him," says Signor Sinigaglia, 
 " but it was impossible — he was getting stifi". 
 We stooped down and asked in his ear if he 
 wished to commend his soul to God. With a 
 last effort he answered, ' Yes,' and then fell upon 
 his back, dead, upon the snow." He had fallen 
 like a soldier at the post of duty, as truly as if 
 he had met his death in his fighting days on the 
 field of Solferino. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 We have come late to the accidents, for the 
 simple reason that accidents hardly ever happened 
 in the early days when people were thoroughly 
 afraid of the mountains. They did not, indeed, 
 take all the precautions that modern experience 
 enjoins. The rope was not at all regularly used 
 by them on crevassed glaciers ; they knew little
 
 124 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 about the hours at which avalanches were speciallj'- 
 liable to fall ; and we have seen De Luc deliber- 
 ately walking on to a cornice in order to enjoy the 
 view. Somehow or other, however, the chapter 
 of chances was in their favour. 
 
 The first Alpine accident properly so called 
 happened in 1800 on the glacier of the Buet. 
 A Dane named Eschen, walking ahead of his 
 companions, "suddenly disappeared from vieM^" 
 He had fallen into a crevasse, two hundred feet 
 deep, from which his body was subsequently 
 recovered. A monument was erected to his 
 memory "under the magistracy of Bonaparte, 
 Cambaceres, Le Brun, Consuls of the French 
 Republic." " Travellers," ran the inscription on 
 one of its three faces, "A Guide, prudent and 
 robust, is necessary to you. Do not leave him. 
 Obey the counsels of experience. It is with 
 mingled sentiments of fear and respect that you 
 should visit the spots which Nature has marked 
 with the seal of her majesty and power." 
 
 Another accident happened, not Jong after- 
 wards, to Herr Escher, Secretary of the Grand 
 Council of Zurich, who fell over a precipice 
 while scrambling near the Col de Balme. The 
 incident is chiefly remarkable for the comment 
 of Pictet, in the " Bibliothfeque Universelle." 
 " How little merit or glory there is," Pictet wrote, 
 " in risking one's life in feats of prowess in which 
 the most ordinary rope dancer will always excel 
 the traveller who thinks to give evidence of his 
 clearness of head or of his agility in these 
 hazardous tours de fmxe." 
 
 The most sensational of the early accidents
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 125 
 
 was that which happened, in 1820, on Mont 
 Blanc. It was the famous Hamel accident that 
 first caused the perils of the pastime of climbing 
 to be realised by those who lived at home at 
 ease. 
 
 Dr Hamel was a Russian savant, employed by 
 the Tsar to make certain scientific observations. 
 At Geneva he picked up M. Selligue, who wished 
 to make some experiments on the mountain with 
 a new barometer of his own construction. They 
 were joined by two young Brazenose men, named 
 Durnford and Henderson, engaged twelve guides, 
 and set out. At the Grands Mulets bad weather 
 detained them. M. Selligue passed a bad night, 
 "during which," says Durnford, "he had made 
 it out completely to his own satisfaction, that a 
 married man had a sacred and imperious call to 
 prudence and caution where his own life seemed 
 at all at stake : thus he had done enough for 
 glory in passing two nights in succession perched 
 on a crag, like an eagle, and that it now became 
 him, like a sensible man, to return to Geneva, 
 while return was yet possible." M. Selligue had 
 therefore to be left, and two of the guides were 
 left with him. The others went on, and got 
 quite near the top. Hamel, in fact, wrote two 
 notes to announce his arrival on the summit, 
 leaving a blank merely to insert the hour. They 
 were oblicjuely crossing a long snow slope, in 
 single file, but not roped together. The rest is 
 best told in Durnford's words. 
 
 "The snow suddenly gave way beneath our 
 feet, beginning at the head of the line, and 
 canied us all down the slope to our left. I was
 
 126 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 thrown instantly off my feet, but was still on my 
 knees and endeavouring to regain my footing 
 when, in a few seconds, the snow on our right, 
 which was of course above us, rushed into the 
 gap thus suddenly made, and completed the 
 catastrophe by burying us all at once in its mass 
 and hurrying us downwards towards two crevasses 
 about a furlong belov/ us, and nearly parallel to 
 the line of march. The accumulation of snow 
 instantly threw me backwards, and I was carried 
 down in spite of all my struggles. In less than 
 a minute I emerged, partly from my own exer- 
 tions, and partly because the velocity of the 
 falling mass had subsided from its own friction. . . . 
 At the moment of my emerging I was so far 
 from being alive to the danger of our situation, 
 that on seeing ray two companions at some dis- 
 tance below me, up to the waist in snow, and 
 sitting motionless and silent, a jest was rising to 
 my lips, till a second glance showed me that, 
 with the exception of Mathieu Balmat, they were 
 the only remnants of the party visible. Two 
 more, however, having quickly reappeared, I 
 Avas still inclined to treat the affair as a perplexing 
 though ludicrous delay, when Mathieu Ealmat 
 cried out that some of the party were lost, and 
 pointed to the crevasses, which had hitherto 
 escaped our notice, into which, he said, they had 
 fallen." 
 
 This should be clear, but readers not used to 
 mountains may need a word of further explana- 
 tion. They must picture the party traversing 
 the side of a steep hill, covered with deep snow. 
 The snow is lying on the top of ice. The ice.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 127 
 
 being on the incline, is not smooth, but slit, at 
 intervals, with crevasses, which are like ditches 
 or dongas, sometimes shallow, more often of 
 immense depth. The snow has started sliding 
 down hill, carrying the climbers with it. The 
 momentum has carried some of them across the 
 crevasse — but not all of them. By degrees 
 Dornford realised exactly what had happened. 
 " The three front guides, Pierre Carrier, Pierre 
 Balmat, and Auguste Tairraz, being where the 
 slope was somewhat steeper, had been carried 
 down with greater rapidity, and to a greater 
 distance, and had thus been hurried into the 
 crevasse, with an immense mass of snow upon 
 them, which rose nearly to the brink. Mathieu 
 Balmat, who was fourth in the line, being a man 
 of great muscular strength, as well as presence 
 of mind, had suddenly thrust his pole into the 
 firm snow beneath, when he felt himself going, 
 which certainly checked, in some measure, the 
 force of his fall. Our two hindermost guides 
 were also missing, but we were soon gladdened 
 by seeing them make their appearance, and 
 cheered them with loud and repeated hurrahs. 
 One of them, Julien Devouassoud, had been 
 carried into the crevasse, where it was very 
 narrow, and had been thrown with some violence 
 against the opposite brink. He contrived to 
 scramble out without assistance, at the expense 
 of a trifling cut on the chin. The other, Joseph- 
 M^rie Couttet, had been dragged out by his 
 companions, quite senseless, and nearly black 
 from the weight of the snow which had been 
 upon him."
 
 128 THi'^ STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 The leaders, however, had disappeared. The 
 party descended on to the snow that had rolled 
 into the crevasses in which they had been lost. 
 
 "Here we continued, above a quarter of an 
 hour, to make every exertion in our power for 
 the recovery of our poor comrades. After 
 thrusting the poles in to their full length, we 
 knelt down, and applied our mouth to the end, 
 in the fond hope that they might still be alive, 
 sheltered by some projection of the icy walls of 
 the crevasse ; but, alas, all was silent as the 
 grave, and we had too much reason to fear that 
 they were long since insensible, and probably at 
 a vast depth beneath the snow on which we 
 were standing. We could see no bottom to 
 the gulf on each side of the pile of snow on 
 which we stood ; the sides of the crevasse were 
 here, as in other places, solid ice of a cerulean 
 colour, and very beautiful to the eye. Two of 
 the guides, our two leaders, h.id followed us 
 mechanically to the spot, but could not be 
 prevailed upon to make any attempts to search 
 for the bodies." 
 
 The ascent was then naturally abandoned. 
 An official enquiry opened at Chamonix reported 
 that no one was to blame, though Couttet said 
 that the disaster was due to the obstinacy of Dr 
 Hamel, who insisted on making the ascent in 
 unsuitable weather. Knowledge of snowcraft, 
 however, being in those days in its infancy, he 
 could hardly be censured. The accident, how- 
 ever, had a curious sequel. J. D. Forbes, knowing 
 the rate at which the glacier moved, predicted 
 that the remains of the lost men 'vould be found
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 129 
 
 again in forty years, and the prediction was 
 fulfilled with singular exactness. On August 
 15th, 1861, Ambroise Simond of Chamonix dis- 
 covered portions of clothing and some human 
 remains near the lower extremity of the Glacier 
 des Bossons. In June 1863, a fragment of a 
 human body was seen protruding from the ice 
 in the same place ; and further relics, including a 
 skull, a crumpled book, a lantern frame, shoes, 
 gloves, ropes, and a hat, came to light in 1865. 
 Some of them are still preserved in the Annecy 
 Museum. 
 
 Curiously enough the accident was repeated, 
 in almost all its details, in the case of the 
 Arkwright accident in 1866. An avalanche 
 fell upon the party. " Couttet," says the Alpine 
 Journal, " saw what was coming, and, with the 
 servant, managed to get out of the way. Captain 
 Arkwright and his guides either remained immov- 
 able or tried to escape in the wrong direction : 
 they were overwhelmed by the avalanche, and no 
 trace of them was discernible by the survivors." 
 And on this occasion too the remains were 
 yielded up by the glacier at a later date. " A 
 pocket handkerchief," says the Alpine Journal, 
 " was intact, the coloured border scarcely faded, 
 and the marking in ink quite perfect. The 
 shirt had been torn to pieces, but two of the 
 studs and the collar stud were found intact in 
 the button-holes. There was a gold pencil-case 
 which would still open and shut, with lead 
 which would still mark. Most remarkable of 
 all was the watch-chain, made of solid gold 
 links, perfectly plain ; not a scratch was visible,
 
 130 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 and the gold was as clean as if it liad just been 
 rubbed up for wear." 
 
 Many more calamities have happened on the 
 same mountain. Mont Blanc has the longest 
 death-roll of all the Alpine summits. The 
 others, however, or such of them as need be 
 mentioned, will be more appropriately treated 
 in a chapter in which the attempt will be made 
 to enlighten those who do not understand what 
 are the various ways in which Alpine accidents 
 are liable to occur. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 A ROUGH classification of Alpine accidents is not 
 difficult to make. There are the accidents which 
 happen when the climber falls ; the accidents 
 which happen when something falls and hits 
 the climber ; and the accidents, not properly 
 so-called, which are due to exposure and ex- 
 haustion. The last class, about which there is 
 least to be said, may here be taken first. 
 
 One may, of course, be wealher-bound and 
 perish on a snow mountain just as people are 
 weather-bound and perish in the Arctic regions, 
 or even on the Yorkshire moors. As has 
 already been told, Jean-Antoine Carrel perished 
 thus upon the Matterhorn. Storms spring up 
 with great suddenness on that mountain, and 
 when they coat the steep rocks with ice, move- 
 ment may often be impossible until the weather 
 mends. Disasters of the kind are, however, 
 more frequent on Mont Blanc than anywhere
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 131 
 
 else in the Alps. It is an easy mountain and 
 not dangerous when ascended by the right 
 route, with proper precautions, and under 
 normal conditions. But the snowfields are 
 of vast extent. Blizzards, or " tourmentes," 
 as they are technically termed, may catch the 
 traveller who does not keep a watchful eye on 
 the barometer. He may, indeed, be able still 
 to keep moving while they blow; but he may 
 also lose his bearings, and so wander round 
 and round in a circle, like the travellers lost in 
 the Australian bush, until he can move no more. 
 Competent guides, indeed, may be trusted either 
 to foresee the coming of the blizzard, or to find a 
 way through it to one of the refuge huts, there 
 to wait until the weather clears. The danger 
 is when the guides are incompetent, and the 
 travellers are weak. 
 
 The worst and most famous calamity of the 
 kind happened in 1870. Three Americans, 
 Mr Randall, Mr J. Bean, and the Rev. J. 
 McCorkindale, met in the August of that year 
 at Chamonix. None of the three had had any 
 experience of mountaineering, and the weather 
 had been bad. Two Englishmen, who had made 
 the ascent, had had a narrow escape of their 
 lives in consequence. The Americans, however, 
 were not discouraged by what they heard, but 
 engaged three guides and five porters, and set 
 out to make the climb. They slept at the 
 Grands Mulcts, and were never again seen alive. 
 The weather became so violent that a search party 
 sent after them on September 7th could not even 
 reach the Grands Mulcts. Not until the 15th
 
 132 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 did the weather begin to improve. Then the 
 telescope revealed five black <lots near the Petits 
 JMulets. On the following day a second search 
 party of twenty-three men started. First they 
 found the bodies of Mr McCorkindale and two 
 of the porters lying about 750 feet below the 
 summit, and then they came upon the bodies of 
 Mr Bean and another porter, in a sitting posture, 
 the head of the former leaning on one hand, his 
 elbow resting on a knapsack. A notebook was 
 found in Mr Bean's pocket. The pathetic entries 
 tell us all that we know about the fatality : — 
 
 " Tuesday, September 6. Temperature 34 deg. 
 F., at 2 A.M. 1 have made the ascent of 
 Mont Blanc with ten persons — eight guides, Mr 
 McCorkindale and T^Ir Randall. We arrived 
 on the summit at half-past two. Immediately 
 after leaving it I was enveloped in clouds of 
 snow. We passed the night in a grotto exca- 
 vated out of the snow, affording very uncomfort- 
 able shelter, and I was ill all night. 
 
 " Mont Blanc, September 7. If anyone finds 
 this note-book, I beg that it may be sent to Mrs 
 H. M. Bean, Jonesborough, Tennessee, United 
 States of America. 
 
 " My dear Hessie, — We have been on Mont 
 Blanc for two days in a terrible snow-storm. 
 We have lost our way and are in a hole scooped 
 out of the snow, at a height of 15,000 feet. I 
 have no hope of descending. Perhaps this book 
 may be found and forwarded. . . . We have no 
 food ; my feet are already frozen, and I am ex- 
 hausted ; 1 have only strength to write a few 
 words. I die iu the faith of Jesus Christ, with
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 133 
 
 affectionate thoughts of my family ; my remem- 
 brances to all. My effects arc in part at the 
 Hotel Mont Blanc, and partly with me in two 
 portmanteaux. Send them to the Hotel Schwei- 
 zerhof at Geneva ; pay my bills at the hotel, and 
 Heaven will reward your kindness." 
 
 Lower down, in handwriting almost illegible : — 
 
 " Morning. Intense cold ; much snow, which 
 falls uninterruptedly ; guides restless." 
 
 That is all we know. There is only one ex- 
 planation of the tragedy — the incompetence of 
 the guides. A strong man like Melchoir Anderegg 
 would have stood out, and forbidden the ascent 
 until the weather lifted. 
 
 Very similar is the story of the death of 
 Richard Lewis Nettleship, Fellow and Tutor of 
 Balliol College, Oxford, in 1892. His guides 
 were Alfred Comte and Gaspard Simond. The 
 storm descended ; they lost their way, and after 
 wandering about for several hours, stopped, dug 
 a hole in the snow, and stayed in it all night. 
 The guides said that Nettleship was in good 
 spirits, and even sang to pass the hours. The 
 rest of the story is thus told : — 
 
 " The storm continued the whole of the night. 
 On the morning of the 15th it was still snowing 
 hard, and all tracks were obliterated. The 
 guides advised Mr Nettleship to remain where 
 he was, on the chance of a change of weather, 
 but Mr Nettleship urged that it was idle to re- 
 main there and die like coivards, and that they 
 must make an effort to get away. He therefore 
 started, the guides following him. They pro- 
 ceeded some little distance, when Mr Nettleship
 
 134 THE STOKY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 stumbled, and became unsteady. The guides 
 offered him wine and brandy, which he refused. 
 He then cried out, and fell forward, uttering 
 some words in English, after which he took each 
 guide by the hand, bade them good-bye, closed 
 his eyes, and expired. 
 
 "The guides remained with him for a short 
 time, and then placing his ice-axe upright in the 
 snow to mark the place where he lay, they left 
 him. After a short time the weather cleared a 
 little, the guides caught sight of the Vallot hut, 
 made for it, and stayed there all the night of 
 Tuesday the 25th. 
 
 '• Friday the 26th was fine, and the guides re- 
 turned to the Dome, where the body lay. They 
 then descended to the Grands Mulets, whence 
 Alfred Comte brought the news to Chamonix, 
 Simond remaining at the Grands Mulets." 
 
 Hardly different is the story of the death of 
 Professor Fedchenko by the side of the Glacier 
 du Tacul in 1873, when caught in a storm with 
 Joseph Payot: "They were soon wet to the 
 skin, and half frozen by the cold wind. Mr 
 Fedchenko was already tired, and the cold and 
 wet told heavily upon him. . . . About 9 p.m. 
 they reached the few scattered rocks which 
 compose the moraine known as La Noire — a 
 moraine totally insufficient in size to afford any 
 protection against the weather. . . . They re- 
 mained in this dreadful position, exposed, without 
 any shelter, to wind, rain and snow, from 9 P.M. 
 to 2 A.M. . . . There was no moon, and the night 
 was dark with clouds and bad weather. Prosper 
 Payot, who was the strongest of the party, re-
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 135 
 
 mained upon his feet all the time, moving about, 
 and as long as he could he kept the traveller 
 and his brother upon their feet; but at length 
 exhaustion became supreme. The traveller sank 
 upon the rock, and despite every eflFort Prosper 
 could make, fell into that fatal sleep of frozen 
 exhaustion from which there is no waking. He 
 had long been in this condition, though still 
 breathing, and Prosper had already had to strike, 
 kick, and shake his brother to prevent him from 
 falling asleep, when the younger brother came to 
 the conclusion that the only chance of saving 
 any life besides his own — perhaps his own also 
 — was to attempt to walk on. He got his 
 brother into motion with infinite difficulty. . . . 
 They both reached the Montanvert in a very 
 exhausted and pitiable condition." 
 
 The lesson of the two latter stories is clear. 
 The amateurs, in each case, were not in good 
 enough health and training to stand any excep- 
 tional exposure. Where weather is changeable 
 and distances are long, no one should venture 
 who is not very sure of his physical power of 
 resistance. 
 
 Now we will turn to the accidents caused by 
 avalanches, first explaining, to those who do not 
 know, exactly what an avalanche is. 
 
 Perhaps the best way to realise an avalanche 
 is to picture a quantity of snow lying on the 
 sloping roof of a house. It is obvious that if 
 the roof be sufficiently steep, the snow will be 
 in unstable equilibrium. A trifling disturbance 
 may detach it from its position, and it will be 
 bad for anyone who happens to be passing below
 
 136 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 when it falls into the street. Imagiue, in the 
 second place, that, while the snow lies on the 
 roof of the house, a number of men start to 
 walk across it. It is obvious that the disturbance 
 caused by their movements may suffice to set it 
 sliding. It is also obvious that, if the snow be 
 deep enough, it will sweep them with it. They 
 will fall into the street, and be buried there by 
 the snow that comes down after them. But 
 snow on the side of a hill may start sliding in 
 the same way, and for the same reasons as snow 
 on the roof of a house. It is particularly 
 liable to slide if it is lying, not on a rock, but 
 on a slope of ice. If the slope of ice terminates, 
 as it often does, in a crevassed glacier, the 
 climbers may be swept into a crevasse and buried 
 there. Even if it terminates, as it sometimes 
 does, in a soft bed of snow, the danger of being 
 buried and smothered still remains, while there 
 is always the additional danger of being knocked 
 against something hard on the way down. 
 
 The mountaineer skilled in snowcraft is 
 supposed to know two things. He should know 
 where avalanches are apt to fall, and should avoid 
 getting in their way. He should also know, 
 by looking at a snow slope, whether the passage 
 across it is likely to set the snow avalanching. 
 The accidents happen either because mistakes 
 are made, or because people deliberately take 
 risks in preference to turning back. A mistake 
 of the kind accounted for a remarkable accident 
 that befell Professor T} ndall. 
 
 The place was the Piz Morteratsch in the 
 Engadine, and the time was July 1864. With
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 137 
 
 the Professor were Messrs Hutchinson and Lee 
 Warner, and the guides Jenni and Walter. 
 Jenui was the leading light of Pontresina, and 
 it seems that he wanted to " show off." The 
 trouble occurred on the way down, when Jenni 
 insisted upon descending a gully of ice with snow 
 resting upon it. He led off, therefore, followed 
 by Tyndall, Hutchinson and Lee Warner, with 
 Walter coming last, ready to check on the 
 instant any false step that Mr Lee Warner, the 
 only inexperienced member of the party, might 
 make. They were all roped together, so that 
 if anyone fell, the others might hold him up. 
 
 After a few steps, Jenni began to see that the 
 slope was less safe than he had supposed. He 
 stopped, and turned round to speak a word of 
 warning to the three men above him. 
 
 "Keep carefully in the steps, gentlemen," he 
 said. " A false step here might start an 
 avalanche." 
 
 As he spoke the false step was made. There 
 was the sound of a fall and a rush, and Professor 
 Tyndall saw his friends and their guide, all 
 apparently entangled, whirled past him. He 
 planted himself to resist the shock, but it was 
 irresistible ; he too was torn from his foothold, 
 and Jenni followed him, and all five found them- 
 selves riding downwards, with uncontrollable 
 speed, on the back of an avalanche, which a 
 single slip had started. 
 
 The counsel given in such circumstances is 
 
 to turn on your face, and grind the point of your 
 
 axe or alpenstock through the moving snow 
 
 into the ice beneath. It is the only way of 
 
 I
 
 138 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 putting on the brake. But it seldom avails 
 much, and in this case it seemed to avail 
 nothing. 
 
 "No time," writes Professor Tyndall, "was 
 allowed for the brake's action ; for I had held 
 it firmly thus for a few seconds only, when I 
 came into collision with some obstacle and was 
 rudely tossed through the air, Jenni at the same 
 time being shot down upon me. Both of us here 
 lost our batons. We had been carried over a 
 crevasse, had hit its lower edge, and, instead of 
 dropping into it, were pitched by our great 
 velocity beyond it. I was quite bewildered for a 
 moment, but immediately righted myself, and 
 could see the men in front of me half buried 
 in the snow, and jolted from side to side by 
 the ruts among which we were passing." 
 
 Presently a second crevasse was reached. 
 Jenni knew that it was there, and did a brave 
 thing. He deliberately threw himself into the 
 chasm, thinking that the strain thus put upon 
 the rope would stop the motion. But though he 
 was over a hundred and eighty pounds in weight, 
 he was violently jerked out of the fissure, and 
 almost squeezed to death by the pressure of the 
 rope. 
 
 And so they continued to slide on. Below 
 them was a long slope, leading directly down- 
 wards to a brow where the glacier fell precipit- 
 ately ; and at the base of the declivity the ice was 
 cut by a series of profound chasms, where they 
 must fall, and where the tail of the avalanche 
 must cover them up for ever. 
 
 The three foremost men rode upon the fore-
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 139 
 
 head of the avalanche, and were at times almost 
 hidden by the snow ; but behind, the sliding 
 layer was not so thick, and Jenni strove with 
 desperate energy to arrest his progress. 
 
 "Halt, Herr Jesus, halt," he shouted, as again 
 and again he drove his heels into the firmer 
 surface beneath. 
 
 For the rest we must quote Professor Tyndall's 
 actual words : — 
 
 "Looking in advance I noticed that the slope 
 for a short distance became less steep, and then fell 
 as before. Now or never we must be brought to 
 rest. The speed visibly slackened, and I thought 
 we were saved. But the momentum had been 
 too great ; the avalanche crossed the brow, and 
 in part regained its motion. Here Hutchinson 
 threw his arm round his friend, all hope being 
 extinguished, while I grasped my belt, and 
 struggled to free myself. Finding this difficult 
 from the tossing, I suddenly resumed the strain 
 upon the rope. Destiny had so related the 
 downward impetus to Jenni's pull as to give the 
 latter a slight advantage, and the whole question 
 was whether the opposing force would have 
 time to act. This was also arranged in our 
 favour, for we came to rest so near the brow 
 that two or three seconds of our average motion 
 of descent must have carried us over. Had this 
 occurred, we should have fallen into the chasm 
 and been covered up by the tail of the avalanche. 
 Hutchinson emerged from the snow with his 
 forehead bleeding, but the wound was superficial ; 
 Jenni had a bit of flesh removed from his hand 
 by collision against a stone ; the pressure of the
 
 140 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 
 
 rope had left black welts on my arm, and we 
 all experienced a tingling sensation over the 
 liands, like that produced by incipient frost-bite, 
 which continued for several days. I found a 
 portion of my watch-chain hanging round my 
 neck, another portion in my pocket ; the watch 
 was gone." 
 
 Here the great danger was from the crevasses 
 at the bottom of the slope. In the case of an 
 avalanche accident hardly less famous on the 
 Haut de Cry, the danger was rather from the 
 weight and vohime of the snow. In this accident 
 Tyndall's favourite guide, Bennen, perished. 
 
 Once more it was a case of crossing a gully 
 full of snow, 150 feet broad at the top, and 400 
 or 500 at the bottom. The snow, however, was 
 more than waist deep, and Bennen was nervous, 
 though he was obliged to defer to the view of 
 the local guides that the snow was safe. The 
 story was told by Mr Gossett in the Alj)me 
 Journal. 
 
 " Bennen advanced ; he had made but a few 
 steps when we heard a deep cutting sound. The 
 snowfield split in two about fourteen or fifteen 
 feet above us. The cleft was at first quite narrow, 
 not more than an inch broad. An awful silence 
 ensued ; it lasted but a few seconds, and then it 
 was broken by Bennen's voice, ' Wir sind alia 
 verloren.' His words were slow and solemn, 
 and those who knew him felt what they really 
 meant when spoken by such a man as Bennen. 
 They were his last words. I drove my alpen- 
 stock into the snow, and brought the weight of 
 my body to bear on it. I then waited. It was
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 141 
 
 an awful moment of suspense. I turned my head 
 towards Bennen to see whether he had done the 
 same thing. To my astonishment I saw him 
 turn round, face the valley, and stretch out both 
 arms. The gi'ound on which we stood began to 
 move slowly, and I felt the utter helplessness of 
 my alpenstock. I soon sank up to my shoulders, 
 and began descending backwards. . . . Before 
 long I was covered up with snow, and in utter 
 darkness. I was suffocating, when with a jerk 
 T suddenly came to the surface again. To prevent 
 myself sinking again I made use of my arms 
 much in the same way as Avhen swimming in a 
 standing position. At last I noticed that I was 
 moving slower ; then I saw the pieces of snow in 
 front of me stop at some yards' distance ; then 
 the snow straight before me stopped." 
 
 But the snow behind pressed on and buried 
 Mr Gossett. So intense was the pressure that 
 he could not move, and he began to fear that it 
 would be impossible to extricate himself. Then, 
 while vainly trying to move his arms, he suddenly 
 became aware that his hands, as far as the wrist, 
 had the faculty of motion. The cheering con- 
 clusion was that they must be above the snow. So 
 Mr Gossett struggled on. At last he saw a faint 
 glimmer of light. The crust above his head was 
 getting thinner, and let a little air pass ; but he 
 could no longer reach it with his hands. The 
 idea struck him that he might pierce it with his 
 breath. He tried, and after several efforts he 
 succeeded. Then he shouted for help, and one 
 of his guides, who had escaped uninjured, came 
 and extricated him. The snow had to be cut
 
 142 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 with the axe down to his feet before he could be 
 pulled out. Then he found that his travelling 
 companion, M. Boissonet, was dead, and that no 
 trace of Bennen was to be found. Afterwards, 
 however, the body was recovered. 
 
 "The Cur^ of Ardon," Mr Gossett wrote to 
 Professor Tyndall, "informed me that poor 
 Bennen was found eight feet under the snow, 
 in a horizontal position, the head facing the 
 valley of the Luzerne." 
 
 So much for the avalanches started by the 
 climbers themselves. AVe have next to consider 
 the case of avalanches falling when climbers are 
 in their way. 
 
 Sometimes climbers get in the way of avalanches 
 through ignorance. Mr Girdlestone relates how 
 he did this when he climbed without guides. An 
 avalanche surprised him while he was having 
 lunch in a gully somewhere above Macugnaga, but 
 happily he saw it coming, and was able to get 
 out of the way in time. Sometimes, again, the 
 only way to the top of a mountain lies in the 
 known track of avalanches. This is notably the case 
 \vith the routes up Monte Rosa from Macugnaga, 
 and up the Dom from Saas. In such cases the 
 only thing to do if one makes the ascent at all, 
 is to take the risk, and minimise it by starting 
 early, before the heat of the sun has deranged 
 the equilibrium of the snow. The danger, how- 
 ever, is always grave, and the risk by no means 
 to be recommended. Many fatal accidents have 
 happened to those who have incurred it, though 
 in the case of the most thrilling of all avalanche 
 stories there was no casualty.
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 143 
 
 The hero of the adventure referre<l to was Mr 
 F. F. Tuckett, who was climbing on the Eiger in 
 the Oberland. He was on the Eiger with Messrs 
 Whitwell and J. H. Fox, and the guides Christian 
 and Ulrich Lauener. Their position needs to be 
 explained with some care. 
 
 The lower part of the glacier, it must be 
 observed, is a slope of only moderate inclination ; 
 the upper part is what is technically termed an 
 ice-fall. An ice-fall, of course, is to a glacier 
 what a water-fall is to a river. The glacier, 
 pushing its way down a steep incline, is not 
 merely crevassed, but is broken up into disorderly 
 blocks of very unstable equilibrium. Mr Tuckett 
 and his party were ascending the glacier towards 
 the ice-fall, but were still at some distance 
 below it. The weather had been bad, and there 
 had recently been a heavy snow-fall. Even the 
 lower portion of the glacier was completely 
 covered with snow. Above the ice-fall the snow 
 was far deeper. Its weight pressed against the 
 ice-fall, from which huge blocks of snow and ice 
 are apt to break away, and come careering down 
 the glacier at any time. As a rule, however, 
 they only career down the middle of it, so that 
 Mr Tuckett, keeping fairly near one of the edges, 
 supposed himself to be secure. The rope, for 
 whatever reason, was not being used. 
 
 All of a sudden, a crack was heard high up 
 above the climbers' heads, and every eye was 
 turned upon the ice-clifF from which it came. A 
 large mass of serac was seen to break away, 
 mingle'^] with a still larger contingent of snow 
 from the slopes above ; and the whole mass slid
 
 1 U THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 down like a cataract, filling the couloir to its 
 brim, and dashing in clouds of frozen spray over 
 the rocky ridges in its path, towards the party. 
 
 For a moment they did not realise that they 
 were in its track. But then the knowledge 
 flashed upon them all, and they shouted to each 
 other, " Run for your lives," and struggled 
 desperately through the deep soft snow to reach 
 the rocks of the Rothstock, yet with their faces 
 turned to watch the swift oncoming of the foe. 
 
 Let Mr Tuckett himself describe that thrilling 
 race for life. 
 
 "I remember," he writes, "being struck with 
 the idea that it seemed as though, sure of its 
 prey, it wished to play with us for a while, at 
 one moment letting us imagine that we had 
 gained upon it, and were getting beyond the 
 line of its fire ; and the next, with mere wanton- 
 ness of vindictive power, suddenly rolling out on 
 its right a vast volume of grinding blocks and 
 whirling snow, as though to show that it could 
 outflank us at any moment if it chose. 
 
 " Nearer and nearer it came, its front like a 
 mighty wave about to break. Now it has 
 traversed the whole width of the glacier above 
 us, taking a somewhat diagonal direction ; and 
 now — run, oh, run, if ever you did, for here it 
 comes straight at us, swift, deadly, and implac- 
 able. The next instant we saw no more ; a wild 
 confusion of whirling snow and fragments of 
 ice — a frozen cloud — swept over us, entirely 
 concealing us from one another, and still we were 
 untouched — at least I knew that I was — and 
 still we ran. Another half second an<i the mist
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 145 
 
 had passed, and there lay the body of the monster, 
 whose head was still careering at lightning speed 
 far below us, motionless, rigid, and harmless." 
 
 The danger was over, and the party examined 
 the avalanche at their leisure. It had a length 
 of 3300 feet, and an average depth of five feet. 
 That is to say, its bulk was 611,000 cubic yards, 
 and its weight, on a moderate computation, 
 about 450,000 tons. 
 
 Avalanches of this character are rare. As a 
 rule the ice-fall breaks away in bits. Sometimes 
 there falls a block like a Saratoga trunk ; some- 
 times a pyramid of blocks as large as a house 
 collapses. One sees the Ehone glacier thus disin- 
 tegrating as one walks up the road beside it ] 
 at Arolla one can see an ice-fall ending on the 
 edge of a cliflF over which the blocks of ice 
 tumble. In such cases there is no danger for 
 the spectator. The danger occurs when the 
 climber has to traverse a slope directly in their 
 track. The classical story of the kind is in Mr 
 Whymper's " Scrambles in the Alps." He and 
 the late A. W. Moore, with Croz and Christian 
 Aimer, were making the first passage of the 
 Morning Pass from Zinal to Zermatt, and had 
 to cut their way over an ice slope thus threatened. 
 Early in the morning the place is reasonably 
 safe ; but they reached it after the sun had 
 struck the seracs, and they could see that the 
 buttresses were liable to descend upon them at 
 any moment. The slope took twenty minutes 
 to cross. 
 
 " I am not ashamed to confess," wrote Moore 
 in his journal, " that during the whole time we
 
 146 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 were crossing the slope my heart was in my 
 mouth." And Mr Whymper says : — 
 
 "It was not necessary to admonish Croz to 
 be quick. He was fully as alive to the risk as 
 any of the others. He told me afterwards that 
 the place was not only the most dangerous he 
 had ever crossed, but that no consideration what- 
 ever would induce him to cross it again. Manfully 
 did he exert himself to escape from the impending 
 destruction. His head bent down to his work, 
 never turned to the right or to the left. One, 
 two, three went his axe, and then he stepped 
 on to the spot where he had been cutting. How 
 painfully insecure should we have considered 
 those steps at any other time. But now we 
 thought of nothing but the rocks in front, and 
 of the hideous seracs, lurching over above us, 
 apparently in the very act of falling." 
 
 The rocks were reached, and the party sat 
 down to rest. Then : — 
 
 "Without a preliminary warning sound one 
 of the largest — as high as the Monument at 
 London Bridge — ^fell upon the slope below. The 
 stately mass heeled over as if upon a hinge 
 (holding together until it bent thirty degrees 
 forward), then it crushed out its base, and, rent 
 into a thousand fragments, plunged vertically 
 down upon the slope that we had crossed. Every 
 atom of our track that was in its course was 
 obliterated ; all the new snow was swept away, 
 and a broad sheet of smooth, glassy ice showed 
 the resistless force with which it had fallen." 
 
 Finally, before leaving the subject of avalanches, 
 we may recall the story of the avalanche that
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 147 
 
 swept away two Austrian climbers, Herren 
 Lammer and Lorria, published in the Saint 
 Mm-itz Post, in January 1888. 
 
 Without guides, they were attempting an 
 ascent of the Matterhorn by a difficult and 
 unusual route. Presently they found themselves 
 in such a position that they were absolutely 
 obliged to cross a gully of ice down which they 
 could see small avalanches sweeping at intervals 
 much in the same way in which soot will sweep 
 down a dirty chimney. They simply had to 
 take their chance of dodging these avalanches, 
 and the chances were against them. The snow 
 knocked them off their feet, and dashed them 
 down on to the Tiefenmatten Glacier, nearly 800 
 feet below. Herr Lorria was unconscious, and 
 did not recover consciousness for three weeks. 
 Herr Lammer, by a miracle, had escaped with 
 bruises, and a badly sprained ankle. He pulled 
 his friend out of the way of danger, placed his 
 own coat over him, and set out to seek help. 
 
 He could not stand, but had to creep all the 
 way upon his hands and knees. He got to the 
 Stockje hut, but found no one there, so had to 
 crawl on to the StafFel Alp. It was a little 
 after five in the afternoon when he started, 
 and it was three o'clock in the morning when 
 he arrived. The people at the Staffel Alp 
 refused to venture on the glacier, but sent a 
 message to Zermatt, whence a search party set 
 out at about five. Herr Lammer had lost 
 consciousness before they came ; but when he 
 felt the faintness coming on, his last act was 
 to write on a piece of paper the precise indication
 
 148 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 of his friend's position. The clue was followed, 
 and Herr Lorria was found. For twenty days 
 he hovered between life and death, and though 
 he recovered, it is said that he never ceased to 
 leel the effects of his terrible fall. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 It remains to speak of the accidents that happen 
 when the climber falls without being first hit by 
 anything in the way of an avalanche or a falling 
 boulder. On a glacier he may fall into a cre- 
 vasse ; on an arete he may fall through a cornice ; 
 on rocks he may fall because he is unable to 
 hold on. 
 
 It has been explained that a glacier flows down 
 a valley, under the same conditions, mutatis 
 mutandis, as a river. Where the bed is very 
 steep, the river makes a water-fall, and the glacier 
 makes an ice-fall. Where the bed is moderately 
 steep or uneven, the surface of the glacier cracks, 
 and the cracks are what are called crevasses. 
 Sonae crevasses are shallow ; others are very deep. 
 Some of them are so narrow that you can step 
 over them ; others are several yards across. 
 More particularly on the upper parts of glaciers, 
 recently fallen snow is apt to conceal the mouths 
 of crevasses. The glacier is then said to be 
 masked. Sometimes the snow bridge is strong 
 enough to bear a man's weight. Sometimes it 
 breaks under his feet and lets him through. 
 
 In the old days, those who had to cross glaciers 
 used merely to sound the snow in front of them
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 149 
 
 with poles or alpenstocks. In this way they sought 
 to discover the hidden crevasses before they came 
 to them. The device was empirical and did not 
 always answer. The modern scientific plan is to 
 use the rope. At least three people are roped 
 together, and they proceed in single file, keeping 
 the rope taut between them. Then, if one man 
 falls into a crevasse, he cannot fall far, but can be 
 hauled out again by the others. Of course, if the 
 direction of the crevasses is mistaken, and the 
 party proceeds to walk along them instead of 
 crossing them, they will be unable to help each 
 other, but will all fall in together. This has 
 been known to happen, but it does not happe)i 
 often. Competent guides are acquainted with 
 the general lie of the crevasses, or can infer it 
 from the appearance of the snow. The real 
 danger is for those who are so rash as to cross 
 crevassed glaciers by themselves. Smugglers 
 often do this, and they often do it with impunity, 
 but accidents happen from time to time. A 
 typical story is told of a porter who, when his 
 engagement was concluded, set out to go home 
 alone over the Lotschen Pass. A snow bridge 
 broke and he fell into a crevasse, where only his 
 knapsack saved him from breaking his neck. 
 He lay on his back, wedged in the ice in such a 
 way tliat he could not move, and it was by the 
 merest chance that he was discovered in time, 
 and rescued by a party journeying in the same 
 direction. 
 
 A word has already been said about cornices, 
 but it may be better to repeat the explanation. 
 They are great overhanging eaves of snow, which
 
 150 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 
 
 project on one side or the other of a ridge, and 
 are due to the action of the wind. Occasionally 
 the cornice is strong enough to bear the weight of 
 several men, as happened when Jean-Andre De 
 Luc settled down on a cornice to admire the 
 view. At other times it gives way. The rule 
 is, therefore, not to tread on cornices, but, of 
 course, it is not always easy from above to know 
 exactly where the mountain ends and the cornice 
 begins. More than once climbers have walked 
 on cornices by mistake, with fatal results. 
 
 The mountain which is most famous for its 
 cornices is the Lyskamn. It is very heavily 
 corniced, and the way to the top lies along the 
 snow ridge from which the cornice is blown out. 
 Three terrible accidents, resembling each other 
 in almost every essential detail, occurred there in 
 1869, in 1877, and in 1896. The Alpine Journal 
 reference to the 1877 accident may be quoted 
 as an example of all accidents of the kind. 
 
 "Messrs William Arnold Lewis, and Noel H. 
 Patterson, with Niklaus, Johann, and Peter 
 Joseph Knubel, left the Riffelhaus at 2 a.m. to 
 make the ascent of the Lyskamn. As they did 
 not return that ni^ht, Mr J. A. Carfrae, accom- 
 panied by Peter Knubel, Joseph Imboden, and 
 J. J. Truflfer, started the following morning at 
 6.30 in search. They followed the tracks of Mr 
 Lewis' party to the foot of the arete leading 
 down from the summit of the mountain towards 
 the Lysjoch, and there found two knapsacks 
 which had been left by them at this spot on the 
 preceding day before they began the final climb. 
 This circumstance caused them at once to fear
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 151 
 
 that a fatal accident had occurred, and after 
 skirting the lower slopes on the Italian side for 
 nearly an hour, they reached a point from which 
 they saw the whole of the party lying upon the 
 snow at some distance beneath them. Being 
 unable to reach the bodies from this point they 
 retraced their steps, and after making a slight 
 detour arrived at the spot. The cause of the 
 accident was at once apparent : a snow cornice 
 on the arete about 500 feet below the summit of 
 the mountain had given way under the weight 
 of the party, and they had fallen some 1200 feet 
 on to the glacier beneath. The whole of the 
 party had received such injuries that death must 
 have been instantaneous in every case. . . . 
 
 " The cornice had broken away in two places, 
 leaving some ten feet in the middle still adhering 
 to the mountain. The length of the parts 
 which broke away was perhaps forty feet on 
 each side of the remaining portion. . . . The 
 bodies, from the nature of the injuries they had 
 received, had evidently fallen upon their heads 
 on the rocks, and then, in one great bound, 
 had reached almost the spot where they were 
 found." 
 
 Occasionally, however, parties have been saved 
 in spite of the breaking of cornices. The great 
 story of the kind is one of which Ulrich Aimer, 
 son of Christian Aimer, is the hero. Ulrich was 
 not on the cornice when it broke, but he was 
 securely roped to those who were — three in 
 number, the guide Brantschen, and two amateurs. 
 He had only a fraction of a second in which to 
 make up his mind bow to act to save himself and
 
 152 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 the others. As quick as lightning he leapt back, 
 planted his axe in the snow, and held the weight 
 of the entire party, until they could get to work 
 with their axes and climb up again on to the 
 ridge. It was a marvellous feat of strength, as 
 well as a marvellous example of presence of mind 
 and quick resource. It is recorded that the 
 climbers testified their gratitude and admiriition 
 by presenting Ulrich with a cow. 
 
 A similar incident occurred, in 1879, on the 
 Piz Palu, in the Engadine. The story may be 
 quoted from Dr Ludwig's "Pontresina and its 
 Neighbourhood." 
 
 " Mr W. and his sister-in-law, Mrs W., with 
 the two veteran guides, Hans and Christian 
 Grass, had ascended the highest summit, and 
 were on their return ; Christian Grass leading, 
 then Mr W., Mrs W., and last, Hans Grass. 
 There was a thick fog. The first three of the 
 party stepped on to the cornice ; it gave way 
 suddenly, and all four would have been dashed 
 down the face of the ice wall, which there falls 
 sheer some 2000 feet, had not Hans Grass had 
 the presence of mind, and the bodily activity 
 and strength, to spring at once to the opposite 
 side of the ridge and plant his feet firmly in the 
 snow. Fortunately Mr W. had not lost his axe ; 
 he gave it to Christian Grass, who in this a-wful 
 situation untied himself from the rope, and cut 
 his way on to the ridge, where his brother and 
 he, joining forces, were able to bring Mr and Mrs 
 W. to safety." 
 
 As regards the accidents that result from falls 
 on rock mountain, there is little to be said that is
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING, 153 
 
 not obvious. One can fall in the Dolomites for 
 just the same reasons for which one might fall 
 when trying to climb up the cliff at Dover. The 
 main difference is that in the Alps the distances 
 are longer, and that climbers may consequently 
 come to difficulties requiring all their strength 
 and energy at times when they are worn out 
 with fatigue. A muscle refuses to obey the call 
 upon it, and a fall is the result. Otherwise such 
 falls are the outcome of foolhardiness or of care- 
 lessness. One uses a foothold or handhold with- 
 out first testing it, and it gives way. Or one 
 gets into difficulties, and cannot find a way out 
 of them. The stories are numerous. In the 
 Austrian Alps, where there is a good deal of 
 guideless climbing by amateurs, one hears a fresh 
 story of the kind at least once a week throughout 
 the season. The Whymper accident on the 
 Matterhorn was an accident of the sort. So was 
 the accident in which Owen Jones perished on 
 the Dent Blanche. 
 
 There is one passage on the Dent Blanche, now 
 generally avoided, which long had a very evil 
 repute. It is called Lochmatter's corner, because 
 the guide, Lochmatter, with his son and a Mr 
 Gabbett, fell there. ISfothing is really known 
 about the accident, as the entire party was lost ; 
 but as the elder Lochmatter was a seventeen 
 stone man, the presumption is that he fell, drag- 
 ging the others, to whom he was roped, down with 
 him. A description of the Mauvais Pas, taken 
 from " La Suisse Inconnue," may be made useful 
 as showing what manner of difficulties rock 
 climbers undertake to cope with. 
 K
 
 154 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 "Here," says the author, "we must get round 
 past a perpendicular ledge by creeping out on an 
 overhanging rock, and then turning sharp round, 
 with heads and arm on one side of the rock, 
 while the legs are still on the other ; then we 
 must at once cling to a hardly visible fissure, 
 and draw round the rest of the body, gently and 
 cautiously, little by little, and hang there by the 
 points of our fingers until our toes find their way 
 to a second fissure lower down. I made this 
 passage," he adds, " like a bale of goods at the 
 end of a rope, without being conscious of the 
 danger, and I really do not know how I escaped 
 in safety." 
 
 From such precarious places someone must 
 inevitably fall from time to time. There are 
 many sad stories of such falls, more particularly 
 in the Dolomites. The fall of Norman Neruda 
 was one very tragic case. The stories, however, 
 necessarily present but little diversity of incident, 
 and this branch of the subject may therefore be 
 left. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 We have spoken of Alpine climbing as a means 
 of scientific study and as a sport. It remains to 
 speak of Alpine climbing as a profession. For 
 the sport has its "professionals," just as have 
 cricket, and football, and golf. The amateur 
 may live to climb, but the guide must climb to 
 live ; and it is not open to any man who likes to 
 call himself a guide, any more than it is open to 
 any man who likes to set up as a doctor, or a
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 155 
 
 dental surgeon. The calling, just like the pro- 
 fessions called "learned," has its guilds, its rules, 
 its examinations, and its diplomas. 
 
 Guides of a sort have, as we have seen, existed 
 from the earliest days of mountaineering. That 
 is to say, the local men who knew the mountain 
 paths could always be hired to place their know- 
 ledge and experience at the disposition of the 
 traveller. But these men were by no means 
 guides in the modern sense of the word. They 
 always had some other trade. They were goat- 
 herds, or crystal seekers, or chamois hunters, or 
 even smugglers, glad to earn a little additional 
 money by guiding the rare travellers who came 
 among them. By degrees the best men among 
 them learnt from the travellers to take an interest 
 in mountaineering, and began to explore the 
 mountains on their own account. It was a great 
 step forward when De Saussure offered his money 
 prize to the first man who should climb Mont 
 Blanc, and promised to pay the wages of any 
 who tried but failed. The offer, as has been 
 shown, brought out Jacques Balmat, who may 
 be reckoned the first of the professional guides. 
 He began by climbing the mountain in response 
 to the challenge of the great geologist, and he 
 ended by climbing it as the professional attendant 
 of tourists. Many of his contemporaries did the 
 same — such men as the Couttots, for example. 
 So far as Chamonix is concerned, their careers 
 mark the beginning of the new profession. Some 
 of them were taken far afield by De Saussure — 
 to Grindelwald, to Zermatt, to Macugnaga. 
 
 With the great influx of tourists that began
 
 156 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 after the Napoleonic wars, the demand for the 
 services of guides naturally increased. First at 
 Chamonix, and afterwards elsewhere, men found 
 that there was a very good living to be made 
 out of the business of Alpine guide ; and tliey 
 also began to see the advantage of forming 
 themselves into a close corporation from which 
 unqualified men could be excluded, and in which 
 codes of rules could be enforced, under State 
 direction, for the advancement of the honour of 
 the calling. The Chamonix guides led the way, 
 their first code dating from 1821, though other 
 codes were substituted in 1851 and 1856. The 
 Bernese Oberland guides formed their organisa- 
 tion in 1856, and the Pontresina guides in 1861. 
 Each of the three organisations imposes tests of 
 competence and rules of conduct, so that the 
 young man who wants to be a guide must eo 
 through a course of study, no less than the young 
 man who aspires to be a solicitor or a physician. 
 Let us trace the career of such a one. 
 
 He is probably the son of a guide, for the 
 profession, not unnaturally, runs in families. As 
 a lad of ten or less, he begins to seek practice as 
 porter. He runs after you when he sees you 
 tramping up the valley, and proposes to carry 
 your knapsack or your camera. He will carry 
 it quite a long way for half a franc. He walks 
 with rather an awkward lumbering gait, but can 
 go on for ever so long without getting tired. 
 Enter into conversation with him and you will 
 hear that his father or his elder brother has 
 already taken him up some of the minor 
 mountains, and that he has fully made up his
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 157 
 
 mind to become a guide like them when he is 
 old enough. And so no doubt he will. But he 
 must first learn much and prove his fitness. 
 
 During the next few years he will naturally 
 get all the practice in climbing that he can If 
 he can get paid for carrying luggage, so much 
 the better; but he will often carry it for very 
 little, or even for nothing, for the sake of the 
 experience to be got by taking part in first class 
 expeditions under first class direction. At 
 eighteen he will make formal application for a 
 porter's licence, which he will duly get if there 
 is nothing against his character, and if he is able 
 easily to carry the prescribed load of fifty pounds. 
 His pay will be from seven to nine francs per 
 day of eight hours, with his food. 
 
 The position of a porter is very much like that 
 of an apprentice bound to a trade. He is under 
 the orders of a guide, takes no responsibilities, 
 and has to do what he is told. If a climber 
 chooses to employ him as a guide — as may some- 
 times happen in the case of the simpler ex- 
 cursions — he does so at his own risk, and with 
 his eyes open. The porter's licence, which he is 
 bound to present for inspection, shows that he is 
 a porter, and nothing more. Before a porter 
 may apply for a licence as guide he must wait 
 until he is twenty ; and must then pass an ex- 
 amination in snow-craft, ice-craft, the general 
 topography of the Alps, and the particular 
 topography of his own neighbourhood. There 
 are schools in which he can study these matters 
 in the winter, and special boards of examiners 
 are appointed in all the most important climbing
 
 158 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 centres. A delightful account of the examination 
 was given by Mrs Aubrey Le Blond in "My 
 Home in the Alps." One may take the liberty 
 of borrowing some examples of the questions 
 and the answers. These show that candidates 
 for the office of guide do not always, any more 
 than the candidates for other offices, know quite 
 everything that they ought to know. 
 
 Examiner. How do you know where the 
 North is 1 
 
 Candidate. By the sun being there. 
 
 Examiner. AVhat is Switzerland ? 
 
 Candidate. A kingdom. 
 
 Examiner. How would you cross the crevasse 
 often found between a glacier and a moraine ? 
 
 Candidate. By stepping over. 
 
 Examiner. But if it is very wide ? 
 
 Candidate. Build a bridge across. 
 
 Examiner. I^onsense. 
 
 Candidate. Go home again. 
 
 Examiner. Never. Cut steps, of course. 
 Now tell me what you would do if a traveller 
 who was with you was very cold and tired, and 
 wanted to go to sleep on a glacier. 
 
 Candidate. I would tell him not to. 
 
 Examiner. But if he insisted ? 
 
 Candidate. Then I would beat him. 
 
 These, we may take it, were the answers of an 
 unsuccessful candidate. He seems to have been 
 quite exceptionally dense. Our business, how- 
 ever, is not with him, but with the candidate 
 who satisfies the examiners, and gets his licence. 
 
 Such a one immediately becomes a member of 
 the close corporation, bound by its rules, and
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 159 
 
 entitled to its privileges. The rules are all set 
 forth in a little book that is presented to him — a 
 book which also contains a certain number of 
 blank pages on which his employers may, from 
 time to time, write their opinion, whether favour- 
 able or unfavourable, of his conduct or abilities. 
 He may be fined, and in extreme cases may lose 
 his licence, as a punishment for drunkenness or 
 serious misbehaviour of any kind. 
 
 Such cases, however, are happily rare, though 
 some climbers have found it expedient to guard 
 against the remote danger of drunkenness by 
 leaving the brandy bottle at home, and only 
 taking a small quantity of spirits in their own 
 flask for use in case of emergencies. A friend of 
 the present writer who omitted the precaution 
 once found himself with a guide who first got 
 scared and then got drunk on the top of the 
 Dent Blanche. But that was a very exceptional 
 occurrence. On the whole, the Alpine guides are 
 an admirable body of men — admirable for their 
 temperance, their courage, their readiness of 
 resource, and their great physical strength. 
 
 Some stories of the courage and resource of 
 guides have been told in the chapter on accidents. 
 Mrs Aubrey Le Blond has preserved another 
 that must not be forgotten. 
 
 Mr Horace Walker, sometime President of the 
 Alpine Club, was with Peter Anderegg, some- 
 where in the Engadine. Roped together, they 
 were cutting steps up an ice slope, Peter leading. 
 They came to a point where a huge boulder was 
 embedded in the ice. Imagining it to be firmly 
 fixed, Peter trod on it. To his consternation it
 
 IGO THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 began to move. It came straight for Mr Walker, 
 who, standing in the steps cut for him, could not 
 possibly get out of the way. He thought nothing 
 could possibly save him. But Peter met the 
 emergency by a wonderful feat of strength. In 
 an instant he shifted himself back into the ice 
 step he had just quitted. Then, with a mighty 
 effort, he jerked Mr Walker out of his foothold, 
 and sustaining his weight by the rope that linked 
 them, swung him out of the way of the rock. 
 The rock thundered down in the very place in 
 which Mr Walker had been standing, and Mr 
 Walker swung back again, and resumed his 
 foothold safely. In the history of climbing there 
 has seldom been a narrower escape. 
 
 Another quality of the best guides is their 
 wonderful faculty of finding or remembering the 
 way through unfamiliar country. A story iUustrat- 
 ing this gift, though the scene is not in the Alps, 
 may be given in the words of another ex-President 
 of the Alpine Club, Mr C. E. Mathews. The 
 hero of it is the great Melchior Anderegg, now 
 on the retired list and in the woodcarviug 
 business, but still famous. 
 
 " He came," says Mr Mathews, " to England on 
 a winter visit to some of his old friends. He 
 arrived at the Landon Bridge station in the 
 middle of a genuine London fog. He was met by 
 Mr Leslie Stephen and Mr HinchlifF, who accom- 
 panied him on foot to the rooms of the latter 
 gentleman in Lincoln's Inn Fields. A day or 
 two later the same party found themselves at 
 the same station on their return from Woolwich. 
 'Now, Melchior,' said Mr Hiuchliff, 'you will
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 161 
 
 lead us back home.' Instantly the skilful guide, 
 who had never seen a larger town than Berne, 
 accepted the situation, and found his way straight 
 back without difficulty, pausing for consideration 
 only once, as to examine the landmarks at the 
 foot of Chancery Lane." 
 
 Melchior is perhaps the most justly famous of 
 the older generation of guides. He is essentially 
 a safe man— no less celebrated for his caution 
 than for his courtesy. " I have never known 
 him," said INIr Mathews to the present writer, 
 "to be unequal to any emergency, and I have 
 never heard him speak a word that could not be 
 repeated in the presence of a lady." To the same 
 generation belong Bennen, whose death on the 
 Haut de Cry has been described, and whom 
 Tyndall called "the Napoleon of guides," and 
 J. A. Carrel, and Christian Aimer, who was with 
 Mr Justice Wills in his first ascent of the 
 Wetterhorn in 1854, and who lived to celebrate 
 his golden wedding hy taking his wife to the top 
 of the same mountain. Most of them belong or 
 belonged to the Oberland — the part of Switzerland 
 which has produced more good guides than any 
 other. 
 
 The guides of the present generation are not 
 inferior to their fathers, and they have a wider 
 range. They are not only climbers but travellers. 
 There are some of them to be met every season 
 in the Canadian Eockies and the Selkirks. They 
 have been to Alaska, to the Andes, to the 
 Himalayas, to New Zealand. The Duke of the 
 Abruzzi even took guides with him on his 
 ex[)edition to the Arctic regions. In the early
 
 162 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 
 
 days they got home-sick when they went so far 
 afield; but now they are getting over that. 
 Among the great names are those of Alexander 
 Burgener, who was with Mummery in the 
 Caucasus; Joseph Imboden, who was in the 
 Himalayas with Mr Graham, who holds the 
 record for high altitudes ; Antoine Maquignaz, 
 who climbed Mount Saint Elias with the Duke 
 of the Abruzzi, and Illimani with Sir Martin 
 Conway. But the greatest name of all is that of 
 Mathias Zurbriggen. 
 
 Zurbriggen was the son of a shoemaker of Saas, 
 and himself began life as a stable boy at Sierre. 
 Then he worked in a copper mine ; then he made 
 his living by driving a cart between Sierre and 
 Brieg; then he worked on the Rhone embank- 
 ment ; then he went to Italy and became a tassel 
 maker ; then he became a postillion on a diligence; 
 then he became a servant to a Swiss gentleman 
 who was going shooting in Tunis ; then he 
 worked as a mason in Algeria ; then he opened 
 a shop at Macugnaga, where he began to climb in 
 1886. After a few seasons in Switzerland, he 
 was engaged to accompany Sir Martin Conway 
 to the Himalayas in 1892. Since then he has 
 been to the Himalayas again with Mr and Mrs 
 Bullock-Workman, and to the New Zealand Alps 
 and the Andes with Mr E. A. Fitzgerald. He is 
 one of the few guides who, even at extreme 
 altitudes, can defy mountain sickness, and he 
 has been heard to express the confident belief 
 that he will climb Mount Everest before he dies. 
 He is a good traveller in the sense that he is 
 perennially interested in the strange things that
 
 THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING. 163 
 
 he sees. The number of notebooks that he took 
 with him, and the diligence with which he filled 
 them, were the constant admiration of the party 
 with which he climbed Pioneer Peak. The 
 reason for all his note-taking became apparent 
 when Mr Fisher Unwin, who is both climber and 
 publisher, issued a book from his pen. 
 
 Not every guide, of course, can hope to rise to 
 Zurbriggen's eminence and prosperity ; but for 
 the competent man it is a calling with fair pay 
 and prospects. The tariff for a big climb is 
 sometimes as much as £5 or £6. The guide 
 who is engaged for the season draws a daily 
 wage which will not be less than ten francs, and 
 may even, in exceptional cases, be as much as 
 twenty-five francs, a day. Their ambition, as 
 a rule, is to save enough money to start a hotel, 
 or to set themselves up in some kind of business, 
 and it is an ambition in which they often succeed. 
 Melchior, as has been said, is in the woodcarving 
 business. Retired guides are the proprietors of 
 a good many mountain hotels, and in some cases 
 continue to act as guides as well as landlords 
 to their clients.
 
 APPENDIX A. 
 A TABLE OF FIRST ASCENTS. 
 
 1335 
 
 K358 
 li9-2 
 
 1518 
 
 1521 
 1536 
 
 1779 
 
 1786 
 
 1788 
 
 1789 
 1789 
 
 1792 
 1793 
 
 1796 
 
 1799 
 
 1800 
 1801 
 
 1802 
 
 1804 
 
 Mountain. 
 
 Ventoux, 6430 ft. 
 Rochemolon, 11,G05 ft. 
 Mont Aiguille ( Dauphin^I), 
 
 7000 ft. 
 rilatus, 6995 ft. 
 
 Popocatepetl, 17,852 ft. 
 Stockhorn (Obcrland), 7195 
 
 ft. 
 Vdlan, 12,169 ft. 
 Mont Blauc, 15,781 ft. 
 
 Stockgron, 11,411 ft. 
 
 Pizzo Bianco, 10,551 ft. 
 Rheinwaldhorn, 11,148 ft. 
 
 Little Matterhorn, 12,750 ft. 
 Piz Urlaun, ll,0d3 ft. 
 
 Gran Sasso d' Italia (Apen- 
 nines), 9577 ft. 
 Oberalpstock, 10,926 ft. 
 
 Gross Glockner, 12,460 ft. 
 Monte Rosa (Punta Gior- 
 
 dani), 13,304 ft. 
 Mont Perdu (Pyrenees), 
 
 10,994 ft. 
 Ortler Spitz, 12,800 ft. 
 164 
 
 Climber. 
 
 Petrarch 
 Bonifacio d'Asti 
 Dompjulian 
 
 Duke Ulrich of Wurtoni- 
 
 berg 
 Francisco Montafio 
 Prof. Johann MlLller 
 
 Prior Murith 
 
 Jacques Balniat and Dr 
 
 Paccard 
 Father Placid us a 
 
 Spescha 
 De Saussuro 
 Father Placid us h, 
 
 Spescha 
 De Saussure 
 Father Placidus a 
 
 Spescha 
 Orazio Delfico 
 
 Father Placidus h 
 
 Spescha 
 Bishop of Gurk 
 Dr Pietro Giordani 
 
 Ramond de Carbonnifere 
 
 Joseph Pichler
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 165 
 
 Jungfrau, 13,671 ft. 
 Finsteraarhorn, 14,026 ft. 
 Breithom, 13,619 ft. 
 
 Monte Rosa (Vincent Pyra- 
 
 mide) 13,829 ft. 
 Monte Rosa (Zumstein 
 
 Spitze), 15,004 ft. 
 Monte Rosa (Ludwigshohe), 
 
 14,253 ft. 
 Bristenstock, 10,086 ft. 
 Hausstock, 10,342 ft. 
 Monte Rosa (Signal Kuppe), 
 
 14,965 ft. 
 Mittaghorn, 10,328 ft. 
 Altels, 11,930 ft. 
 Piz Linard, 11,208 ft. 
 Piz Palu, 12,835 ft. 
 Aiguille d'Arve, 11,513 ft. 
 Dussistock, 10,703 ft. 
 Scheerhorn, 10,814 ft. 
 Riffelhorn, 9,616 ft. 
 Stockhorn (Pennines), 
 
 11,795 ft. 
 Lauteraarhorn. 
 Wasenhom, 10,680 ft. 
 Wetterhorn (Hasli Jung- 
 frau), 12,149 ft. 
 Wetterhorn (Rosenhorn), 
 
 12,110 ft. 
 Wetterhorn (Mittelhorn), 
 
 12,166 ft. 
 Galenstock, 11,802 ft. 
 Uh-ichshorn, 12,891 ft. 
 
 Grand Tournalin, 11,086 
 
 ft. 
 Piz Bernina, 13,295 ft. 
 Glarner Todi, 11,815 ft. 
 
 Climber. 
 
 Hieronymus and Rudolf 
 
 Meyer 
 Hieronymus, Rudolf and 
 
 Gottlieb Meyer 
 Henri Maynard with M. 
 
 J. Couttet 
 Johann Niklaus Vincent 
 
 Zumstein, Molinatti, and 
 
 the Vincents 
 Ludwig von Welden 
 
 Dr Lusser of Altdorf 
 Dr Oswald Heer 
 Giovanni Gnifetti 
 
 A Bavarian Princess 
 A party from Frutigen 
 Dr Oswald Heer 
 Dr Oswald Heer 
 Three hunters 
 Escher von der Linth 
 Hoffmann 
 Some Englishmen 
 J. D. Forbes 
 
 Desor 
 
 J. D. Forbes 
 
 Desor and guides 
 
 Dessor and Dollfuss 
 
 Spier 
 
 Desor and Dollfuss 
 Professor Melchior Ulrich 
 
 and Pastor Imseng 
 Ahh6 Gorret 
 
 J. Coaz 
 
 Gottlieb Studer and Sieg- 
 fried
 
 166 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Mountain. 
 
 Wetterhorn (Hasli Jung- 
 
 frau), 12,149 ft. 
 Mont Blanc de Seilon, 
 
 12,701 ft. 
 Monte Rosa (Hochste 
 
 Spitze), 15,217 ft. 
 Weissmies, 13,225 ft. 
 Mont Emilius, 11,677 ft. 
 Aiguille du Midi, 12,609 ft. 
 Monch, 13,465 ft. 
 Dom, 14,942 ft. 
 Nadelhorn, 14,219 ft. 
 
 Piz Morteratsch, 12,315 ft. 
 Eiger, 13,042 ft. 
 Aletschhoru, 13,721 ft. 
 Bietschorn, 12,970 ft. 
 Rimpfischorn, 13,790 ft. 
 Monte Leone, 11,684 ft. 
 Grivola, 13,022 ft. 
 Blumlisalphorn, 12,038 ft. 
 Allalinhorn, 13,235 ft. 
 Grand Paradis, 13,324 ft. 
 
 Grand Combin, 14,163 ft. 
 Schreckhorn, 13,386 ft. 
 Monte Ro.sa (Nordend 
 Spitze), 15,132 ft. 
 
 Woisshorn, 14,804 ft. 
 Monte Viso, 12,609 ft. 
 
 Doldenhorn, 11,966 ft. 
 
 Taschhorn, 14,758 ft. 
 Dent Blanche, 14,318 ft. 
 
 Pelvoux, 12,973 ft. 
 Dent Blanche, 14,318 ft. 
 
 Monte Rosa (Parrot Spitze), 
 14,643 ft. 
 
 Climber. 
 
 Mr Justice Wills 
 
 MM. Thury, Vanner and 
 
 Martin 
 Messrs G. and C. Smith, 
 
 Hudson, etc. 
 Dr Haiisser 
 Canon Carrel 
 Two Chamonix guides 
 Herr Porges of Vienna 
 Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies 
 Herren Zimmermann, 
 
 Supersaxo and others 
 Dr Brugger 
 Harrington 
 H. H. Tuckett 
 Sir Leslie Stephen 
 Sir Leslie Stephen 
 Officers of Federal Army 
 J. Ormsby and R. Bruce 
 Sir Leslie Stephen 
 Sir Leslie Stephen 
 J. J. Cowell and W. 
 
 Dundas 
 M. Deville 
 Sir Leslie Stephen 
 Sir T. F. and Mr E. N. 
 
 Buxton and Mr J. J. 
 
 Cowell 
 Professor Tyndall 
 W. Matthews and J. W. 
 
 Jacomb 
 Dr Roth and Mr R. de 
 
 Fellenberg 
 Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies 
 T. S. Kennedy and W. 
 
 Wigram 
 F. F. Tuckett 
 T. S. Kennedy and W. 
 
 Wigram 
 Macdonald, Grove and 
 
 Woodman
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 167 
 
 1863 
 
 1863 
 1864 
 
 1864 
 
 1864 
 
 1864 
 
 1865 
 1865 
 
 1865 
 
 1865 
 1865 
 
 1865 
 1865 
 1867 
 1868 
 
 1870 
 
 1871 
 1873 
 
 1878 
 
 1880 
 
 1882 
 
 1882 
 1884 
 
 Climber, 
 
 Balfrin, 12,500 ft. 
 
 Piz Roseg, 12,935 ft. 
 Balmhorn, 12,176 ft. 
 
 Basodino, 10,680 ft. 
 
 Ecrins, 13,462 ft. 
 
 Zinal Rothhorn, 13,855 ft. 
 
 Matterhom, 14,705 ft. 
 
 Grandes Jorasses (W. Sum- 
 mit), 13,767 ft. 
 
 Aigiiille de Bionassay, 
 13,324 ft. 
 
 Grand Cornier, 13,022 ft. 
 
 Ober Gabelhorn, 13,364 ft. 
 
 Wellenkuppe, 12,828 ft. 
 Monte Cristallo, 10,495 ft. 
 Mont CoUon, 11,957 ft. 
 Grandes Jorasses (E. Sum- 
 mit), 13,800 ft. 
 Meije, 13,026 ft. 
 
 Aiguille du Plan, 12,051 ft. 
 Grande Ruine, 12,317 ft. 
 
 Aiguille du Dru, 12,517 ft. 
 
 Aiguille des Charmoz, 11,293 
 
 ft. 
 Aiguilles Rouges d'AroUa, 
 
 11,975 ft. 
 Aiguille du G^ant, 13,157 ft. 
 Croda da Lago, 8887 ft. 
 
 Mr and Mrs Watson and 
 
 Cur^ Imseng 
 George and A. W. Moore 
 Frank, Horace and Lucy 
 
 Walker 
 Signori Brioschi and Bau- 
 
 mann 
 A. W. Moore, Horace 
 
 Walker and Edward 
 
 Whymper 
 
 F. C. Grove and Sir Leslie 
 Stephen 
 
 Edward Whymper 
 Edward Whymper 
 
 K N. Buxton, F. C. 
 
 Grove, etc. 
 Edward Whymper 
 A. W. Moore and Horace 
 
 Walker 
 Lord Francis Douglas 
 Grohmann 
 
 G. E. Forster 
 Horace Walker 
 
 W. A. B. Coolidge and 
 
 Miss Brevoort 
 J. Eccles 
 W. A. B. Coolidge and 
 
 Miss Brevoort 
 C. T. Dent and J. W. 
 
 Hartley 
 A. F. Mummery 
 
 Hughes and Stable 
 
 Signer Sella 
 Baron Roland 
 Buda-Pesth 
 
 Edvos of
 
 168 APPENDIX. 
 
 APPENDIX B. 
 
 ALPINE BOOKS. 
 
 No complete bibliography of Climbing exists. The 
 most useful works of the kind are :— 
 Ueber Eis und Sohnee. By Gottlieb Studer. 1869- 
 
 1871. 
 Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide Books. By the Rev. 
 
 W. A. B. Coolidge. 1889. 
 Landes-und-Reisebeschreibungen. By A. Waber. 
 
 1899. 
 It should be noted, however, that the two last named 
 volumes enumerate general books of travel as well as 
 climbing books, and that all three of them deal only 
 with the Alps of Switzerland. For other Alpine regions 
 the handiest work of reference would be the new cata- 
 logue of the Alpine Club Library. 
 
 The early history of the subject is dealt with in the 
 
 work by Mr Coolidge, already mentioned, and also in :— 
 
 Gesciticiite des Reisens in der Schweiz. By G. 
 
 Peyer. 1885. 
 The Early Mountaineers. By Francis Gribble. 
 
 1899. 
 La Montagne A. Travers les Ages. By Jean Grand- 
 Carteret. 1903. 
 The last named book is only appearing as I write, and 
 I have not had the opportunity of referring to it. 
 
 The histories of certain mountains have also been 
 
 written in great detail, but it may be sufficient here to 
 
 mention the three principal monographs on Mont Blanc. 
 
 They are : — 
 
 The Story of Mont Blanc. By Albert Smith. 
 
 1853. 
 Le Mont Blanc. By Charles Durier. 1877. 
 The Annals op Mont Blanc. By C. E. Mathews. 
 
 1898. 
 The first named of these may be read for entertain- 
 ment, but for instruction the others are to be preferred. 
 Both of them are excellent. Far be it from me to say 
 that either of them is better than the other.
 
 APPENDIX. 169 
 
 In reviewing the older books, and the narratives of 
 personal adventure, my aim is to confine myself, so far 
 as possible, to tooks written in the English language. 
 That possibility, however, is limited by the fact that the 
 books in the English language do not cover all the 
 ground. A batch of books in Latin must first be 
 polished off: — 
 
 Stockhornias. By Johann Miiller. 1536. 
 
 Descriptio Montis Fracti Jcxta Lucernam. By 
 Conrad Gesner. 1555. 
 
 De Alpibus Commentarius. By Josias Simler. 1574. 
 
 Itinera per Helvktiae Alpinas Regiones Facta. 
 By Johann Jacob Scheuchzer. 1723. 
 
 The first of these books relates in verse an ascent of 
 the Stockhorn near Thun ; the second describes an ascent 
 of Pilatus ; the third gives a general account of the 
 dangers of Alpine travel ; while the fourth recounts the 
 happenings of various Alpine journeys, and proves the 
 presence of dragons in the Alps. 
 
 Serious climbing, as has been pointed out, began in 
 the Chamonix neighbourhood. The first classic relating 
 to this branch of the subject is : — 
 
 An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy. 
 By William Windham and Peter Martel. 1744. 
 
 The first accounts of actual ascents of snow peaks, 
 however, are contained in : — 
 
 Relations de Differents Voyages dans les Alpes 
 DU Faucigny. By MM. D. and D. 1776. 
 
 Lettres Physiques et Morales sur la Montagne. 
 By Jean-Andr6 de Luc. 1778. 
 
 The other interesting books of this period are the 
 Voyages dans les Alpes of Horace Benedict de Saus- 
 sure — of which the " partie pittoresque," describing 
 the climbing, can be obtained separately — and the 
 many Alpine writings of Marc-Theodore Bourrit. One 
 of these can be got in an English translation. It is : — 
 
 A Relation of a Journey to the Glacieks in 
 THE Duchy of Savoy. By M. T. Bourrit. 
 1776.
 
 170 APPENDIX, 
 
 For the eai-ly affairs of the Oberlancl mountains we 
 have to turn to four German books : — 
 
 Versuch einer historischen und physischen 
 
 BeSCHREIBUNG DER HELVETISCHEN ElSBERGBN. 
 
 By J. G. Altmann. 1751. 
 Die Eisgebirge des Schweizerlandes. By G. S. 
 
 Gruner. 1760. 
 Reise auf die Jungfrau-Gletscher und Erstei- 
 GUNG seines Gipfels. By Herr Zschokke. 
 1812. 
 Reise auf die Eisgebirge des Cantons Bern und 
 Ersteigung ihrer hochsten Gipfel. By Herr 
 Zschokke. 1813. 
 The last two books describe the first ascents of the 
 Jungfrau and Finsteraarhorn. There is, it may be 
 remarked, a French translation of Gruner. 
 
 The Alpine literature of the next thirty years consists 
 largely of pamphlets recording ascents of Mont Blanc. 
 For a full list of these, whether buried in periodicals 
 or separately published, the reader must be referred 
 to the bibliography in Mr Matthews' monograph. The 
 more serious Alpine writings of the period are from the 
 pens of savauts writing in either French or German. 
 Note especially : — 
 
 Natdrhistorische alpen Reise. By F. J, Hugi. 
 
 1830. 
 Ueber das Wesen DER Gletscher und Winter- 
 
 reise in das Eismeer. By F. J. Hugi. 1842. 
 Wanderungen in DER Gletscherwelt. By Georg 
 
 Hoflfmann. 1843. 
 Reise in die weniger bekannten Thaeler auf 
 
 DIE NORDSEITE DER PENNINISCHEN AlPEN. By 
 
 Julius Froebel. 1840, 
 Excursions et Sejours dans les Glaciers et les 
 
 Hautes Regions des Alpes de M. Agassiz et 
 
 DE ses Compagnons DE VoYAGE. By E. Dcsor. 
 
 1844 and 1845. 
 Die Seitenthaeleb des Wallis. By Melchior 
 
 Ulrich. 185;i
 
 APPENDIX. 171 
 
 Hugi's second work, be it remarked, describes the 
 beginnings of winter climbing. Desor's work should be 
 read for the account of the "Hotel des Neuchatelois. " 
 Ulrich gives his name to the Ulrichshorn, near Saas, 
 of which he made the first ascent. 
 
 The earliest climbing books, other than Mont Blanc 
 monographs, are those of J. D. Forbes. All Forbes' 
 scattered Alpine writings were lately published in a 
 single volume, with an introduction and notes by the 
 Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge. He wrote of Dauphin6 and 
 of the Pennines, being one of the earliest visitors to 
 Evolena and Arolla. His first work, TeaveIaS in the 
 Alps of Savoy, appeared in 1843 ; and the great output 
 of Alpine books by English climbers did not begin until 
 several years later. The most interesting of them, from 
 many points of view, is Peaks, Passes and Glaciers, 
 of which the first series, published in 1859, was edited 
 by John Ball, and the second, published in 1862, ap- 
 peared under the editorship of T. S. Kennedy. The 
 papers contained in it, written by various climbers, 
 relate in great detail many important early ascents. 
 Other books valued by collectors are : — 
 
 Outline Sketches in the High Alps of Dauphin^. 
 By T. G. Bonney. 1865. 
 
 The Alpine Regions of Switzerland and the 
 Neighbouring Countries. By T. G. Bonney. 
 1868. 
 
 A Lady's Tour round Monte Rosa. By Mrs Cole. 
 1859. 
 
 The Alps from End to End. By Sir Martin Con- 
 way. 1895. 
 
 Above the Snow Line. By T. Clinton Dent. 1885. 
 
 Across Country from Thonon to Trent. Bv 
 Douglas Freshfield. 1865. 
 
 The Obekland and its Glaciers. By H. B. George. 
 1866. 
 
 The High Alps without Guides. By A. G. Girdle- 
 stone. 1870. 
 
 Summer Months among the Alps. By T. W. 
 Hinchliff. 1857. 
 
 Where there's a Will there's a Way : an Ascent
 
 172 APPENDIX. 
 
 OF Mont Blanc by a New Route and without 
 
 Guides. By C. Hudson and E. S. Kennedy. 
 The Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps. By 
 
 S. W. King. 185S. 
 The High Alps in Winter. By Mrs Aubrey Le 
 
 Blond. 1883. 
 The Alps in 1864. By A. W. Moore. 1867. 
 My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus. By A. F. 
 
 Mummery. 1895. 
 The Playground of Europe. By Sir Leslie Stephen. 
 
 1871. 
 The Glaciers of the Alps. By John Tyndall. 1860. 
 Hours of Exercise in the Alps. By John Tyndall. 
 
 1871. 
 Scrambles amongst the Alps. By Edward Wh vmper. 
 
 1871. 
 Wanderings among the High Alps. By Sir Alfred 
 
 Wills. 185S. 
 The Eagle's Nest in the Valley of Sixt. By Sir 
 
 Alfred Wills. 1860. 
 
 Among books dealing specially with the Dolomites 
 note also :— 
 Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys. By 
 
 Miss Amelia B. Edwards. 1 873. 
 The Dolomite Mountains. By Josiah Gilbert and 
 
 G. C. Churchill. 1865. 
 Climbing Reminiscences of the Dolomites. By 
 
 Leone Sinigaglia. 1896. 
 Dolomite Strongholds. By J. Sanger Davies. 1896. 
 
 The best book on the Pyrenees is Through the High 
 Pybknees, by Harold Spender and H. Llewellyn Smith, 
 1898 — a relation of a journey, including an exhaustive 
 bibliography of tke subject. The lives of the most 
 notable of the Alpine guides are written in Tiik Pioneers 
 OF THE Alps, by C. D. Cunningham end W. de W. 
 Abney, 1887 ; while no one need desire a better treat- 
 ment of the general art of mountaineering than is to be 
 found in Mountaineering, by C. T. Dent, in the Bad- 
 minton Library.
 
 APPENDIX. 173 
 
 APPENDIX C. 
 
 ALPINE JOURNALS. 
 
 The story of Alpine climbing can be traced in greatest 
 detail in the periodical publicatious of the various 
 Alpine Clubs. The chief of these are : — 
 
 Alpine Journal (London). 
 
 Annuaire du Club Alpin Fran^ais (Paris). 
 
 Revue Alpine (Lyon). 
 
 Annuaire ue la Soci^t]^ dks Touristes du Dauphin^ 
 
 (Grenoble). 
 BoLLETTiNO DEL Club Alpino (Turin). 
 Echo des Alpes (Geneva). 
 Jahrbuch des schweizer Alpenclub (Berne). 
 
 MlTTHEILUNGEN DES DEUTSCHBN U ND OESTBREICHISCHER 
 
 Alpknvereins (Vienna). 
 Annuabio della Societa Alpina DEL Trentino 
 (Trent). 
 
 APPENDIX D. 
 GUIDE BOOKb. 
 
 The first Swiss Guide Book published in Enijlish was 
 an adaptation of the German work of J. (4. Ebel by a 
 certain Daniel Wall. The first edition appeared in 1818. 
 Murray's "Handbook" made its first appearance in 
 1838, and Karl Baedeker came into the field somewhat 
 later. Ebel presently dropped out, but Murray and 
 Baedeker are still with us. None of these early works 
 are of much interest to the climber, though Ebel did go to 
 that enterprising climber. Father Placidus k Spescha, for 
 information. The current editions of Murray and Baede- 
 ker, however, deal with the subject as amply as space 
 permits. For practical information as to the price which 
 guides charge for particular ascents, Baedeker is to be 
 preferred ; but the history of the mountains is better 
 treated in ftlnrraj', the recent editions having been ])ro 
 duced with the invaluable assistance of the Rev. W. A.
 
 174 APPENDIX. 
 
 B. Coolidge. Both books, however, are intended, not 
 for mountaineers, but for the general public. 
 
 Climbers were first specially catered for in John 
 Ball's "Alpine Guide," of which the first edition was 
 published in 1863. This book having got out of print, 
 and also to some extent out of date, the Alpine Club 
 decided, in 1890, to revise and re-issue the work. The 
 editorship was offered to and accepted by Mr Coolidge, 
 who brought out a first volume, dealing with the 
 Western Alps, in 1898. Subsequently, however, Mr 
 Coolidge resigned both the editorship of the Guide and 
 his membership of the Alpine Club, and the reconstruc- 
 tion of the remainder of the work is now in other hands. 
 
 Meanwhile a Climber's Guide of a new sort, entitled 
 " The Zermatt Pocket-Book," had been produced by Sir 
 Martin Conway in 1881. This work, dealing only with 
 a small, though a profoundly interesting district, gave 
 detailed directions for a great number of ascents. Its 
 utility was attested by the fact that it passed out of 
 print, and it subsequently served as the model for a con- 
 siderable series of Climber's Guides, edited jointly by 
 Sir Martin Conway and Mr Coolidge. These volumes 
 give a careful bibliography of each peak and pass, 
 together with precise directions, in severe technical 
 language, for climbing or crossing. There are volumes 
 dealing with "The Central Pennine Alps," "The 
 Eastern Pennine Alps," "The Central Alps of the 
 Dauphiny," "The Chain of Mont Blanc," The Moun- 
 tains of Cogne," "The Todi," "The Adula Alps," 
 " The Leopontine Alps," etc., etc., etc. ; and the series 
 is still, I believe, " in progress." 
 
 Two other Guide Books to be mentioned as of par- 
 ticular interest to climbers and students of the history 
 of climbing are Mr Whymper's " Guide to Zermatt and 
 the Matterhorn," and "Guide to Chamonix and the 
 Range of Mont Blanc." These are necessarily less 
 minute in their practical directions to climbers than 
 the Conway-Coolidge series ; but they are sufficiently 
 complete to be very useful even from this point of view, 
 and they relate the history of the exploration of the 
 districts dealt with in a very bright and entertaining 
 manner. It is sincerely to be hoped that Mr Wh3mper
 
 APPENDIX. 175 
 
 may some day write Guide Books on similar lines to 
 Grmdelwald and Pontresina. 
 
 It may be interesting, before leaving the subject, to 
 mention that the first Joanne Guide was a Guide to 
 Switzerland, and appeared in 1841. Adolf Joanne 
 conceived the idea of writing it at the foot of the 
 Diablerets, where a peasant woman, observing his en- 
 thusiasm, said: "Since you find it so beautiful you 
 should bring your countrymen to see it." 
 
 APPENDIX E. 
 
 GLOSSARY. 
 
 Alp : A pasture land in the mountains, used in summer- 
 Arete : A ridge. It may be of rock, or snow, or ice ; 
 
 but the term is usually applied to ridges of some 
 
 degree of sharpness. 
 Avalanche : A mass of snow or ice which slides down 
 
 hill. One also speaks of rock avalanches and mud 
 
 avalanches, though these are perhaps more properly 
 
 to be classed with landslips. 
 Bergschrund : The large crevasses generally to be 
 
 found where the suowfield and the face of the 
 
 mountain meet. 
 Chalet : A hut on the pastures which may or may not 
 
 be used as a dwelling place. 
 Chimney : A steep rock gully. 
 Col : A pass. 
 Cornice : An unsupported crest of snow overhanging a 
 
 precipice. 
 Couloir : Much the same as Chimney, but often filled 
 
 with ice or snow, and sometimes raked by falling 
 
 stones. 
 Firn : An accumulation of hard snow in the course of 
 
 transformation into a glacier. 
 Fohn : The warm wind from the south which, striking 
 
 the snow mountains, brings bad weather. 
 Gendarme : A big block or tower, blocking the way on 
 
 a ridge.
 
 176 APPENDIX. 
 
 (tLISSade : The act of sliding down a snow slope. 
 
 Grat : The same as Arete. 
 
 Ice-Fall : The steep portion of a glacier in which the 
 ico is very much crevassed. 
 
 JocH : A pass. 
 
 Moraine : The huge accumulations of debris, formed in 
 the vicinity of glaciers. The lateral moraines are 
 at the sides of the glaciers, the terminal moraines are 
 at their lower ends. When two glaciers meet, their 
 lateral moraines meet also, and form what is called 
 a medial moraine. 
 
 Pas ; Sometimes used for a pass, and sometimes for a 
 difficult bit of climbing, as in the expression " mau- 
 vais pas." 
 
 Rucksack : A more convenient kind of knapsack. 
 
 ScHRUND : An abbreviation of Bergschrund. 
 
 Seracs : The towers of ice formed in an ice-fall. 
 
 Snout : The lower end of a glacier. 
 
 Snow-Line : The point at which the summer suns never 
 completely melt the winter snows. The altitude of 
 the snow-line naturally varies with the aspect as 
 well as the latitude of the mountain. 
 
 Screes : Heaps of small loose stones, sometimes found 
 on slopes, or piled up against the bases of moun- 
 tains. 
 
 Tourmente : A blizzard. 
 
 Traverse : The act of crossing a steep slope or the face 
 of a precipice. Also used of the place to be crossed. 
 
 Verglas : A thin film or layer of ice coating the surface 
 of rocks.
 
 GENERAL INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 Abruzzi, "Duke of the, 161. 
 Agassiz, Louis, 96, 98, 99, 100, 
 
 101, 103, 104, 107, 115. 
 Aiguille, Mont, 14. 
 Aiguilles, 35. 
 Aimer, Christian, 118, 145, 
 
 161. 
 Aimer, Ulrich, 151. 
 " Alpina," 88. 
 Alpine Qub, 109, 112, 113. 
 Altmann, J. G. , 86. 
 Anderegg, Melchior, 160, 161, 
 
 163. 
 Anderegg, Peter, 159. 
 Arkwright, Captain, 129. 
 Auldjo, John, 66. 
 
 B. 
 
 Baillie, Mr, 29. 
 Ball, John, 109, 113, 115. 
 Balmat, Auguste, 64. 
 Balmat, Jacques, 51, 54, 56, 
 
 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 
 
 65 155. 
 Bavry, Dr Martin, 67. 
 Beaufoy, Colonel Mark, 65. 
 Beck, Jean-Joseph, 73. 
 Bennen, J. J., 140, 142. 
 Berkeley, Bishop, 10. 
 Bernard, Great Saint, 10, 51. 
 Bianco, Pizzo, 71. 
 Blanc, Mont, 28, 46, 51, 52, 
 
 54, 58, 65, 67, 68, 74, 75, 
 
 82, 88, 94, 125, 130. 
 Bossons, Glacier des, 52. 
 Bourrit, Marc-Theodore, 39, 
 
 41, 50, 52, 53, 62, 65, 90. 
 Brantschen, Joseph, 122. 
 Breithorn, 27, 106. 
 Bremble, John de, 10, 111. 
 Buet, 41, 42, 43. 
 Burnet, Bishop, 28, 90. 
 
 Cade, Mr George, 106. 
 Camper, Mr, 65. 
 Candale, Comte de, 15, G8. 
 Canigou, Pic, 12. 
 Carbonni^re, Eamond de, 69, 
 
 90. 
 Carrel, Jean-Antoine, 116, 
 
 122, 161. 
 Cenis, Mont, 10. 
 Chamonix, 28, 82, 86, 105. 
 
 110, 128, 155. 
 Charles VII. of France, 14. 
 Charpentier, M., 98, 99, 115. 
 Chetwynd, Mr, 29. 
 Clark, Dr Edmund, 66. 
 Clement, M., Cure of Cham- 
 
 pery, 49. 
 Clissold, Frederick, 66. 
 Collon, Col de, 107. 
 Croz, Michel, 119, 120, 121, 
 
 145, 146. 
 
 177
 
 178 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 D. 
 
 Delfico, Orazio, 71. 
 
 Dent Blanche, 114, 153, 159. 
 
 Dent du Midi, 49. 
 
 Desor, Edouard, 101, 104, 
 
 115. 
 Dollfus-Ausset, M., 104. 
 Dompjulian, 14, 15. 
 Doorthesen, M., 65. 
 Douglas, Lord Francis, 119, 
 
 120, 121, 122. 
 Dragons, 25. 
 Dru, Aiguille du, 105. 
 
 E. 
 
 Ecrina, 114. 
 Eiger, 88, 114. 143. 
 Eschen, 124. 
 Escher, Herr, 124. 
 Etna, 11, 38. 
 Evelyn, John, 10. 
 
 F. 
 
 Fedchenko, Professor, 134. 
 Follows, Charles, 66. 
 Finstwaarhom, 95. 
 Forbes, J. D., 106, 115, 128. 
 Fomeret, M., 65. 
 Freygrabend, Dr, 27. 
 
 Glockner, Gross, 76, 81, 82, 
 
 84, 88. 
 Gnifetti, Signer, 93. 
 Gossett, Mr, 140, 141, 142. 
 Grass, Hans, 152. 
 Grindelwald, 85, 86, 87. 90. 
 
 91 92 155. 
 Gruner,' Gottlieb Sigmund, 
 
 86, 87. 
 Guibert, General, 90, 91. 
 
 H. 
 
 Hacquet, Balthazar, 77. 
 Haddington, Lord, 29. 
 Hadow, Mr, 119, 120, 121. 
 Hadrian, 11. 
 HiEmus, 11. 
 Hamel, Dr, 125, 128. 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 38. 
 Haut de Cry, 140. 
 Hawes, William, 66. 
 Heer, Professor Oswald, 96. 
 Herons, Col. d', 108. 
 Hinchliff, Thomas Woodbme, 
 
 109, 112, 113, 160. 
 Hohenwart, Sigismund von, 
 
 77, 78, 80. 
 Howard, Dr William, 66. 
 Hudson, Charles, 109, 112, 
 
 119, 120, 121. 
 Hugi, Francois-Joseph, 9o. 
 
 G. 
 
 G6ant, Col. du, 39. 
 Gebhard, Dr, 83, 84, 85. 
 Gesner, Conrad, 22, 23, 24, 40. 
 Giordani, Dr Pietro, 74, 93. 
 Girdlestone, Rev. D. G., 142. 
 
 Jackson, H. H., 66. 
 John, Archduke, 82, 83. 
 Jungfrau, 89, 95, 106. 
 
 Lalande, 57. 
 Lammer, Herr, 147.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 179 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, 14. 
 
 Lochmatter, 153. 
 
 Lorria, Herr, 147, 148. 
 
 Lotsch-Sattel, 87. 
 
 Luc, Jean-Andr^ de, 39, 41, 
 
 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 78, 
 
 124, 150. 
 Lyskamn, 150. 
 
 M. 
 
 Martel, Pierre, 34. 
 Matterhorn, 114, 116, 122, 
 
 147, 153. 
 Matzewski, Count, 65. 
 Mer de Glace, 33. 
 Merian, Matthew, 86. 
 Meyers, 89. 
 Midi, Pic du, 15, 68. 
 M61e, 33. 
 Molinatti, 93. 
 MoU, Baron von, 79. 
 " Monboso," 14. 
 Monch, 114. 
 Monch-joch, 95. 
 Montafio, Don Francisco, 
 
 18. 
 Montanvert, 30, 31, 34, 36, 
 
 40, 135. 
 Moore, A. W., 145. 
 Moore, Dr John, 36, 105. 
 Morozzo, Count, 74. 
 Morteratsch, Piz, 136. 
 Mo.seley of Boston, Dr, 122. 
 Mliller, Johann, 18. 
 Miiller, Pastor Johann, 23. 
 Murith, Prior, 41, 49, 50. 
 
 N. 
 
 Neruda, Norman, 154. 
 Nettleship, Richard Lewis, 
 
 133. 
 Neville, Mr Aldworth, 29. 
 
 0. 
 
 Oberaarjoch, 89. 
 
 Obera^ahelhorn, 119. 
 
 Ortler Spitz, 76, 82, 84, 85, 
 
 Paccard, Dr, 51, 52, 56, 57, 
 59, 60, 63, 66. 
 
 Palu, Piz, 152. 
 
 Paradis, Maria, 65. 
 
 Parrot, Dr, 93. 
 
 Pays, BenS Le, 28. 
 
 " Peaks, Passes, and Gla- 
 ciers," 113. 
 
 Peter HI. of Arragon, 12. 
 
 Petrarch, 13. 
 
 Pichler, Joseph, 83, 84. 
 
 Pilatus, 20. 
 
 Placidus-a-Spescha, Father, 
 67. 
 
 Pococke, Dr, 29. 
 
 Popocatapetl, 17. 
 
 Price, of Foxley, 29. 
 
 R. 
 
 Rensselaer, Jeremiah van, 6(3. 
 RifiFelhorn, 108. 
 Roche Melon, 11. 
 Rochefoucauld, Due de la, 36. 
 Rohrdorf, Caspar, 95. 
 Rosa, Monte, 71, 74, 76, 94, 
 
 114. 
 Rothhorn, Zinal, 114. 
 
 S. 
 
 Salis, Count Ulysses von, 88. 
 Salm - Reifferscheid - Kran- 
 
 theim, Altgraf von, 76. 
 Sasso d'ltalia, Gran', 71.
 
 180 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Saussure, Horace Benedict 
 de, 37, 38, 39, 51, 53, 54, 
 56, 61, 62, 65, 67, 71, 72, 
 78, 90, 92, 94. 
 
 Scheuchzer, Johann Jacob, 
 24, 71, 80. 
 
 Schreckhorn, 114. 
 
 Schultes, Dr A., 81. 
 
 Seller, Alexander, 115. 
 
 SherwiU, Captain Markham, 
 66. 
 
 Silberhorn, 88. 
 
 Simler, Josias, 24, 27. 
 
 Simond, Pierre, 51. 
 
 Simplon, 10. 
 
 Sinigaglia, Signer, 122, 123. 
 
 Smith, Albert, 109, 110, 111, 
 112. 
 
 Steinmuller, 88, 95. 
 
 Stieregg Chalet, 95. 
 
 StillingSeet, Benjamin, 28. 
 
 Stockhorn, IS. 
 
 Strahlhorn, 116. 
 
 Strasburg, 89. 
 
 Studer, 115. 
 
 Taugwalder, Peter, 119. 
 Theodule, 27, 114, 115. 
 Tilly, Comte Henry de, 67. 
 Titlis, 27. 
 
 Tuckett, Mr F. F., 143, 144. 
 Tyndall, Professor, 116, 136, 
 138, 139, 142. 
 
 Undrell, R.N., Captain J., 
 66. 
 
 " Vadianus," 21, 22. 
 Velan, 49, 112. 
 Venetz, M., 99. 
 Ventoux, Mont, 13. 
 Vincent, J. N., 93. 
 Vogt, Karl, 101. 
 
 W. 
 
 Walker, Mr Horace, 159, 160. 
 Weiss, Herr, 89. 
 Woisshorn, 114. 
 Welden, Baron von, 93, 94, 
 
 95. 
 Wetterhom, 9, 64, 112. 
 Whyraper, 116, 118, 119, 120, 
 
 121, 122, 145, 146. 
 Wilbraham, the Honourable 
 
 Edward Bootle, 67. 
 WiUs, Mr Justice, 9, 64, 78, 
 
 109, 112, 113. 
 Windham, William, 28, 33, 
 
 105. 
 Woodley, Mr, 65. 
 Wurtemberg, Duke Ulrich of, 
 
 21, 
 
 U Zermatt, 106, 115, 147, 155. 
 
 Zumstein, 93, 94, 95. 
 Ulrich, Professor Mclchior, i Zurbriggcn, Matbias, 162. 
 96. ' 
 
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