In 1541 the naturalist Conrad Gesner made an extraordinary decision. ‘I am resolved,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘that as long as God grants me life, I will each year climb some mountains, or at least one, at the season when the flowers are in bloom, in order that I may examine these, and provide noble exercise for my body at the same time as enjoyment for my soul.’1
Gesner’s decision was unusual for several reasons. In the short, uncertain and uncomfortable lifespans of the time, most people did not seek extra toil; climbing a mountain even once, let alone every year, was an unnecessary and profitless burden. Then there was the very fact of mountains; they were steep, nasty, cold, frightening and potentially hazardous. They were also high, and height was anathema. What could one do with height? Nothing. One could not till its thin soil. One could trade only with difficulty over its rocky passes. One could hardly even invade one’s own neighbour if height intervened. It was a worthless and obstructive thing. All these factors made Gesner’s decision unusual. But what made it extraordinary was his decision to climb not just mountains but Alps.
The Alps were - and are - Europe’s most majestic mountain range. Springing in the west from the Tenda Pass above Nice, the main chain of summits ran in a 700-mile arc to the south-west of Vienna. Lesser offshoots poked southwards to the Adriatic and the Balkans, but it was the main chain, and especially the western part of the main chain, in the regions of Piedmont, Savoy and Switzerland, that first sprang to mind when anybody mentioned the Alps.
Lying at the cultural crossroads of Europe, where French, German and Italian influences met, the western Alps should theoretically have been a vibrant, cosmopolitan area. And to an extent they were: in the sixth century BC they had witnessed the brilliant Celtic culture of La Tène; the Romans had marched over them, as had Hannibal and his Carthaginians; since the second century AD Christian missionaries had proselytised in the valleys; pilgrims from as far afield as Iceland had crossed the Great St Bernard Pass and other of the twenty-three major passes which led to Rome. For a brief period they were controlled by Saracen bandits. Every conceivable nationality had either passed over the Alps or settled below them. One region was proud of its Scandinavian heritage, another of its Prussian; one area venerated an Irish monk; in others the place names were clearly Arabic in origin; neighbouring valleys spoke different languages, held different political allegiances and embraced different religious beliefs.
Yet for all this diversity, for all this coming and going, the Alps were a blank on the map. Apart from a few pockets of civilisation such as Geneva, Berne and other cities which prospered in the mountains’ shadow, and apart from the well-trodden passes (which had once been well maintained but since the fall of Rome had become increasingly ruinous), nobody cared about the rest. Scattered agricultural communities, inbred and disease-ridden, grazed livestock on the upper pastures. And that was all people knew or wanted to know about the place. The culprit, as usual, was height.
The Alps were, indeed, tremendously high. Within the central range, which was in places 120 miles wide, there were hundreds of peaks higher than 10,000 feet, dozens higher than 13,000 feet and one, Mont Blanc, which at 15,771 feet was the highest in western Europe. So high were the mountains that they formed one of the continent’s great climatic barriers, wringing the moisture from prevailing winds to divide Europe into cold, wet north and warm, dry south. They were rough as well as high. Thrust up by the tectonic collision which welded Italy onto mainland Europe, they displayed the earth’s crust in all its rawness. There were crags of black granite and sharp needles of pink; there were piles of disintegrating shale whose shards left silvery dust on the hands; there were vast, orange columns of limestone. On Alpine cliffs one could trace the swirls of petrified mud and hack from them the skeletons of tiny, fossilised fish. Veins of gold, silver, iron, lead, zinc and copper came to the surface; marble, slate and salt could be hewn from the hills; grottos yielded valuable crystals.*
Above all, however, the Alps were cold. Beyond the treeline lay a world of frigidity into which humans rarely ventured. In summer it was possible to put cattle and sheep up there, and farmers decamped to temporary stone shelters called chalets from which they kept an eye on their herds. But for most of the year the high peaks were clamped in snow, and between them lay field after field of year-round ice whose offshoots dribbled menacingly into the valleys below. In the first century AD a Roman chronicler wrote that ‘everything in the Alps is frozen fast’2 - and this was a relatively warm period. Three centuries later St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, feared that the ice would suffocate all civilisation. By the Middle Ages monastic orders had erected hospices at the top of every pass to succour pilgrims and, in the case of the Great St Bernard hospice, to rescue them with snow-trained hounds. In 1690 the villagers of Chamonix, beneath Mont Blanc, imported the Bishop of Annecy to exorcise the glaciers which threatened to obliterate them. (It worked: allegedly the ice retreated one-eighth of a mile, thereby showing God’s greatness and also justifying the large sum the Bishop charged for his services.)
The Alps were a world to themselves: they produced flowers found nowhere else on the continent, tiny plants that had shrunk to cope with near-Arctic conditions, yet which retained in miniature all the beauty of their lowland equivalents; hidden by snow for much of the year they emerged in spring and summer to carpet the mountainside. There was an equally rare set of fauna: the chamois was unique, so were the Bouquetin ibex, the lammergeier, or bearded vulture, and the marmot, a burrow-dwelling member of the squirrel family which looked like a rabbit-beaver cross and emerged from its annual hibernation with a chorus of whistles - to be quickly knocked on the head and eaten.
Such was the ignorance surrounding the mountains that most of them had no names - if they did, they were called things like Accursed or Unapproachable - and the very term ‘alp’ was itself a misnomer: when early geographers had pointed at the peaks and asked what they were called, locals had replied alpes. But this referred only to the high-level pastures on which they grazed their stock; they had no word for the mountains themselves. Thus the name which appeared on world atlases became an unwitting reminder of just how little Europeans knew of the wilderness in their midst - and of how radical Gesner’s decision was.
By Gesner’s time the Alps were a source of terror and superstition. Plains-dwellers still shuddered at the thought of Hannibal’s march in 218 BC. Philemon Holland, a sixteenth-century translator of Livy, painted a terrifying picture of the campaign, in which Hannibal’s men smashed their way through the Alpine passes, shattering boulders with fire and vinegar before dragging their protesting elephants, ‘ever readie and anone to run upon their noses’, towards Italy. He described the invaders’ fear at ‘the height of those hills … the horses singed with cold … the people with long shagd hair’ and the horrors of the journey where ‘the snow being once with the gate of so many people and beasts upon it fretted and thawed, they were fain to go upon the bare yce underneath and in the slabberie snow-broth as it relented and melted about their heeles’.3 And if Holland was not enough there were the words of Master John de Bremble, a Canterbury monk who had braved the Alps in 1188. ‘I put my hand in my scrip that I might scratch out a syllable or two,’ he wrote to his subprior, ‘lo, I found my ink-bottle filled with a dry mass of ice; my fingers too refused to write; my beard was stiff with frost, and my breath congealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news I wished … Lord, restore me to my brethren that I may tell them that they come not to this place of torment.’4 True, like many other pilgrims, Master John had chosen to cross the Alpine passes in early spring, the most changeable season as far as the weather was concerned. But this in no way diminished his message of woe.
One or two souls had braved the forbidding peaks. In 1358 a knight named Rotario of Asti climbed Roche Melon near Susa and deposited a bronze triptych on its 11,600-foot summit. In 1492, the year Columbus discovered America, Charles VII of France passed by Mont Aiguille near Grenoble - Mont Inaccessible as it was then called - and ordered his chamberlain to climb it. The chamberlain did so, surmounting its rocky, 7,000-foot mass by ‘subtle means and engines’ -which seems to have involved a rickety chain of ladders - to erect three crosses on the top. The feat was considered so astounding that it produced a flurry of official correspondence.
At one undetermined time in the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci climbed what may have been Monte Rosa, near Zermatt, and recorded his impressions:
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 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 was quite dark; and the sun as it fell on the mountain was far brighter here than in the plains below, because a smaller extent of atmosphere lay between the summit of the mountain and the sun.5
If Leonardo had reached the summit - which he almost certainly hadn’t - he would have stood 15,203 feet above sea level.
Generally, however, the Alps were as distant from the normal world as was the moon. Anything could happen in this icy semi-circle of teeth that bit off Italy from the rest of Europe. To many they represented hell, combing the freezing conditions of a Nordic Niflheim with, in summer, the roasting inferno of Christianity. When people approached them, it was only to scuttle over their passes as speedily as they could, alert for impending danger. Many travellers were carried blindfold lest they be overwhelmed by the awfulness of the scenery. Here was a realm whose upper reaches were, by all accounts, home to a race of malformed and malevolent sub-humans. The peaks above were inhabited by demons of every kind. Witches were well attested, their presence being routinely exorcised by one form or other of social purging. It was an undisputed fact that dragons lived in Alpine caves, ready to incinerate any who set foot above the snowline. Now and then, an intrepid traveller might acquire a ‘dragon stone’, which could cure haemorrhage, dysentery, diarrhoea, poisoning, plague and nosebleeds. This miraculous stone could only be obtained by cutting open the forehead of a dragon as it slept in its lair - care had to be taken, however, for should the dragon awake the stone would lose its power. Naturally hard to come by, one specimen was preserved at Lucerne, having been dropped luckily, if illogically, by a passing serpent.
Representative of the rumours was Pilatus, a mountain near Lucerne, that held a pond full of biblical terror. According to legend, Pontius Pilate had committed suicide rather than face the prospect of death at the hands of Emperor Tiberius. His body was weighed down with stones and hurled into the Tiber. The result was a bout of the most atrocious weather the Romans had ever seen. He was hastily recovered and taken to Vienne - in a show of contempt for its inhabitants - where he was thrown into the Rhone. Further storms and tempests ensued, so he was fished out once again and thrown into the waters at Lausanne. Here, too, Pilate worked his malevolence so he was salvaged for a third time and dumped in a lake on a mountain above Lucerne. For good measure his wife Procla was tossed into a nearby pond. The storms were phenomenal.
When the local bishop strode forth to exorcise the lake he met with qualified success. The weather returned to normal but Pilate demanded a quid pro quo. Every Good Friday he would rise from the lake on his judge’s throne, dressed in scarlet robes. Anyone who saw him would die before the year was out. The bargain was struck.
Pilate remained quiet, save that a number of locals died every year from unexplained causes - obviously they had seen the scarlet apparition - and now and then Pilatus would be subject to horrendous blizzards, clearly brought about by folk who taunted Pilate by throwing stones into the lake or by mobbing him in some other disrespectful fashion. To avert calamity the authorities expressly forbade anyone to approach the mountain without an approved guide. When six clerics tried to climb the hill unaided in 1387 they were imprisoned. For centuries Mount Pilatus, as it became known, was forbidden territory.
In the sixteenth century, a number of brave men put Pilatus to the test. In August 1518 Joachim von Watt, Burgomaster of St Gall, obtained permission from the authorities to go up the mountain. Following the advice of his guide he did nothing untoward near the lake and managed to climb one of Pilatus’s peaks. He was followed in 1555 by Conrad Gesner who set out on 20 August with a small body of men - among them the court usher of Lucerne who carried on his back a sustaining quantity of wine - and reached the actual peak without disaster. He marked his conquest with a blast on an alpen-horn. Then, in 1585, Pastor Johann Müller of Lucerne did the unheard of: he climbed the mountain and deliberately threw stones into the lake. Nothing happened.
Of these three conquests, Müller’s would appear initially to be the most important. He had set out to quash a superstition and he had been successful. It is Gesner’s climb, however, that deserves most attention. For Gesner was not out to slay dragons. What he wanted to do was see the Alps in a new light, as spiritual totems whose summits would lead him to greater awareness of the world about him. In 1541, far ahead of his time, he declared that ‘The consciousness is in some vague way impressed by the stupendous heights and is drawn to the contemplation of the Great Architect. Men of dull mind admire nothing, sleep at home, never go out into the Theatre of the World, hide in corners like dormice, through the winter, never recognise that the human race was sent out into the world in order that through its marvels it should learn to recognise some higher Power, the Supreme Being himself.’6 Two years after climbing Pilatus he was able to express himself in greater detail. Writing in Latin, he told his limited readership that the Alps ‘are the Theatre of the Lord, displaying monuments of past ages, such as precipices, rocks, peaks, chasms, and never-melting glaciers’. And, he added quaintly, even if the walking was tiresome, the accommodation bad and the perils numerous, ‘it will be pleasant thereafter to recall the toils and dangers; it will gratify you to turn over these things in your mind and to tell them to friends’.7
Gesner was widely ignored and died in 1565. He did, however, set rolling a ball that would be caught almost two centuries later when Johann Scheuchzer, the Professor of Physics at Zürich University, wrote a definitive study of the Alps. From August 1702 he undertook nine journeys through the mountains and published his findings in 1723 under the title Itinera per Helvetiae Alpinas Regiones. Scheuchzer had a solid reputation in his field - the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz was one of his supporters - and he was a notoriously modern thinker: he propagated Sir Isaac Newton’s notions of gravity, for example, and opposed capital punishment for witchcraft. When his two-volume work came out, therefore, people were expecting something special. Scheuchzer did not disappoint. His enquiring mind made a number of botanical and mineralogical discoveries that were of benefit to science as well as a number of personal observations that were not. At Fürstenau he encountered a cheese that had been treated with wine and oil of cloves for so many years that it had become a porridge - ‘which for connoisseurs of such food has a particularly delicious flavour’.8 From the quarries of Oehningen he received a fossil that he believed was the missing link and which he triumphantly named Homo diluvii testis. (It was later found to be a species of giant newt.) He wondered at glaciers, and came to the conclusion that their movement was caused by the expansion of water trapped in their crevasses. Near Brig he discovered a super-intelligent community, most of whose members shared the surname Supersaxo, who were fluent in German, French, Italian and Latin and descended from a sixteenth-century Italian count who had sired twelve sons and eleven daughters.
Scheuchzer shunned the peaks. He was not, by inclination, a climber. At the Sègnes Pass he warned that people prone to giddiness should try another route. At the Gemmi Pass he decided that its name came from the sighs (Latin gemitus) of those who tried to cross it. And at Leukerbad he became exasperated: ‘we have already climbed sufficient mountains, but we must get over one today which will give us enough to do’.9 His visit to the St Gotthard Pass was endurable only because it gave him an opportunity to talk about the formation of crystals. He had a stab at Pilatus but ‘partly because of bodily fatigue and partly because of the distance remaining to be traversed’10 he did not reach the summit. ‘Very few care for this laborious kind of pursuit, which is by no means lucrative,’ he commented. ‘It is not everyone who can take pleasure in climbing hills which reach the clouds.’11 Nevertheless, he did cover a lot of ground and if some of his observations seemed absurd - such as his belief that certain chamois possessed a stone in their bellies which rendered them immune to bullets - others did not. His theory of glacial movement would not be bettered for almost 150 years. Above all, he set at rest a question that had haunted people for a long time. Yes, the Alps did contain dragons.
From a number of reliable witnesses, Scheuchzer compiled a list of these creatures. There was one that had the body of a snake and the head of a cat. Another had four short legs and a coxcomb. A third was a snake equipped with bat’s wings. Some had crests. (Were crested dragons the cock of the species? he wondered.) The best specimen of all had the head of a ginger tom, a snake’s tongue, scaly legs and a hairy, two-pronged tail. Its eyes sparkled horribly. All it lacked was physical stature, being a mere two feet long.
Scheuchzer dismissed most of the dragon tales. But those in which he believed - including all the above - were accorded full respect. The ginger tom, for example, came from the Grisons, an area, according to Scheuchzer, that was ‘so mountainous and so well provided with caves, that it would be odd not to find dragons there’.12 One could tell the real article from the false by the number of birds they inhaled during their flight. Without wishing to seem alarmist, he concluded that ‘from the accounts of Swiss dragons and their comparison with those of other lands … it is clear that such animals really do exist’.13
Not everybody believed him. But for several years thereafter a respectful silence fell over the Alps.
The hush was broken in 1741 by two Britons, Messrs Pococke and Windham. In that year they led a small party of fellow countrymen to Chamonix, a valley in Savoy overlooked by Mont Blanc. It was an uneventful excursion by modern standards. The travellers entertained themselves by cracking whips and firing pistols to hear the echoes rattle off the mountains. They went up the Montenvers, marvelled at the ‘terrible havock’ made by avalanches, and gaped at the views, which were now ‘delicious’ and now ‘terrible enough to make most people’s heads turn’.14 Windham, the party’s main chronicler, was amazed by his first glaciers, and was quite taken aback by the Mer de Glace, a tremendous snake of ice that curled away below the Montenvers into a distance of needle-like peaks. ‘I own to you that I am extremely at a loss how to give a right idea of it,’ he wrote to a friend in Geneva, ‘as I know no one thing which I have ever seen that has the least resemblance to it. The description which travellers give of the seas of Greenland seems to come nearest to it. You must imagine your lake put in agitation by a strong wind, and frozen all at once, perhaps even that would not produce the same appearance.’15 Witches, he was told, came to ‘play their pranks on the glacieres [sic] and dance to the sound of their instruments’.16
They saw no witches; they saw no dragons; nor did they see any of the bandits they had been assured roamed the region, although Windham advised future visitors to go armed - ‘’tis an easy precaution … and oftentimes it helps a man out of a scrape’.17 In fact, the worst shock they received was of a dietary nature - ‘there are some places where one can get no provisions, and the little there is to be had in other places, is very bad’.18 Pococke, who had recently visited the Middle East and was a bit of a show-off, filled empty moments by dressing as an Oriental potentate, thereby causing the guides some anxiety. But otherwise a cheery time was had by all. They were unabashed tourists, and Windham did not try to hide it: ‘a man of genius might do many things we have not done. All the merit we can pretend to is having opened the way to others who may have curiosity of the same kind.’19
Others would indeed come to Chamonix, drawn as much by Pococke and Windham as by a new flourish of Alpine literature. In 1732, the Swiss naturalist and philosopher Albrecht von Haller had published the poem Die A/pen. Haller was widely respected throughout Europe and beyond. Such was his renown that, according to one story, when pirates once captured a ship carrying a case of books addressed to him they deposited the parcel at the next port with instructions that it be forwarded. His poem, which addressed the moral aspects of mountains rather than mountains themselves, was treated with similar reverence. It was reprinted thirty times during his lifetime and was recited by heart in the salons of France and Germany. Then there was the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the apostle of noble savagery, who was one of the first to suggest that powdered wigs and court glitter might not be the only measure of human worth. Rousseau favoured natural beauty over the artificial and slightly squalid fashions of the time, and in doing so started a craze for rugged scenery and rustic simplicity that has yet to abate. The Alps were the closest example of ruggedness to hand and, although Rousseau never did more than dally beneath them, his 1761 novel La Nouvelle Héloïse contained a long section describing their emotional impact. ‘There is something magical and supernatural in hill landscape which entrances the mind and the senses,’ ran one typical passage. ‘One forgets everything, one forgets one’s own being; one ceases to know where one stands.’20 Like Haller before him, he became one of the century’s bestselling authors.
Rousseau and Haller drew people to the Alps for their spiritual qualities. Pococke and Windham did the same in respect of their physical beauties. The mountains became a place of pilgrimage for literary-minded Europeans and for wealthy young Britons doing the Grand Tour. The Alps were painted and written about and marvelled at, and their glacial waters were quaffed by the gallon by those who had heard of their supposedly health-giving properties. People became aware that mountains need not be feared but could actually be enjoyed. The medieval attitude, which had hailed towns as oases of comfort in a harsh world, was replaced by an anti-urban trend. Parisians, for example, became conscious that in certain conditions travellers could smell their city before they even saw it. Other centres were the same. Pure air, clear skies and green trees suddenly became valuable and nowhere were these qualities more plentifully available than in the Alps. But although people came to the Alps they did not climb them. The new wave of tourism lapped no higher than the snowline. Pococke and Windham, for example, had trampled through Chamonix without once mentioning their constant companion, Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. Height, it seemed, was just as intimidating as ever.
Artists, writers and philosophers had popularised the Alps - or at least certain, easily accessible segments of them - but they had done little to explore them. Dragons, for all anyone knew, and hosts of demons and whole species of unknown humanity might yet inhabit the upper slopes. Nobody had a clue about glaciers, those monstrous seas of ice, constantly and inexplicably sliding downhill, whose snouts poked into most valleys; it was very seriously believed that they were the agents of the devil, and priests were routinely summoned to keep them at bay. The area remained a mystery, comprising ‘great excrescences of earth, which to outward appearance indeed have neither use nor comeliness’.21 It needed a scientific mind to probe its secrets, a mind such as belonged to a Genevan aristocrat named Horace Bénédict de Saussure.