John Tyndall was a pale, highly intelligent, very aggressive, Irish scientist who worked his way from obscurity to fame by sheer force of intellect. Born on 2 August 1820, he received a rudimentary education from a local priest and went on to work as a surveyor in England before studying in various European universities. To say he was quick would have been an understatement. In 1854 he wrote: ‘I am … sadly bewildered. I know nothing of magnetism. The experiments which everybody seems to understand are those which puzzle me most.’1 The following year he was lecturing on magnetism to the Royal Society. His forte, however, was gases, and he coughed himself sick over them as long as he lived. He later became one of Britain’s most famous physicists. He was a populariser rather than an innovator, but he gave his name to numerous discoveries - such as ‘Tyndall’s Scattering’, an analysis of light rays that explains why the sky looks blue. After Faraday he was the world’s most successful promoter of science: his books sold in thousands and his lectures were attended by as many.
Tyndall was thin but possessed huge hands and an enormous head on which were perched exaggerated features that betrayed humour and irritation in equal measure. He wore an under-the-chin beard in an attempt to make his long face look shorter - the style was known as a Newgate fringe, after the notorious London gallows - and he was usually seen in a tall hat which he hoped would achieve the same effect. Neither device worked; indeed, they made him look even stranger than he already did. He was probably aware of this, which may have fuelled his notoriously short temper. He instantaneously loathed anybody who disagreed with his views - once he offered to fight a man who spoke slightingly of his favourite poet, Carlyle - and he held strong views about the Alps.
He first visited the mountains in 1849 when, like Smith and so many others, he went on a walking tour as a student. He was very poor: ‘Trusting to my legs and stick, repudiating guides, eating bread and milk, and sleeping where possible in the country villages where nobody could detect my accent, I got through amazingly cheap.’2 He was more interested in the people he met and in the novelty of travelling alone than he was in the Alps themselves. The celebrated tourist peak of the Rigi, the view from which at sunrise and sunset was reckoned the most magnificent in the world, he described merely as ‘a cloudy mountain, famous for its guzzling and its noise’.3 When he came home he declared in Ruskinesque fashion that ‘the distant aspect of the Alps appeared to be far more glorious than the nearer view’.4 He would probably have continued to hold this opinion forever were it not for slaty cleavage.
Slaty cleavage, by which was meant a particular result of pressure upon mineral bodies, was the subject of a lecture that Tyndall gave to the Royal Institution on 10 June 1856. By this time he was a well-known and respected scientist - in 1853 he had been offered one of the Royal Society’s two annual medals but had turned it down in a fit of purism; the other one was accepted by Charles Darwin - and he and his fellow scientist and friend ‘I. H. Huxley, both of whom had read Forbes’s Travels, wondered if the theory of slaty cleavage might be applicable to the laminations Forbes had found in the glaciers. That summer they went to the Alps to investigate. Scientifically, the only interesting outcome of this visit was a furious spat that turned on an emendation suggested by Tyndall of the way in which glaciers moved and a query as to who had first formulated the idea of glaciers being plastic. Tyndall said it was Rendu via Agassiz, Forbes said it was himself. Tempers rose: ‘Forbes is not great man,’5 Tyndall wrote in his journal. A colleague went further, declaring that Forbes was ‘selfish, uncandid and ungenerous minded’,6 and that his reasonings were ‘contemptible from beginning to end’.7 Both men were about equal in scientific respectability, intransigence, temper and health - Forbes suffered from gastric problems, Tyndall from chronic indigestion and insomnia - and they enjoyed a choleric correspondence from which Forbes emerged, narrowly, as the victor. This was was quite some victory for, as one man said, Tyndall was ‘in debate a terribly rough and unconquerable antagonist… he enjoys an intellectual fence for its own sake, and I am not sure that his own dexterity in inflicting sharp lashes is not a source of amusement to him’.8 Amongst Tyndall’s peers there was a quiet joy that he had met his match.
On a secondary but more lasting level, Tyndall fell in love with the Alps. ‘By and by,’ he had written in 1855, ‘when the mind has grown too large for its mansion, it often finds difficulty in breaking down the walls of what has become its prison instead of its home.’9 A troubled agnostic, he wanted something more emotive than science and more tangible than religion: ‘My power over science is, I think, increasing greatly; but the power and vigour of what I call my soul is not commensurate,’10 he wrote in the same year. The Alps offered the physical and spiritual release he craved. Relaxing after a climb with Huxley he ate a meal of mutton and fried potatoes, washed down with cool, fizzy Sallenches beer. ‘I can hardly think it possible for [anyone] to be more happy than we then were,’ he wrote.11 In a letter to Michael Faraday dated 27 August 1856 he said little about science and much about the view to be had from the Bernese Oberland glaciers:
A scene of indescribable magnificence opened before us. Right in front was the mighty mass of the Finsteraarhorn, further towards the horizon was the grand peak of the Weisshorn, more to the left we had the snowy summits of Monte Rosa, by the side of which the cone of the Matterhorn rose like a black savage tattooed with streaks of snow. Still further to the left the chain of the Furca, with shoulders of snow as smooth as chiselled Carrara marble, completed the picture; and over all this the glorious sun poured his undimmed radiance. It was a scene calculated to stir the heart of man, and to carve for itself an everlasting place in his memory.12
Against this, slaty cleavage seemed a trifle dull.
Tyndall continued to make forays into the Alps, and reiterated constantly that he was doing so only for scientific purposes. Simultaneously, he announced that there was nothing he liked so much as a difficult climb over undiscovered slopes. Bit by bit, and without for a moment admitting it, he mutated from scientist to explorer - a move that reflected the overall trend. With the great glacier question more or less solved, the Alps were of diminishing interest to scientists. This did not mean that they had nothing to offer. Quite the contrary: geologists, botanists, astronomers, meteorologists, glaciologists and geographers still found plenty to occupy them. But in relative terms science no longer held sway as it had done. The great game for modern explorers was to cover new ground, to scale unclimbed peaks and - though it would be a while before anyone expressed it in so many words - to examine the inner, spiritual benefits which mountaineering conferred.
Within a few years Tyndall was climbing for the sheer pleasure of it. Reading the journals of his climbing years one gets an idea of the forces that drove him. At home, in London, his health was appalling: he was plagued by constant headaches; every month he was wracked by some new pain in other parts of his body; his digestion was so dreadful that once, having eaten some bread and butter for breakfast and a bowl of soup for lunch, he had to go for a three-hour walk to relieve the discomfort. The heaviest he ever weighed was ten stone, and that with his clothes on. Worst of all was his insomnia: perhaps one night in thirty he managed six hours’ sleep; for the rest he got by with five minutes and the odd doze. He tried to combat his condition with a careful, but ineffective, combination of plain food, brandy, cigars, chloroform and exercise. Every day he went for an hour’s walk around Kensington Gardens; sometimes he would run instead of walk. He wanted desperately to find a wife but feared that his age, physical oddness and devotion to science were against him. His loneliness was exacerbated by an extraordinary fondness for children. His scientific mind forbade him any comfort in religion and he was outspoken on that other Victorian solace, spiritualism.
In the Alps, Tyndall forgot his pains. His digestion improved, he slept better and he was able to forget his matrimonial disappointments. He also found there a source of comfort which he was hard pressed to define but which seemed to fill a void. ‘There are certain aspects of nature,’ he wrote, ‘which … utter or make manifest the human soul.’13 In similar vein: ‘The soul is a form into which those masses pour themselves thus imparting to it their mass and vigour.’14 From being a catalogue of woes and doubts his journal became, during the months of July, August and September, a model of positive thinking. ‘Hail to the Alps!’15 began a typical entry, as he embarked on a new spree of mountaineering. Infused with the strength of the hills, he went up them in a maniacal display of toughness. In 1858 he climbed the Finsteraarhorn once and Monte Rosa twice - on the second occasion he did so with no guides, no porters and no provisions save a bottle of tea and a ham sandwich. At the top he dropped his axe without which he would have been unable to make his descent. It slid towards the edge of the precipice and came to a rest 30 yards from the brink. He regained it and made light of the incident in his journal. But as he told a friend towards the end of his life, it had been the worst moment of his life. Later that season he climbed Mont Blanc with Wills and Auguste Balmat in conditions so appalling that Balmat nearly lost both hands to frostbite and the porters looked ‘like worn old men, their hair and clothing white with snow, and their faces blue, withered, and anxious-looking’.16 The following year he took Balmat to Mont Blanc again for the purpose of erecting a chain of permanent thermometers up and down its slopes. He felt ill when he started, and became sicker as he went on. But he refused to give up - ‘had I faltered my party would have melted away’17 - and proceeded to spend a record twenty hours on the summit at 5°F below freezing, firing pistols to test the transmission of sound waves, lighting candles to see how fast they burned, sending rockets up to check on the speed and extent of their combustion and making careful observations of transmitted and reflected light at sunrise. Then he returned to Chamonix having lost his temper only once and presumably -although he did not mention it - still feeling sick.
Describing his lust for hardship, he wrote that ‘Vague and deep combinations organised in barbarous times, have come down with considerable force to me.’18 It was almost as if he was trying to redefine himself as one of Rousseau’s noble savages. If he succeeded in doing so it was as a particularly aggressive Victorian savage. He attacked mountains with ferocity, ambitious to conquer, keen to break new ground - scientific, geographical or spiritual, it did not matter which - determined to succeed, to free his mind from its mansion and his soul from its fetters. He quickly gained a reputation. ‘One of the best mountaineers is one of the foremost Engish scientists,’ wrote the Belgian economist Émile de Laveleye, ‘all through the Swiss Alpine districts people know of him … [as] a hardy and dauntless mountaineer … Guides never mention him … save with the utmost respect.’19 His friend Huxley was so struck by his tenacity that he nicknamed him ‘Cat’. No longer was Tyndall an odd man with a long face, silly beard and narrow shoulders. He may still have possessed all these physical attributes - his shoulders did fill out with time - yet such was his presence that he came across as a giant. A Genevan climber named Thioly, who had a temper to match Tyndall’s, recalled meeting him. ‘Mr. Tyndall … stared me up and down from head to foot (I was wearing white canvas gaiters), just as a member of the Jockey Club might look at the legs of a racehorse. As I was not completely arrayed in wools and furs, I was to him only an amateur, a meddler attempting to defy the giant of the Alps, erected by God himself for the exclusive use of English mountaineers.’20 In the laboratory Tyndall was a diligent practitioner. In the mountains he was the lord of all creation.
As a mountaineer Tyndall was among the first to realise that if people wished to reach the unknown they had better refine their technique for doing so. Mountaineering skills had reached a certain level in the sixteenth century and since then had hardly advanced at all. Climbers went to the hills equipped with an alpenstock and crampons but little else. In Chamonix, the typical alpenstock was seven or eight feet long, tipped with an iron ferrule; it was good for surmounting steep glaciers, it was a magnificent glissading pole and, turned horizontally, it made a good trapeze when snow bridges disintegrated beneath your feet. But it was unwieldy; and its length was so smooth that unless you gripped the top it was all but useless as a stay. Oberlanders were slightly more sophisticated, favouring shorter poles equipped with a small axehead that could be hooked into crevices to give the user extra purchase. Both Chamoniards and Oberlanders carried a small hatchet for cutting ice steps. The modern ice axe with a pick and a blade was in its infancy. Crampons were only slightly more advanced. In the late eighteenth century Chamonix hunters had used crampons that consisted of a single bar of iron strapped beneath the instep of each foot; Saussure had found this incredibly uncomfortable and had suggested a better device comprising a human horseshoe studded with nails at the front and sides. It was adopted without question - it was anyway already commonplace in the Oberland. Trusting nobody in the matter of footwear, Britons eschewed crampons altogether and drove two rows of triple-headed tacks around their double-soled ‘London’ boots. (Continental tacks were acceptable in an emergency, but travellers were advised to purchase the genuine item from a reputable bootmaker in the Strand.) When it came to ropes, however, Chamoniards, Oberlanders and Britons were equally obtuse. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the use of ropes was considered unmanly and unprofessional -dangerous, even: it was universally held that if a party was roped on a steep slope and one member slipped, then everybody else would be dragged to their doom with him. No, ropes were not for serious climbers, they were a placebo for the faint-hearted. Guides would string a line of tourists together and lead them over the glaciers holding onto either end of the rope as if it were a dog’s lead. When ropes were deemed necessary on major ascents, the same philosophy prevailed: stout hessian and good knots gave the étrangers a sense of security, but the guides still preferred just to hold on, or, at a pinch, to loop the rope around a free arm.
The first suggestion that ropes could save lives had come in the aftermath of the Hamel disaster. Dornford, however, had quashed the idea. As a survivor he could state confidently that ropes were a hindrance to climbing and the lack of them had probably saved his life. In that particular case he may have been right for the counterweight of one man, two men or even 20 men would have been as nothing against the force of an avalanche. There were other cases, however, where he was wrong and this was quickly spotted by members of the Alpine Club - among them Tyndall.
The weather in 1860 was as bad as the Alps had experienced in years. Nevertheless, three Britons accompanied by three guides, decided to climb the Col du Géant. They reached the top without any trouble but on the way down the Britons felt tired: they opted for a short cut via a treacherous snow slope rather than take the longer but safer route over rocks. (This was another realisation that was slowly dawning on the mountaineering community: rocks, although harder and apparently less sure than snow, held fewer perils because they were avalanche-free and their solidity was not so dependent on the weather. Tyndall, ahead of his time, was a rock man.) The Britons were roped together with one guide, Frédéric Tairraz, on the rope between them. The other two guides, as was customary, held the rope at either end. Exhausted, one of the Britons slipped. He dragged first Tairraz and then his two companions off their feet. All four slid through the fresh snow, precipitating an avalanche that swept them to their deaths. The guides who should have been supporting them, either had the rope pulled from their hands or let go. Tyndall was in the area at the time and, being a member of the Alpine Club and therefore a sort of Honorary Consul to the state of mountaineering, he decided to investigate the accident. His findings were grim.
Accompanied by one guide from Courmayeur, he climbed the slopes down which the climbers had fallen. It was not hard to follow their route. At regular intervals his hand grasped for a rock only to find traces of the dead men’s passage - a penknife, a compass, scraps of cloth, a brand-new axe. On reaching the col he was deeply depressed: ‘As I stood there and scanned the line of my ascent a feeling of augmented sadness took possession of me. There seemed no sufficient reason for this terrible catastrophe. With ordinary care the slip might in the first instance have been avoided, and with a moderate amount of skill and vigour the motion, I am persuaded, might have been arrested soon after it had begun.’21
Meticulously, Tyndall reconstructed the disaster. The weather had been foggy and by the time they reached the top everybody was in a state of fatigue. Even on the gentler slopes one of the Britons had slipped repeatedly. Coming down, the guides should have been alert to the danger of letting weary men enter difficult ground. But they weren’t. The first man slipped and the others came down after him. They slid, gathering momentum as the snow crust separated from the ice below, and flew over a ridge of rocks that marked the top of a precipice. The ridge gave them an upward lift which carried them over a steep slope of rocks leading to the brink of a second precipice. They bounced over this and hurtled towards a third. One Briton stopped at the bottom of the second precipice, another stuck on the edge of the third and the last dangled over the lip, still attached to his companion by the rope. Tyndall did not say exactly where Tairraz landed, but it was much lower down and in consequence the body ‘was much more broken’.22
Tyndall was certain that they all died painlessly: ‘I do not think a single second’s suffering could have been endured. During the wild rush downwards the bewilderment was too great to permit even of fear, and at the base of the precipice life and feeling suddenly ended together.’23 He was also certain that the Britons died as Britons should. ‘Tairraz screamed,’ he recorded, ‘but, like Englishmen, the others met their doom without a word of exclamation.’24 And he was even more certain that the two other guides had been derelict in their duties: ‘What efforts were made to check their fearful rush, at what point the two guides relinquished the rope, which of them gave way first, the public does not know, though this ought to be known. All that is known to the public is that the two men who led and followed the party let go the rope and escaped, while the three Englishmen and Tairraz went to their destruction.’25
Tyndall’s verdict was that inadequate use had been made of the rope. ‘Each man as he fell ought to have turned promptly on his face, pierced with his armed staff the superficial layer of soft snow, and pressed with both hands the spike into the consolidated mass beneath. He would thus have applied a brake, sufficient not only to ring himself to rest, but, if well done, sufficient, I believe, to stop a second person.’26 The fallers had been unable to do so, for some reason - a note of reproof enters Tyndall’s analysis at this point - but the guides on either end could have, had they been roped around the waist leaving both hands free to deploy the alpenstock. ‘I do not lightly express this opinion,’ Tyndall concluded, ‘it is founded on various experience upon slopes at least as steep as that under consideration.’27
An enquiry exonerated the surviving guides of all blame, sending Tyndall into paroxysms of outrage. ‘A catastrophe of this kind ought not to be suffered to be skimmed over by a mere judicial acquittal,’ he wrote to The Times. ‘What can an ordinary Government official know of the power or the duty of a guide under such circumstances? Cast such an official upon such a slope; he will infallibly go to smash, and he naturally concludes that all others must do so in similar circumstances. But little weight is to be attached to the opinion of any man unpractised in such matters … The guides of Chamonix ought to regard this terrible disaster as a stain upon their order which it will require years of service faithfully and wisely rendered to wipe away.’28
Tyndall’s letter was printed on 8 September 1860. Four days later a correspondent gave the following reply: ‘I would … inquire what right we wealthy strangers have, making Switzerland our playground, thus to thrust ourselves in sheer wantonness into all manner of dangerous positions, bribing the poor people of the country to aid and protect us in doing so at the peril of their own lives.’ He asked Tyndall to imagine what might happen if the Swiss descended on the Highlands of Scotland, sending ‘their overfed and plethoric men of pleasure and their wan and jaded lawyers’ to climb a hill accompanied by whatever locals were willing to accept their money. What then, if they slipped and fell? Would the Highlanders be to blame? Or would the Swiss be responsible, for having lured them with their bottomless moneybags to try feats they had never attempted before? ‘And then imagine,’ he concluded, ‘a Swiss Mr. Tyndall writing to The Times to denounce and censure the uneducated peasants who had been enticed into the foolish and deadly undertaking by educated men like himself who ought to have known better.’29 The writer signed himself COMMON SENSE.
The Alpine Club hastened to Tyndall’s rescue. A flock of letters landed on the editor’s desk - most of them anonymous, most of then published - rebutting all of COMMON SENSE’S arguments. The guides knew what they were doing; guiding was the best chance they had of making money; they earned little enough as it was; and the risks were minimal compared to their usual occupation, chamois-hunting. Tyndall’s was the one absent voice. But he had never been prone to argument in the press.
Unlike many of his fellow climbers, Tyndall did not lose sight of the dangers inherent in mountaineering. ‘The perils of wandering in the High Alps are terribly real,’ he warned, ‘and are only to be met by knowledge, caution, skill and strength.’30 This was the right attitude and he was supported in it by many fellow members of the Alpine Club. Strangely, however, there were some who thought the dangers exaggerated. ‘With tolerable training and proper precaution, nothing serious need be apprehended,’31 stated the climber Thomas Hinchliff. More extraordinarily, Kennedy announced after ascending Mont Blanc that ‘the risk of serious accident was but little greater than that incurred by the pedestrian in the streets of London’.32 The very clothes of some climbers suggested insouciance: back in 1787 Beaufoy had conquered Europe’s highest mountain in what he described as little more than a pair of pyjamas; Wills went up the Wetterhorn wearing elastic-sided boots and cricketing flannels; Smith’s Cambridge companions climbed Mont Blanc in ‘a light boating attire’.33 It was not that these people underrated the hazards of the Alps, simply that they thought they knew how to handle them. Their judgement was clouded by familiarity. They needed a shake-up and they got it in 1861 when the glaciers of Mont Blanc oozed forth a timely reminder.
In the spring of 1861, Tyndall invited Auguste Balmat to speak at a meeting in the British Museum. The occasion started uneventfully but, halfway through, Balmat was interrupted by an old man in the audience. Was he from Chamonix, the man wanted to know? Balmat admitted that he was. ‘Then when are you going to recover the bodies of my three guides?’ the man snapped. ‘I am Dr. Hamel.’ Balmat could only stutter that he was sure they would surface sooner or later. ‘Yes, yes, I think so too, and it’ll be a happy day for Chamonix,’ sneered Hamel. ‘They’ll make very interesting museum exhibits and lots of tourists will come to see them.’34 In the commotion that ensued, Balmat sat down and said nothing more. For forty-one years, ever since the disaster of 1820, Chamoniards had execrated the Russian doctor who, they believed, had brought about the deaths of three brave men; his name had become legendary, the stuff of cautionary tales and childhood admonishments. Meeting Hamel was, for Balmat, like meeting the tiger under the bed.
Hamel’s acerbic reappearance was not coincidental. In 1858, during his last visit to Chamonix, Professor James Forbes had calculated that if his measurements of the various glaciers’ speeds was correct, the bodies of Hamel’s guides would emerge between thirty-eight and forty years after the accident. He was only a year out. On 12 August 1861 a panting guide arrived at the Chamonix town hall with a sack on his back. It contained a number of items he had found in a crevasse at the bottom of the Glacier des Bossons. The sack was opened and its contents spread across a table for inspection by M. Million, the local doctor. Million closed the doors and began his examination. His findings, which were delivered in the subsequent procès-verbal and later published under a pseudonym by the chief of police, read as follows:
More than three-quarters of two skulls with flesh attached.
Several tufts of blond and black hair adhering to the scalps.
An entire jaw bone displaying good, white teeth.
A fore-arm with the hand attached, the latter missing only one finger. Both displaying undecayed, white flesh, with traces of blood at the stump of the ring finger, and retaining a degree of flexibility at the joints.
One left foot, severed at the calf, the flesh undecayed and white, the bones firm but slightly darkened.
Several ribs, intact and broken, two sections of spinal column, and a number of other anatomical fragments shattered to a greater or lesser degree but all recognisable as being of human origin.
Alongside the remains lie several other items: several pieces of cloth - wool or linen; part of a waistcoat; half of a black felt hat, some lengths of woven straw, part of another hat; a hobnailed boot, its crampon still attached by a strap; the rim and the top of a white felt hat lined in yellow silk; a pigeon wing with black feathers; a length of dark pine attached to a rusted ferrule, and a piece of sharpened iron, also rusted, measuring 0.12 metres in length and 0.03 metres in diameter; a tin lantern, its base circular and flat; a gigot of cooked mutton, the only item amongst the remains that smells foul. The guide swears that on the glacier it was as odour-free as the rest…35
And so Million went on, detailing with clinical precision the relics arrayed before him, while outside the town hall a crowd of locals waited for news. Million ordered the doors to be opened only once, to admit Hamel’s two surviving guides: the octogenarian Julien Dévouassoud and Joseph-Marie Couttet, aged 72. Dévouassoud was now in his dotage and seemed to recognise or remember nothing. Couttet, however, identified everything with precision. The blond-haired skull belonged to Pierre Balmat. The other was that of Pierre Carrier. The silk-lined hat had been worn by Auguste Tairraz; and there was a wing from one of the pigeons he had been carrying. The iron segment had come from Couttet’s own alpenstock. As the litany went on, Couttet lost his composure and tried to shake the hand that lay on the table - ‘That is Balmat’s hand, I know it well!’36 he cried -but no further confirmation was needed. What Dr Million had before him was the split, mangled yet horribly fresh remains of three men who had fallen into a crevasse forty-one years before.
When Million was through, a search party was sent to the glacier to look for more remains. It was driven back by bad weather and not until the following year, a little lower down, was more debris recovered. Amongst the gruesome finds was a forearm that protruded horizontally from the wall of a crevasse, its hand offering itself as if to be shaken. The man who found it, one Francis Wey, did actually shake it. He noted that although the flesh was white the fingernails were pink and the knuckle joints were perfectly mobile. When he pulled it free there was no body attached, and as he held it in the sun its flesh began to wither and its nails faded to an opaque alabaster. Bit by bit, and lower with each passing season, more body parts seeped out. Another hand was recovered, which had gripped its alpenstock so tightly that splinters of wood were embedded in its palm. In 1863, to everybody’s distress, a portion of somebody’s back became visible in the ice.
Exactly as Hamel had predicted, the relics were handed to the great-niece of one of the guides, in whose home they were displayed in a coffin to be gawped at by tourists. Such was the demand that her door was open twenty-four hours a day. The remains were finally buried in a communal grave - except the foot, which was immured in a glass case by the Department of Museums at Annecy. The grave was opened eight times in the next two years to accommodate additional pieces of body. Meanwhile, the simplest articles retrieved from the glacier sold for a phenomenal sum. Little scraps of cloth fetched ten francs; larger rolls of material went for 100 francs a metre. An iron crampon and part of a tin lantern fetched almost their weight in gold. Back in London, the Alpine Club railed against such commercialism: ‘It is sincerely to be hoped that a degrading trade in these relics will not be allowed to spring up at Chamonix.’37 It had no effect. An Englishman paid one pound sterling for a trouser button.
If anything gave mountaineers a jolt, it was the discovery of these remains. Having witnessed the hideous results of a process that shredded men, very slowly, limb from limb and then ejected them in as pristine a state as if they had died the day before, they became more subdued in their estimates of the Alps’ dangers. There was no more talk of the risks involved in crossing a London street, nor was there a great deal of support for cricketing flannels as the ideal climbing trouser. In succeeding years most mountaineers wore plus fours made of tweed (now considered out of date, but an excellent material in damp conditions) and were very cautious in the vicinity of glaciers. They also roped up properly - some of the time.