Both Tyndall and Whymper were obsessed with the Matterhorn, and by 1862 the race was on. If the Alpine Club had seen fit to make wagers, Tyndall would have been the favourite: he had years of mountaineering experience, was a lover of risks, knew how to deal with rock faces, knew the hill and was primed for a conquest. Whymper was a dark horse: he had only started climbing seriously in 1861, had shown poor form on his single attempt at the Matterhorn, and was notoriously suspicious of guides, describing them collectively as ‘pointers out of paths, and large consumers of meat and drink’,1 and on one specific occasion as men whose faces ‘expressed malice, pride, envy, hatred and roguery of every description’.2 On the positive side there was his sturdy physique, his steeplejack ability and his nut-cracking approach to anything that stood in his path. A gambling man would have put his money on Tyndall; but he would also have put something on Whymper, a guinea or two at high odds, just in case.
Whymper beat Tyndall to the Matterhorn in the season of 1862, arriving at Breuil on 5 July accompanied by a man named MacDonald with whom he had climbed Mont Pelvoux the previous year. They brought with them a tent of Whymper’s own design which they hoped would withstand the winds. The tent held up but they did not. Whymper, MacDonald, their two guides and their porter, an inexperienced hunchback named Luc Meynet, survived a night of tremendous storms on the mountain. When they woke, however, the storm was still raging. ‘We clutched our hardest when we saw stones as big as a man’s fist blown away horizontally into space,’ Whymper wrote. ‘We dared not attempt to stand upright, and remained stationary, on all fours, glued as it were to the rocks … Our warmth and courage soon evaporated.’3 They packed up the tent and came down as quickly as they could.
Undaunted, they regrouped for a second attempt. Once again they took a porter and two guides but this time they were fortunate enough to be able to hire as chief guide a man named Jean-Antoine Carrel. The cousin of César Carrel who had accompanied Tyndall and Brennen, Jean-Antoine Carrel had more experience of the Matterhorn than anyone else. He had been scouting its slopes for some four years in a quiet, unobtrusive fashion - purely for his own benefit, not as part of a group - and his record for the highest climb had only recently been beaten by Tyndall. Whymper was delighted to have him. ‘We thought ourselves fortunate,’ he wrote, ‘for Carrel clearly considered the mountain a kind of preserve, and regarded our late attempt as an act of poaching.’4 Starting from Breuil on 9 July, they pitched camp below the chimney at a height of 12,550 feet and the following day made a reconnaissance of the slopes above. Everything seemed fine; the only impediment to success would be bad weather. They returned to the tent full of optimism and were greeted the next morning by a perfect, cloudless sky. But once again Whymper was to be disappointed. The second guide felt ill and refused to continue. Carrel, likewise, refused to continue without his companion. MacDonald, ‘the coolest of the cool’,5 took Whymper aside and murmured that they could leave both guides behind and attack the mountain on their own. It was now Whymper’s turn to refuse, not from any compassion for the sick guide but from a suspicion that MacDonald’s skills were not equal to his own. Fuming, he returned to Breuil for the second time that season, not even bothering to take down his tent. On 12 July MacDonald left for home.
Whymper had now been up the Matterhorn three times and on every occasion save one he had been forced to retreat by the weakness of his companions. He suspected that Carrel had deliberately sabotaged the last attempt out of pique. This may well have been correct: Carrel did resent outsiders poaching on his mountain. More to the point, though, Carrel was a patriot and if anyone was to climb the Matterhorn he wanted it to be an Italian. This never entered Whymper’s mind. Secure in their island stability, Britons had fallen into the habit of viewing continental Europe as a mishmash of squabbling kingdoms in thrall either to France or the Austrian or Russian empires. After the revolutions of 1848, however, Europe had changed. Nations had expanded and solidified into culturally distinct blocks. Savoy became part of France in 1861. That same year the Risorgimento turned Piedmont and the rest of the Italian peninsula into a unified state. In 1871, Prussia and its neighbouring German principalities would coalesce into a single entity. It was important for the new states to prove themselves, and short of military expansion -to which they would soon resort - mountaineering was as good an expression of national pride as any other. Germany would later prove this in the 1930s with its obsession with the north face of the Eiger. In the 1860s, however, Italy had its eyes on the Matterhorn. Without realising it, Whymper was battling the covert forces of nationalism.
Whymper’s last attempt left him helpless. ‘Want of men made the difficulty, not the mountain,’6 he raged. He left Breuil and walked to Zermatt to drum up some enthusiasm amongst the Swiss. It was no good. Whereas the Italians believed the Matterhorn was surmountable, the Swiss were resolute that it was not. They had a point: from the Italian side the Matterhorn offered a series of shoulders and plateaux; from Zermatt it was a sheer rock face. Unable to find a guide, Whymper vented his fury by climbing Monte Rosa, from which he was able to scowl at the Matterhorn. Then, on 17 July, he returned to Breuil for a fourth attempt. Carrel either could not or would not help him, so Whymper resigned himself to the tedious task of climbing back to the chimney to retrieve his tent.
Whymper had never made a solo climb before and he found he rather liked it. He wandered up the lower slopes collecting plants -something he had never done before in his life - and when he reached the tent he did not dismantle it but decided to spend the night, watching the sun go down until ‘the earth seemed to become less earthly and almost sublime; the world seemed dead, and I its sole inhabitant’.7 This sentiment had been repeated ever since Saussure first slept on Mont Blanc, but for Whymper, all alone, it now had some meaning. Solitude suited him. When he awoke he felt so good that he decided to climb a little bit higher.
Whymper was the most practical of all Alpine men. His tent was an example of his handicraft: its endpieces comprised two pairs of iron-tipped wooden stakes, bolted at the top, which could find purchase on most surfaces; its covering was of canvas, sheeted over with mackintosh, thus protecting the occupants while giving them room to breathe; the guy ropes were held down by stones; and the whole thing could be dismantled in minutes to make a bundle which one man could carry with ease. On this ascent Whymper also carried another of his inventions: a grapnel. Based on the maritime model, it was a metal claw to which was attached a length of rope. The claw could be hoisted on top of an alpenstock or it could be thrown to give purchase beyond the normal reach, and it was fitted with an innovatory iron ring which allowed the rope to be pulled free during a descent. Armed with his grapnel, Whymper went up the chimney.
He reached his highest point yet with little difficulty and was so charmed by the ease of it all that he went on. ‘When I got to the foot of the tower it certainly seemed a pity to turn back,’ he wrote, ‘so I went a little further to see what was round the corner, and when I got round the mountain seemed more interesting than ever; the pinnacles behind it were wagging in the wind. Without exaggeration, one could take hold of huge Egyptian-like blocks, ten or more feet high, and rock them backwards and forwards.’8 This surreal spot was nicknamed ‘the coxcomb’ by valley-dwellers. ‘Strangely fascinated,’ Whymper wrote, ‘on I went…’9
Leaving ‘the coxcomb’, he clung to tiny ledges and manoeuvred across precipitous faces. Occasionally he glanced upwards and saw rocks that seemed to leer at him with demonic faces from the ridge above. Finally he reached a point where the cliffs became even steeper and at this point he gave up. He had cause for satisfaction: he had come within 1,400 feet of the summit and had climbed higher than anyone before him. ‘Some amiable critics [he meant Tyndall] have announced that I was endeavouring to make an ascent by myself,’ he later smirked. ‘I should be the first to laugh at any idea so absurd; it was a combination of accidental circumstances that caused me to get alone on that day higher than any other person.’10 On any other mountain he would have had to plant a flag so that the world could see what he had done. Not here. Simply being able to describe where he had been was enough on the Matterhorn, whose features were soon to be spoken of in capital letters - the Chimney, the Col du Lion where he had pitched his tent and, the face he had just climbed, the Great Tower.
He climbed back to his tent, left it where it was, fixed a rope to the top of the Chimney and started down for Breuil. He was rightly thrilled by what he had done. But as he later wrote, his ‘exultation was a little premature’.11 He had reached easy ground and was heading as hard as he could for the hotel at Breuil where he could tell the world what he had done, when he slipped. The slip would have been nothing had he not been wearing a heavy knapsack and had it not happened at the head of a 200-foot couloir that ended in a precipice, below which lay the Glacier du Lion 800 feet below.
Whymper fell twelve feet, head first, onto rocks and bounced into the couloir. Carried by the weight of his knapsack he ricocheted from side to side, crashing from stone to ice to snow. He later wrote:
I was perfectly conscious of what was happening, and felt each blow; but, like a patient under chloroform, experienced no pain. Each blow was, naturally, more severe than that which preceded it, and I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Well, if the next is harder still, that will be the end!’ Like persons who have been rescued from drowning, I remember that the recollection of a multitude of things rushed through my head, many of them trivialities or absurdities, which had been forgotten long before; and, more remarkable, this bounding through space did not feel disagreeable. But I think that in no very great distance more, consciousness, as well as sensation would have been lost, and upon that I base my belief, improbable as it seems, that death by a fall from a great height is as painless an end as can be experienced.12
While Whymper’s mind resigned itself to extinction, his body made a final leap of 60 feet and lodged momentarily on some rocks on the side of the couloir. He landed head up and by reflex scrabbled at the snow as he began his final slide. He stopped himself ten feet from the precipice, while his hat, his alpenstock and his tinted veil flew past him, pursued by a shower of rocks. For the moment he was safe, but ‘The situation was still sufficently serious. The rocks could not be left go for a moment, and the blood was spirting out of more than twenty cuts. The most serious ones were in the head, and I vainly tried to close them with one hand, while holding on with the other. It was useless; the blood jerking out in blinding jets at each pulsation. At last, in a moment of inspiration, I kicked out a big lump of snow and stuck it as a plaster on my head. The idea was a happy one, and the flow of blood diminished.13
He had just the strength to drag himself up the couloir - that had a gradient of at least 60° - and wedge himself behind some boulders before he fainted. When he came to the sun was setting. As night fell, he took stock:
The battering was rough, yet no bones were broken. The most severe cuts were one of four inches long on the top of the head, and another of three inches on the right temple: this latter bled frightfully. There was a formidable-looking cut, of about the same size as the last, on the palm of the left hand, and every limb was grazed, or cut, more or less seriously. The tips of the ears were taken off, and a sharp rock cut a circular bit out of the side of the left boot, sock, and ankle, at one stroke. The loss of blood, although so great, did not seem to be permanently injurious.14
Superhumanly, Whymper climbed up the couloir - despite his injuries and the lack of an alpenstock - and then came down 4,800 feet in pitch blackness to Breuil, ‘without a slip, or once missing the way’.15 He slunk past the first cow sheds, ‘utterly ashamed of the state to which I had been brought by my imbecility’,16 and managed not to alert the inhabitants whom he could hear talking and laughing within. But he was detected as soon as he tried to sneak into his inn unnoticed. The landlord appeared with a lamp and yelled with fright when he saw Whymper’s condition. Soon there were two dozen people clustered over him and, protest as he might, he was unable to prevent them administering an immediate remedy. His journal does not say whether he screamed when the Breuil folk rubbed his wounds with salt and vinegar; but it is hard to believe that he did not.
Whether because of the cure or his own stubborness, Whymper was back on his feet within days. He must have been a terrible sight, limping through the village, his face covered in black scabs. Yet for all his wounds he managed to persuade Carrel to take him up the Matterhorn again. He, Carrel and one of Carrel’s cousins set off on 23 July, spent a night in the tent and were at 12,992 feet when the weather turned. Whymper argued that it was a local snowfall and that they should wait another night for it to clear, ‘but my leader would not endure contradiction, grew more positive, and insisted that we must go down’.17 They did so, and discovered to Whymper’s despair that the cloud was indeed a passing affair and below 3,000 feet the mountain basked in sunshine.
Whymper was becoming tired of Carrel.
[He] was not an easy man to manage. He was perfectly aware that he was the cock of the Val Tournanche, and he commanded the other men as by right. He was equally conscious that he was indispensable to me, and took no pains to conceal the knowledge … It seemed to me that he was spinning out the ascent for his own purposes, and that although he wished very much to be the first man to the top, and did not object to be accompanied by any one else who had the same wish, he had no intention of letting one succeed too soon - perhaps to give a greater appearance of éclat when the thing was accomplished. As he feared no rival, he may have supposed that the more difficulties he made the more valuable he would be estimated.18
Whymper’s assessment was largely correct. Carrel, on the other hand, must have thought his employer a lunatic. His suspicions were confirmed on the night of 24 July when Whymper ordered him to make ready for another ascent the next morning.
Carrel obviously did not think it a serious proposition. When Whymper woke at dawn on 25 July he found a note to the effect that it was a beautiful day for marmot-hunting and Carrel would not be available. It was the ultimate insult. ‘These men clearly could not be relied upon,’19 Whymper wrote. He hired the hunchback porter Luc Meynet and left Carrel to his marmots. They slept that night in the tent and early on the morning of 26 July had passed Whymper’s highest point and were struggling with the Great Tower. ‘Little by little we fought our way up,’ Whymper wrote, ‘but at length we were both spread-eagled on the all but perpendicular face, unable to advance and barely able to descend.’20 Clinging to the rock, Whymper saw smooth walls seven or eight feet high in every direction. In such a situation it was impossible for one man to help another up them. The only recourse was a ladder. Back he went for the fifth time that year, Meynet consoling him at every difficult patch with the news that, ‘“We can only die once,” which thought seemed to afford him infinite satisfaction.’21 But when Whymper reached Breuil he ‘found [his] projects summarily and unexpectedly knocked on the head’.22 Tyndall was there.
It was unreasonable for Whymper to imagine that he had sole rights to the Matterhorn but one can sympathise with his disappointment. Tyndall had mustered an incredibly strong team consisting of the mighty Bennen, a ‘powerful and active’23 Valaisian guide named Anton Walter and, to Whymper’s undying disgust, Jean-Antoine and César Carrel. He had acquired a ladder, was stocking up with provisions and was planning to leave the following evening. It was almost as if he had been watching Whymper’s progress through a crystal ball, had seen the path, had seen the problems and had chosen the perfect time to intervene. As for the turncoat Carrel, Whymper could only attribute his behaviour to anger at his temerity in daring to try the Matterhorn without him - in which he was probably correct. If it was an insult to Whymper that Carrel should go marmot-hunting, it was an even greater insult to Carrel that Whymper should think so lightly of his abilities as to take a twisted little porter in his place. ‘It was useless to compete with the Professor and his four men,’ Whymper wrote, ‘so I waited to see what would become of their attempt.’24
If Whymper was surprised by Tyndall’s presence, Tyndall was even more horrified by his. Far from watching Whymper through a crystal ball, Tyndall had been killing time at Visp, as he wrote to Huxley, ‘not dreaming that the enemy would be so soon upon myself. Well, here he is: and I write not through love of you but through hate of him.’25 Publicly, of course, he remained polite, and when Whymper offered him the use of his tent which was still pitched on the mountain, Tyndall professed delight at the clubman-like spirit in which the offer was made. In return, he asked if Whymper would like to come with them.
‘It certainly would have enhanced the pleasure of my excursion if Mr. Whymper could have accompanied me,’ he wrote stiffly, long after the event.
I admired his courage and devotion; he had manifestly set his heart upon the Matterhorn, and it was my earnest desire that he should not be disappointed. I consulted with Bennen, who had heard many accounts - probably exaggerated ones - of Mr. Whymper’s rashness, He shook his head, but finally agreed that Mr. Whymper could be invited ‘provided he proved reasonable.’ I thereupon asked Mr. Whymper to join us. His reply was, ‘If I go up the Matterhorn, I must lead the way’ Considering my own experience at the time as compared with his; considering, still more, the renown and power of my guide, I thought the response the reverse of ‘reasonable’, and so went on my way alone.26
Whymper could only look on impotently as Tyndall’s group set out in high spirits for a cloudless mountain. He was ‘tormented with envy and all uncharitableness. If they succeeded, they carried off the prize for which I had been so long struggling; and if they failed, there was no time to make another attempt, for I was due in a few days more for London.’27 He began to pack his bags.
Tyndall had not, in fact, been merely killing time in Visp, as he told Huxley. For the past three weeks he had been training on the Bernese and Valaisian Alps. He had climbed the Wetterhorn, the Galenstock and the Great Aletsch Glacier, ‘burning up the effete matter which nine months’ work in London had lodged in my muscles … each succeeding day added to my strength’.28 When he was completely fit and thought that further delay would be counterproductive, he decided it was time to move. More even than Whymper, Tyndall was wedded to the mountain. ‘The Matterhorn,’ he wrote, as he crossed the pass from Zermatt, ‘was our temple, and we approached it with feelings not unworthy of so great a shrine.’29
Tyndall, like Whymper, was not beyond a few technical tricks. His ladder had not been acquired at Breuil, as Whymper had supposed, but was a collapsible model that he himself had devised, comprising two poles and a sack containing rungs, nails and a hammer. The poles could be used as huge alpenstocks but when the need arose the rungs could be hammered into them to create a ladder. He also carried a rope, made to his own specifications in London, which was guaranteed to have a greater breaking strain than anything available in Switzerland. Armed with these tools, Tyndall was certain that the Matterhorn would be his - or, failing that, that he would go as high as was humanly possible.
While Tyndall was climbing ever higher, crossing with ease the couloir in which Whymper had nearly lost his life - Tyndall noted this specifically in his journal - Whymper was assembling his luggage. As he did so, he noticed that he had left one or two essentials in the tent. He therefore went back up the Matterhorn to get them. It is hard to imagine what he might have left that was so essential: he would have taken his climbing equipment for the descent with Meynet; likewise, other valuables such as his knapsack and his tea caddy - a novel gadget that comprised a cylindrical tube containing furnace, cup and kettle as well as a compartment for storing food and tea - would have been brought back for refilling. In all likelihood it was just an excuse, metaphorically speaking, to cock his leg on the mountain.
Climbing fast and skilfully, he passed Tyndall’s party as they were having lunch, and soon reached the tent. Then a strange thing happened. Down below, Tyndall and his men were gathering up their bits and pieces, ‘when suddenly an explosion occurred overhead’.30 A boulder cracked down from above, shattering into a spray of fragments slightly wide of them, ‘but still near enough to compel a sharp look-out’.31 Two or three similar explosions occurred, each of them leaving a strong smell of sulphur as the rocks split and cascaded down the hill. It would be wrong to suggest that Whymper dislodged the rocks; he had a fondness for boulder-tumbling like many other climbers of the time, but whatever his faults he would not endanger another person’s life; besides, the mountain was notorious for the way in which it shed its rocks. Nonetheless, it was uncanny that the Matterhorn should give such a violent display of its power on the only occasion when the two men were on the mountain simultaneously. It was almost as if it had sensed their rivalry and decided to join in.
Whymper waited at the tent until Tyndall arrived, gave him his double-edged congratulations, then returned to Breuil. Back in his hotel he packed and repacked his bag. Although he was meant to be travelling for London he could not tear himself from the Matterhorn while Tyndall was still on it. Soon, the first reports came in. A flag had been seen on the summit. Whymper quailed, but to his relief the sighting was false. Then Tyndall was seen to have passed Whymper’s highest point - of this there could be no question. ‘I had now no doubt of their final success,’32 Whymper wrote in despair.
On the Matterhorn, Tyndall was less confident. ‘The mountain is a gigantic ruin,’33 he recorded, as Bennen led the way from crevice to crumbling shelf. Up the Great Tower they went, Walter scrabbling his way from ledge to ledge under Bennen’s direction, then lowering a hand for the next person. ‘It was manifest that for some time our fight must be severe,’34 Tyndall wrote. But he rejoiced in the struggle: ‘we worked up bit by bit, holding on almost by our eyelids,’ he told Huxley. ‘It was the best and hardest piece of rock climbing that I have ever known man to accomplish. It was these precipices that stopped Whymper. Well, we scaled them.’35 Soon he was standing on a ridge that led upwards to a conical peak. It was not the summit, but it was something to aim at. Tyndall said as much to Bennen, only to be told, ‘That will not satisfy us.’36 Then Bennen pointed to the Matterhorn’s pyramidical apex, looming against the sky: ‘In an hour the people at Zermatt shall see our flag planted yonder.’37 The Carrels gave a laugh of scorn, which Tyndall assumed was aimed at the Matterhorn rather than at Bennen. He wrote: ‘We felt perfectly certain of success; not one amongst us harboured a thought of failure … Up we went in this spirit, with a forestalled triumph making our ascent a jubilee.’38 They planted a flag on the lower summit then surveyed the path to the peak itself. It was a ragged, narrow ridge flanked by ‘ghastly abysses’39 and ending at a sheer cliff. Walters voiced his doubts: ‘We may still find difficulty there.’40 The Carrels were of similar opinion. Tyndall very nearly lost his temper: ‘The same thought had probably brooded in other minds; still it angered me slightly to hear misgiving obtain audible expression.’41 The only one not to speak was Bennen.
Tyndall drove Bennen and the others forward, following them as they edged towards the last face. Once they reached it the Matterhorn would be theirs. As he told Huxley, ‘We were as sure of it as you are of your dinner.’42 At the end of the ridge, however, they met an unexpected obstacle: between them and the cliff was a sheer-sided notch, several hundred feet deep. ‘So savage a spot I had never seen,’ Tyndall wrote, ‘and I sat down upon it with the sickness of disappointed hope. The summit was within almost a stone’s throw of us, and the thought of retreat was bitter in the extreme.’43 Bennen could see no obvious way over it, so Tyndall asked the Carrels what they thought. The Carrells were not happy. They had been hired as guides but had been treated as porters throughout. Now, when Bennen was stuck, and their expertise was required, they saw no reason to give it. Their answer was frank: ‘Ask your guides.’44 Tyndall did so. Bennen pondered the notch for thirty minutes and then gave up. ‘Our occupation was clearly gone,’45 Tyndall recorded. It only remained to plant a marker to show how far they had come - a six-foot length of ladder was used - then to go home. Smirking, Jean-Antoine Carrel offered to take Bennen’s place in front. Tyndall refused: Bennen had led them up and he would lead them down.
This was the difference between Tyndall and Whymper: whereas Whymper was willing to lead, Tyndall trusted always in his guide. When Bennen asked him what he thought, Tyndall would ask him what he thought, and kept on asking until Bennen came up with an answer. If there was no answer, Tyndall was satisfied. ‘Where you go I will follow, be it up or down,’46 was his refrain.
Shakily, Bennen took them down the mountain. They had to use the remains of the ladder at one point, lowering it by rope and then sliding down it one by one. Unable to retrieve it, they left it dangling. The weather worsened and their retreat became more miserable. ‘A tempest of hail was here hurled against us,’ Tyndall wrote, as they reached the camp, ‘as if the Matterhorn, not content with shutting its door in our faces, meant to add an equivalent to the process of kicking us downstairs. The ice-pellets certainly hit us as bitterly as if they had been thrown in spite, and in the midst of this malicious cannonade we … returned to Breuil.’47
Whymper had hung around until the last moment, and was drinking a farewell glass of wine with his landlord, when Tyndall’s group came into view. ‘There was no spring in their steps - they, too, were defeated,’ he crowed. ‘The Carrels hid their heads, but the others said, as men will do when they have been beaten, that the mountain was horrible, impossible, and so forth.’48 Tyndall was so exhausted that he greeted Whymper like an old friend, wrung his hand, ‘and in the most earnest and impassioned manner abjured me to have nothing more to do with the Matterhorn’.49 He stated that he had come within a stone’s throw of the summit but the thing was totally impossible. The notch could never be crossed, and he himself was not going to make another attempt. In Tyndall’s view, ‘the Matterhorn is inaccessible and may raise its head defiant as it has hitherto done - the only unconquered and unconquerable peak in the Alps’.50 Whymper was relieved. He too was ‘almost inclined to believe that the mountain was inaccessible’,51 but he could not have left it if Tyndall was going to have another go. He said goodbye to Breuil, depositing his equipment with the landlord for the use of whoever needed it. The gesture was made ‘more, I am afraid, out of irony than for generosity. There may have been those who believed that the Matterhorn could be ascended, but, anyhow, their faith did not bring forth works.’
Nothing Whymper ever did was free from controversy, and the same could be said to a lesser degree of Tyndall. It was inevitable, therefore, that when both men published their accounts of that year’s mountaineering they disagreed violently. Tyndall, who published last, said that Whymper had lied by omission - he had not mentioned, for example, his refusal to join the climb unless he was its leader - and that he had denigrated Bennen by suggesting that Carrel had shown him a route to the top but had been ignored. ‘Regarding other inaccuracies,’ Tyndall concluded, ‘and touching Mr. Whymper’s general tone towards myself, I do not feel called upon to make any observations.’52
Whymper responded greedily: ‘My account … of the Professor’s defeat is not perhaps so clear as it might have been, because I did not wish to lay too much stress upon it, and condensed it to a few lines [ninety-five lines, to be precise, accompanied by a diagram of Tyndall’s route up the Matterhorn]. I willingly take the opportunity to refer to it at greater length.’53 On the matter of his insisting to be leader he explained that Tyndall had requested him to follow Bennen’s instructions implicitly and that he had naturally refused. ‘You will remember, Dr. Tyndall,’ he had said, ‘that I have been much higher than Bennen, and have been eleven days on the mountain, whilst he has been on it for a single day; you will not expect me to follow him if he is evidently wrong.’54 As for Carrel’s willingness to carry on, Whymper had said no such thing, but he was very willing to say it now: ‘I have no doubt that he could have pointed out a way, and have led the party to the top.’55 Moreover, Tyndall had been utterly mistaken in declaring that he had come within a stone’s throw of the summit: there was indeed a notch that fitted Tyndall’s description but there was also a second one, a good deal higher than the one he had reached - as any fool could see, Whymper all but said - and there remained at least another 800 feet of rock unclimbed between the two. Having quashed Tyndall’s assertions, Whymper delivered the coup de grâce. Tyndall had deliberately told him that the hill was unclimbable and had insinuated that he was not going to try it again; but as soon as Whymper was out of sight he had asked Bennen to prepare for another assault; Bennen’s refusal - whether through good judgement or weakness - was all that saved Tyndall from being a blackguard.
Whymper smashed people as he did mountains. Tyndall did not respond, or if he did his response has been lost. He abandoned the Matterhorn for the time being, leaving Whymper to solve the problem of the final notch. ‘This defeat has fallen upon us like the chill of age,’ he explained to Huxley, ‘and I must “mix myself with action” to shake it off… The mountain is one of the most savage grandeur … certainly on the whole - both near and far - the grimmest and grandest object in the Alps. Well, goodbye to him and goodbye to you and goodbye to my climbing. For there is nothing else in the Alps that I should care to do.’56