Normally, Edward Shirley Kennedy knew how to write. On occasion, however, he could produce blisteringly awful prose. In 1855, when he climbed Mont Blanc with the Revd Charles Hudson -one of the Golden Age’s most talented climbers - he wondered why they should try such a tired old hill on which so many scientific experiments had been made: ‘May we add yet another drop to that mountain cup of knowledge, which is about to overflow?’ Kennedy asked purply. ‘The knapsack of Alpine lore is closing; and can we venture to assert that they who pack it leave one small corner unoccupied?’1 His answer was that ‘the ascent of this monarch of mountains gave us unbounded gratification’.2 In other words, they did it just for the fun - and for the satisfaction of attacking it from such a direction as to avoid the iniquitous charges levied by the Chamonix Compagnie des Guides. But he was right in one respect: the knapsack was closing, and as the throng of Alpine Club members picked off more and more peaks there remained only one that ranked alongside Mont Blanc as the ultimate challenge: the Matterhorn.
Travellers and scientists had seen the Matterhorn from afar. But they had never dared dream of climbing it. Why not? Because it wasn’t a mountain, it was a rock, the biggest rock in the known world, a rock that defied humankind with its absolute grandeur and its sheer faces. It was a decaying rock, and centuries of erosion had created an embankment of smaller rocks around its base. Twenty-four hours a day boulders dribbled down its flanks before smashing into the debris below. In winter its faces were covered with unstable snow; in summer the snow became a varnish of black ice. There was no clear way up it and its slopes were so impenetrably awful that nobody had ever thought of finding one. Anyway, dragons lived there.
Tyndall did not believe in dragons. He believed in what he saw, and what he saw was beauty. ‘The summit seemed to smoke sometimes like a burning mountain,’ he wrote, ‘for immediately after its generation, the fog was drawn away in long filaments by the wind. As the sun sank lower the ruddiness of his light augmented, until these filaments resembled streamers of flame.’3 In 1860 he and a friend named Vaughan Hawkins decided to climb the Matterhorn with the Oberland guide Johann Bennen. Everybody in the Alpine Club had a favourite guide, and Bennen was Tyndall’s. Tyndall had an uncomfortable relationship with his guides. In 1857, when he made his first ascent of Mont Blanc, he refused the services of Auguste Balmat -’the cunning of the boy did not please me’4 - and chose a guide called Simond who was apparently even more unsatisfactory: ‘Had a disaster occurred he certainly would have been clear of blame, for from beginning to end a word of encouragement never crossed his lips … Simond “fears” - his fears are perpetual. He is forever anticipating difficulty.’5 Having accomplished the climb, Tyndall met again ‘that grasping little Balmat … [he] put me on the whole in a humour which would have found pleasure in kicking him’.6 Later, of another respected guide named Christian Lauener, he wrote that he did not like him because his trousers were too baggy: ‘you prefer a machine whose parts work more easily, and do not expend their work in friction at the places of contact’.7
In Bennen, however, Tyndall found the man he wanted. When he first met him in 1858 he described him thus:
His round shoulders were bent forward, and set firmly upon them was a thick pedestal of a neck, which bore a massive round head. He wore earrings. His trunk was of the same width throughout: his pelvis was broad, which set his legs rather far apart, but a slight bow neutralised this to some extent. His limbs were massive but moved with alacrity and firmness. The man’s countenance was firm and straightforward looking while a light of good nature broke from his eye and made his face pleasant to look upon. In short, the whole man gives the impression of great physical strength combined with great decision of character.8
Hawkins was equally enthusiastic, describing Bennen as ‘remarkable’. He belonged to
a type of mountain race having many of the simple heroic qualities which we associate, whether justly or unjustly, with Teutonic blood, and essentially different from - to my mind, infinitely superior to - the French-speaking, versatile, wily Chamoniard … he surpasses all the rest in the qualities which fit a man for a leader in hazardous expeditions, combining boldness and prudence with an ease and power peculiar to himself, so he has a faculty of conceiving and planning his achievements, a way of concentrating his mind upon an idea, and working out his idea with clearness and decision, which I never observed in any man of the kind … any one who has watched Bennen skimming along through the mazes of a crevassed glacier, or running like a chamois along the side of slippery ice-covered crags, axe and foot keeping time together, will think that nothing could bring him to grief but an avalanche.9
When Tyndall called him the Garibaldi of mountaineering, Bennen replied, ‘Am I not?’10
In fact, Bennen was far less remarkable than Tyndall and Hawkins thought. He was hesitant, sometimes nervous, and wanted not so much to lead as to be told where to lead. Having lost his wife he shunned society and moved homes with odd regularity on the grounds that the people did not suit him. In 1860 he was living at Laax with his mother and three sisters where, as Hawkins surmised, ‘I guess him to be not perhaps altogether at home.’11
Not often at this date did Alpine Club members give much thought to their guides’ characters. With one or two exceptions they preferred them to be stereotypes and portrayed them as such. In almost every journal the guide comes across as a simple, manly type with lungs like bellows, legs of steel, a hearty laugh, a keen eye and manners as perfect as any to be found in London society. Occasionally they were allowed wit, as in the case of Wills’s guide Franz Andermatten whose favourite, and oft-quoted, expression with regard to difficult ascents was ‘Es muss gehen!’ - ‘It must be done!’ or literally, ‘It must go!’ (It sprang from a mildly risqué joke that involved a priest, a lecherous old man and the latter’s chances of getting into heaven.) On one memorable occasion an Englishman pointed at a difficult peak and tried to cajole Andermatten into climbing it with the words ‘It must go!’ Andermatten replied that it might well go but he wasn’t.
When it came to Bennen the picture shimmered. He was agile yet recalcitrant, determined yet timorous, at one moment bold at another frightened. He was hearty when heartiness was required but had a disturbing tendency to burst into tears. In private he was almost a misanthrope. Out of season he worked on his own as a carpenter and went chamois-hunting with a silent friend named Bortis. One gets the impression that he climbed for the same reason as did his employers: he sought release. Whatever demons might lurk on the peaks, they were imps against those that bedevilled him in the valleys.
The Matterhorn, up which Bennen was to lead Tyndall, lay on the boundary between Switzerland and Italy and could be approached from two different directions. One was from the north, from Zermatt. This was considered beyond the bounds of human capability. A single glance was enough to dissuade people from climbing it. Like most north faces in the Alps it was sheer rock and seemed to offer not the smallest handhold. The other approach was from the south, from Breuil in Italy, where glaciers and a series of minor peaks presented a better chance of reaching the summit. Hawkins and Bennen had surveyed the Matterhorn in 1859 and had decided that they could reach the top from Breuil - ‘almost’, according to Bennen - and so, with Tyndall (whom Hawkins had met by chance on the train to Basle), they set about conquering the giant.
Tyndall may have not believed in dragons, but Hawkins did - or if not dragons, then something similar. ‘The mountain has a sort of prestige of invincibility,’ he wrote, ‘which is not without its influence on the mind, and almost leads one to expect to encounter some new and unheard-of source of peril upon it.’12 In 1860 the perils included not only falling rocks but a shroud of snow that obliterated the terraces up which they had planned their route. Even before they started they realised that they had little chance of reaching the top. But they went ahead anyway, if only to show that the mountain could be approached. They took with them a shaggy-haired, easy-going porter named César Carrel who was said to be the best man for the job. He was 40 or 50 - it was hard to tell - and had a sense of humour as well as a sense of what was possible. He was willing to go wherever he was directed but, as Hawkins wrote, ‘I don’t think his ideas of our success were ever very sanguine.’13
The group left their hotel at Breuil at 3.00 a.m. on Monday, 20 August, Carrel carrying a lantern to see them over the rough patches. Beyond its light the Matterhorn’s outline beckoned against a nascent dawn. ‘Measuring with the eye the distance subtended by the height we have to climb, it seems as if success must be possible,’14 Hawkins recorded. It was a climb unlike any other that had been attempted before. Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Wetterhorn and even the Breithorn were by and large snow mountains. The Matterhorn was rock - except that in this year it was also ice with a thin covering of snow. Up they hacked, Tyndall shouting down constantly to remind Hawkins of what he called ‘the conditions’. The conditions were that Hawkins should turn on his face if he slipped and drive his alpenstock into the snow. If he did not do so, or if he rolled onto his back, it ‘is all over, unless others can save you: you have lost all chance of helping yourself’.15 Soon, however, they found themselves free of snow and were onto a plateau. ‘We are immersed in a wilderness of blocks, roofed and festooned with huge plates and stalactites of ice,’ Hawkins wrote, ‘so large that one is half disposed to seize hold and clamber up them.’16 Bennen searched for an escape from this surreal landscape and eventually found one: it was a narrow ledge, above which rose a cliff that lacked any handholds and below which the mountain dropped sheer to the glacier below. The ledge was 1 foot wide and had a pronounced slope. They inched their way along it. Hawkins was scared: ‘if the nails in our boots hold not, down we shall go’.17 At one point they rounded a jutting rock to find themselves under a waterfall. They strode through it. On the other side the ledge stopped.
Dripping, they surveyed their options. The only possible way up was via a chimney of rock. But Tyndall and Hawkins could not imagine how anybody could climb it. Its sides were covered with an inch of black ice; the top was out of their sight; and the bottom opened onto space. Neither of the two Britons could explain what Bennen did next. One moment he was standing on the ledge, the next he had rolled ‘like a cat’18 to the top of the chimney and was lowering a rope to help the others up. Tyndall went first, followed by Hawkins, who tried to brace himself against the walls but dropped, only to be saved by the rope. Carrel was hauled up afterwards.
Three hours later, after they had climbed an endless succession of ridges and snow slopes, Hawkins got fed up. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of such expeditions,’ he wrote, ‘and the impression had been gaining ground with me that the tide on the present occasion had turned against us.’19 Bennen thought there was still a chance and Tyndall ventured no opinion; he would do whatever the guide thought right. When Bennen reached ‘a mighty knob, huger and uglier than its fellows, to which a little arête of snow served as a sort of drawbridge’20 and insisted on climbing it, with Tyndall pushing on his heels, Hawkins let go the rope and sat down with Carrel to await the outcome.
As silence descended, and Carrel took out his pipe, Hawkins began to revise his opinion both of the climb’s practicability and the beauties of mountain scenery. ‘The air was preternaturally still,’ he wrote, ‘an occasional gust came eddying round the corner of the mountain, but all else seemed strangely rigid and motionless, and out of keeping with the beating hearts and moving limbs, the life and activity of man. These stones and ice have no mercy in them, no sympathy with human adventure; they submit passively to what man can do; but let him go a step too far, let heart or hand fail, mist gather or sun go down, and they will exact the penalty to the uttermost. The feeling of “the sublime” in such cases depends very much, I think, on a certain balance between the forces of nature and man’s ability to cope with them: if they are too strong for him, what was sublime becomes only terrible.’ Had he been offered at that moment the finest Alpine sunset he would have seen not the vision of unearthly loveliness which so many had described so often, but only ‘the angry eye of the setting sun fixed on dark rocks and dead-white snow’.21
Shouting up to Tyndall, he asked how long he intended to be. ‘An hour and a half,’ came the reply. Hawkins felt lonelier than ever. As if the Matterhorn was aware of his despair, it hurled down a boulder. It fell from the crags above, bounced down the rock face and then careered along a nearby couloir, narrowly missing Hawkins. Along its way it shed a splinter that hit Tyndall in the throat, nearly choking him. This shot across their bows, plus the fact that time was running out, persuaded Tyndall and Bennen to retreat. ‘I was glad he had not gone on as long as he chose,’22 Hawkins recorded plaintively, as he heard the clatter of nails on rock grow louder.
The way down, in which Bennen repeated his mysterious trick with the ice chimney, was, in Hawkins’s opinion, as bad as the way up. Tyndall, however, seemed impervious to all perils. ‘Splendid practice for us, this!’23 he cried as he clambered across each successive difficulty. Roped between Tyndall and Carrel, who was now in such a haze of relaxedness that he had to be reminded constantly not to let go of the rope, Hawkins felt a touch queasy. After two hours they had overcome most of the major obstacles and were faced with the choice of continuing by the way they had come up or taking a short cut via a funnel of snow which issued onto the glacier below. Bennen was all for the snow: it was now afternoon and the rocks would be slippery with melting ice. But the funnel was ‘portentously steep, deeply lined with fresh snow, which glistens and melts in the sun’.24 It was perfect for an avalanche, as well as an obvious conduit for rocks falling from above. After a brief discussion, they opted to go down it.
Tyndall must have been either touched by the sun or very tired. Already he had relaxed his rules to allow Carrel - the last in the line, an important position - to hold the rope rather than tie it round himself. Now, instead of sticking to the hard ground as was his wont, he decided to go down the snow - precisely the same decision that killed the four men on the Col du Géant. There were a few small outcrops at the bottom of the funnel which he persuaded himself would halt them in the event of a slide - a strange theory, given his knowledge to the contrary, but one which he often used to justify a dangerous move. Hawkins was less sure: ‘Their tender mercies seem to me doubtful,’25 he wrote. The four men spreadeagled themselves and began to climb down the funnel following a zigzag course set by Brennen. No rocks fell but, sure enough, there was an avalanche. It fell to their right just after they had zagged to the left. It was a small one, but it slid with terrible speed. Hawkins, who was nearest, said it was like being in the carriage of a provincial train as the London express passed by. Luckily - incredibly luckily - that was their only bad moment. They reached the bottom without further adventure and floundered waist-deep over the glacier, heedless of crevasses. Above them, storm clouds gathered over the Matterhorn.
On reaching dry ground Tyndall ran as fast as he could for Breuil, leaving Hawkins, Brennen and Carrel to follow. They did so with a degree of dignity, stopping off at a chalet for a drink of milk for which they offered the cowherd 40 centimes. He refused the payment, saying it was too much. Hawkins was bewildered and humbled. Like Forbes and other climbers, he could not help reflecting on the difference between his world and the one inhabited by these simple, hospitable people. In the industrial age it seemed as if the ancient projections were true: the Alps did harbour an alien race.
Bennen, Tyndall, Hawkins and Carrel had achieved something quite impressive. They had climbed to a height of 13,000 feet on what was never intended to be more than a reconnaissance mission -despite Hawkins’s earlier hopes - and on their final burst Tyndall and Bennen had spied a relatively easy route to a peak that seemed to be a stepping stone to the summit itself. But Tyndall was discontented. ‘Had I felt we had done our best on this occasion,’ he wrote, ‘I should have relinquished all further thought of the mountain; but, unhappily, I felt the reverse, and thus a little cloud of dissatisfaction hung round the memory of the attempt.’26 He never stated explicitly what caused his dissatisfaction, but it may have been Bennen’s behaviour. On the final stretch, while he and Bennen were scrambling up the rocks in just the hazardous fashion that Tyndall liked best, Bennen had announced excitedly ‘I will lead you to the top!’ Tyndall was equally excited and would have shouted ‘Bravo!’ had he not been squashed like a frog against the rock, in such a position that filling his lungs for a shout would have dislodged him. Later, however, Bennen dithered, became doubtful and - one of the worst crimes a guide could commit, in Tyndall’s view - asked his employer what to do. Tyndall offered no opinion, and after further deliberation Bennen decided to retreat.
Tyndall was willing to be beaten by a mountain but he was not going to be beaten by a guide’s nervousness. In 1861 he arrived at Breuil, primed for a second attempt. Alas, Bennen announced it was not to happen. On inspection he found the mountain more difficult and dangerous than he had imagined. It was impossible to reach the top in a day and if they tried to spend the night on the slopes they would freeze to death. Tyndall was puzzled: people had slept on Mont Blanc without dying. Might they, he wondered, reach a lower peak, which was a long way below the main one but only 400-500 feet above where they had turned back the previous year? To this Bennen replied, ‘Even that is difficult. But when you have reached it, what then? The peak has neither name nor fame.’27 Tyndall did his best to keep an even temper. While listening to Bennen’s speech he stroked his beard thoughtfully; once the guide had gone he kicked the ground in anger, grinding his hobnails into the grass. Not being able to climb even one portion of the Matterhorn was ‘like the removal of a pleasant drug or the breaking down of a religious faith. I hardly knew what to do with myself. One thing was certain … the mountains alone could restore what I had lost.’28
That year Tyndall embarked on a ferocious campaign of mountaineering. From Grimsel he climbed the Eggishorn. From the Eggishorn he descended to the Aletsch Glacier and fell in love with the views to be had from the hotel at Bel Alp. He discovered a pine tree growing horizontally from the gorge at the end of the glacier and climbed along its trunk to bathe his frustrations in the cold breath that came from below: ‘I hugged its stem, and looked down into the gorge. It required several minutes to chase away my timidity, and as the wind blew more forcibly against me I clung with greater fixity to the tree. In this wild spot, and alone, I watched the dying fires of the day, until the latest glow had vanished from the mountains.’29
From Bel Alp he saw the grey pinnacle of the Sparrenhorn. He went up it. Later he went up the Monte Moro and after that the Old Weissthor too, during which he and Bennen were caught in a rockfall. They had risked a traverse across a gulley when a single boulder rumbled down on them. They ducked behind an outcrop and it sprang over their heads. In its wake, however, came a shoal of smaller rocks each of which was ‘quite competent to crack a human life’.30 At that moment they hung on a horribly steep slope of ice, which could only be crossed by hacking steps. A single slip would have meant death. ‘“Schnell!” with its metallic clang rang from the throat of Bennen; and never before had I seen his axe so promptly and vigorously applied.’31 Bennen chopped footholds and handholds - mere scratches, according to Tyndall - and led his party on a fingernail escape to the other side of the couloir. It was an astonishing display of coordination: while carving steps Bennen also had to dodge the cannonade of stones and at the same time protect his employer. ‘He once caught upon the handle of his axe,’ Tyndall wrote, ‘as a cricketer catches a ball upon his bat, a lump which might have finished my climbing.’32 Hacking, ducking and batting, Bennen led them with a final jump to an embankment that was out of the line of fire, ‘and we thus escaped a danger extremely exciting to us all’.33 Tyndall may have found it exciting but the others did not. The experienced guide Franz Andermatten, who was part of the team, was so shaken that he slipped on the next traverse, knocked Bennen off his legs and might have dragged everybody with him had he not halted his fall. Had he heard Tyndall’s later opinion that the rope ‘was not made in England, and was perhaps lighter than it should have been’,34 he would have been more shaken still. Eventually they reached the summit and had a bite of cold mutton washed down with champagne.
The Old Weissthor aside, Tyndall’s greatest achievement that year was the first ascent of the Weisshorn, a mountain that was 14,780 feet high and which was the most impressive thing to be seen from Zermatt other than the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa. ‘I have always regarded [it] as the noblest mountain in the Alps,’35 he wrote semi-truthfully to Faraday. He set out for it at 4.30 a.m. on Friday, 16 August 1861, leaving Bel Alp for Randa, near Zermatt, while ‘the eastern heaven was hot with the glow of the rising sun’.36 He had instructed Bennen to reconnoitre the Weisshorn - for once, the prognostication was favourable - and he had two pairs of rugs sewn together and forwarded to Randa in case sleeping bags were needed during the ascent.
Tyndall, Bennen and a guide named Wenger started for the Weisshorn from Randa at 1.00 p.m. on 18 August. Tyndall, as usual, had neither eaten well nor slept well but was fortified by a draught of milk at a chalet. ‘The effect … was astonishing,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed to lubricate every atom of my body, and to exhilarate with its fragrance my brain.’37 The sleeping bags were needed, and the team spent their first night in the open. Come sunset, Tyndall was agog. ‘An intensely illuminated geranium flower seems to swim in its own colour, which apparently surrounds the petals like a layer, and defeats by its lustre any attempt of the eye to seize upon the sharp outline of the leaves. A similar effect was observed upon the mountains … the crown of the Weisshorn was imbedded in this magnificent light.’38 He watched the stars wheeling over him and at length he covered his eyes with a handkerchief for fear he be blinded by the sight. He did not sleep.
At 3.35 a.m. the climb resumed. Tyndall shed his tweed jacket -’The sunbeams and my own exertion would keep me only too warm during the day’39 - and stowed it against his return. After three hours of slow progress they glimpsed the peak of the Weisshorn for the first time since leaving Randa. It looked as if it was within their grasp. When Tyndall remarked on this, Bennen replied grandly, ‘I do not allow myself to entertain the idea of failure.’40 Down below they could see the figures of two Randa guides who had set out with the idea of following them - maybe even beating them - to the summit. Tyndall was not worried: let the poor fools do their best; they were no match for Bennen, Wenger and himself; anyway, it could only be a short time before they were at the top.
Six hours later, however, the summit seemed no nearer and Tyndall was feeling unaccustomedly tired. ‘There is scarcely a position possible to my body into which it was not folded up at one time or another during the day,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes it was a fair pull upwards, sometimes an oblique twist round the corner of a rock tower; sometimes it was the grip of the finger ends in a fissure and lateral shifting of the whole body in a line parallel to the crack. Many times I found myself with my feet highest and my head lowest.’41 The worst moment came when they reached a 20-yard ridge that spanned two sets of rocks. It was topped by a ridge of snow, and precipices sloped away on either side. Tyndall balked: ‘How to cross this snow catenary I knew not, for I did not think a human foot could trust itself upon so frail a support.’42 Bennen looked at it, trod the snow down and then walked across it on a path that was little wider than a hand’s breadth. Tyndall ‘followed him, exactly as a boy walking along a horizontal pole, with toes turned outwards. Right and left the precipices were appalling.’43 At the other side Tyndall could only marvel at Bennen’s sagacity. Ever the scientist, he wondered how Bennen knew that the snowy molecules would compress into ‘a semi-solid rather than a mass of powder’.44 Bennen replied that he’d given it a tread and it seemed firm enough.
By this time they were all flagging and Tyndall feared they would never make it: ‘Wenger complained of his lungs, an expression of deep weariness shaded Bennen’s face, while I was half bewildered and stupefied by the incessant knocking about.’45 The summit, once so attainable, now seemed ‘hopelessly distant’.46 Wenger and Bennen fortified themselves with food and wine. Tyndall, for whom this was not an option, steeled himself with patriotic sentiment: ‘I thought of Englishmen in battle, of the qualities which had made them famous: it was mainly the quality of not knowing when to yield - of fighting for duty even after they had ceased to be animated by hope. Such thoughts helped to lift me over the rocks.’47 These selfsame qualities had also driven many British explorers and soldiers to their deaths, but this he did not dwell upon. The team struggled on, over false horizon after false horizon, until, four hours later, they met a knife-edge of pure snow that ran up to a little point. At first Tyndall refused to believe it was the summit, but when he slithered along the ridge and stood, shakily, on the peak he realised that at last the Weisshorn was his.
‘Bennen shook his arms in the air and shouted as a Valaisian,’ he recorded, ‘while Wenger yelled the shriller cry of the Oberland.’48 Some 3,000 feet below, the rival Randa climbers heard the shouts. ‘Again and again the roar of triumph was sent down to them,’49 until they acknowledged defeat and turned for home. Bennen then stripped the head from one of their axes and stuck the shaft in the snow with a red handkerchief tied to it. Tyndall was too awestruck to share in the enthusiasm. All he could do was stare. He could not even bring himself to make scientific notes. ‘I had never before witnessed a view which affected me like this one,’ he wrote. ‘I opened my notebook to make a few observations, but soon relinquished the attempt. There was something incongruous, if not profane, in allowing the scientific faculty to interfere where silent worship seemed the “reasonable service’”.50 What gave him greatest happiness was not the view, however, but the contemplation that nobody in Randa had believed the Weisshorn could be climbed, least of all by a puny beanpole who couldn’t even eat the food he was served. Tyndall had proved them all wrong and had done so on nothing more substantial than twelve meat lozenges.
The descent was hazardous. As Kennedy had on the Bristenstock, Bennen chose a different route from the one they had taken going up, and at one point Tyndall, now weary beyond belief having eaten little and slept not at all for more than forty-eight hours, feared they had climbed themselves into a dead end. ‘I felt desperately blank,’51 he recorded, as he stared at the cliffs in front of them. But Bennen found a way down. As they descended, the Weisshorn gave a dramatic display of contempt: a single boulder fell from the summit; it bounced down, raising clouds of dust and bringing hundreds of smaller rocks in its wake, each of which puffed more dust into the air. Within seconds a major rockfall was under way. ‘The clatter was stunning,’ Tyndall wrote. ‘Black masses of rock emerged here and there from the cloud, and sped through the air like flying fiends. Their motion was not one of translation merely, but they whizzed and vibrated in their flight as if urged by wings. The echoes resounded from side to side, from the Schallenberg to the Weisshorn and back, until finally, after many a deep-sounding thud in the snow, the whole troop came to rest at the bottom of the mountain.’52 The rocks came nowhere near them but, after his experience on the Old Weissthor, Tyndall was shaken. It was ‘one of the most extraordinary things I had ever witnessed’.53
They reached Breuil at 11.00 p.m., when Tyndall managed to swallow a bowl of broth and a piece of boiled mutton. Then he had a hot footbath and slept for a whole six hours. It was a welcome climax to a season of unparallelled triumph and hardship. When he woke, however, the Matterhorn still niggled at his mind. He was determined to conquer it, and told Bennen so. By 1862, he declared, the ‘savage’ would be his.