‘Although there have been fools before, and very big ones, Mr. Whymper is the biggest of the lot.’1 This oddly personal criticism appeared in the British press in 1862, and caused Whymper a degree of annoyance. Had he learned of an acquaintance’s patronising comment that ‘[he] always put in a little visit to me on this hopeless quest of his’,2 he might have been even more annoyed. But the opinions of others were not enough to put him off. On 29 July 1863 he crossed the English Channel for his sixth attempt at the Matterhorn. With him he carried what he hoped would be a solution to the final notch (or notches) - a fireman’s ladder that extended to 24 feet but which could be compressed to half that length for ease of transportation. It was a good idea: the ladder was tried and tested whereas the grapnel - which Whymper also took, along with several lengths of rope and other climbing equipment - was still an uncertain novelty. Unfortunately, Swiss customs officers did not look favourably upon the ladder. When Whymper staggered with his load to the border, he was greeted not as a mountaineer but as a potential housebreaker. Not knowing what to do with him, and unsure as to his intent, they hemmed and hawed until they arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. He was a circus turn, one man said, who was going to balance on top of his ladder in Turin. Yes, agreed another, and he would light his pipe, put his alpenstock in it, and then swivel round. The rope might be used to keep spectators at a distance, put in a third. ‘Monsieur is an acrobat then?’3 they asked. Philosophically, Whymper admitted that he might be; he was passed without hesitation. After many similar tribulations, the ladder became ‘the source of endless trouble’.4 It fitted awkwardly on a mule; many hoteliers turned him away on account of it; and it was generally more bother than it was worth. Still, having dragged it all this way, Whymper was not going to relinquish it.
He reached Breuil on 1 August only to find that fresh snow covered the Matterhorn and that he would have to wait until it cleared. He also learned that MacDonald, with whom he had tentatively agreed to make the ascent, was not going to join him after all. ‘I get a letter from MacDonald,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘by which I plainly see that he means to have nothing to do with it; a reliable companion!’5 Irritably, Whymper took Jean-Antoine Carrel on a seven-day jaunt over the Matterhorn’s surrounding peaks and passes in order to study the mountain from every possible angle. Along the way, to compensate for the Matterhorn’s graceless unavailability, he tackled the virgin summit of the Dent d’Hérens. The experience did nothing to improve his temper. Whereas Whymper favoured an approach via snow slopes which lay above the Glacier de Za de Zan, Carrel insisted on leading him up the rocky west ridge. At 12,500 feet it looked as if Carrel had made the right choice: to all appearances it was at most an hour before they stood on the summit. An hour later, however, they were balanced on a narrow slice of snow that trembled underfoot; before them loomed a massive boulder that teetered as precariously on the precipice as they did themselves. Had they been able to surmount the boulder - which they could not; it was more than twelve feet high and after all Whymper’s efforts they had forgotten the ladder - they would still have had to climb for another hour, by Whymper’s revised estimate, before they reached the top. He rebelled. ‘There was no honour to be gained by persevering,’ he wrote, ‘or dishonour in turning from a place which was dangerous on account of its excessive difficulty.’6 On returning, however, he noted that ‘This is the only mountain which I have essayed to ascend, that has not, sooner or later, fallen to me. Our failure was mortifying.’7 It was all the more mortifying when, four days later, the mountain was climbed by MacDonald following exactly the route which Whymper had advocated in the first place.
The Dent d’Hérens aside, Whymper’s reconnaissance satisfied him in one respect: the Matterhorn could only be climbed from Breuil. He and Carrel had crossed the Zmutt Glacier which lay below the Matterhorn’s western flank and had decided that an approach from that direction was impossible. ‘Nothing can be more inaccessible than the Matterhorn upon this side,’ Whymper wrote, ‘even in cold blood one holds the breath when looking at its stupendous cliffs. There are few but equal to them in size in the Alps, and there are none which can more truly be termed precipices… Stones which drop from the top of that amazing wall fall for about 1500 feet before they touch anything; and those which roll down from above, and bound over it, fall to a much greater depth, and leap well nigh 1000 feet beyond its base. This side of the mountain has always seemed sombre - sad -terrible; it is painfully suggestive of decay, ruin, and death.’8
Ruskin had written that, ‘There is no aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn cliffs.’9 When Whymper saw the western face, he exploded in derision: ‘But approach, and sit down by the side of the Z’muttgletscher [the Zmutt Glacier], and you will hear that their piecemeal destruction is proceeding ceaselessly - incessantly. You will hear, but, probably, you will not see; for even when the descending masses thunder as loudly as heavy guns, and the echoes roll back from the Ebihorn opposite, they will still be as pin-points against this grand old face, so vast is its scale!’10 From the west and the north, Zermatt had nothing to offer. Far better to attack the Matterhorn from its gentler, southern slopes.
Just before dawn, on 10 August 1863, Whymper and Carrel left Breuil with four porters including Carrel’s cousin César and Luc Meynet. They were well equipped, carrying tent, blankets, provisions, 450 feet of rope and the extending ladder. The sky was still and cloudless. The men were keen and confident - particularly Meynet, who was pathetically pleased to have been chosen. ‘Pay me nothing, only let me go with you,’ he had begged earlier. ‘I shall want but a little bread and cheese and I won’t eat much.’11 Everything in fact, in Whymper’s opinion, ‘seemed to promise a happy termination to our enterprise’.12 He felt so cheerful that he passed some time during the walk estimating the value of Meynet’s clothes. He decided that if they were sold by weight as rags they might fetch just under one and a half shillings.
They were at the Col du Lion by 9.00 a.m. and Whymper found things very much changed since last he was there. Familiar ledges had vanished; the platform on which he had pitched his tent in 1862 had half disappeared; the summit of the Col, which had been a respectably broad and easy mound of snow was now sheer ice and ‘sharper than the ridge of any church-roof’.13 The rocks were glazed and treacherous: Whymper and Carrel both slipped, with potentially fatal consequences. And the party was hampered by loose snow which poured over them like flour, obscuring ice steps as soon as they were cut. Yet they were not deterred. ‘The weather was superb,’ Whymper recorded, ‘the men made light of the toil, and shouted to raise the echoes from the Dent d’Hérens. We went on gaily, passed the second tent platform, the Chimney and the other well-remembered points, and reckoned, confidently, on sleeping that night upon the top of “the shoulder’”.14
Before they reached the Great Tower, however, the Matterhorn hit them with one of its temperamental moods. Their first inkling of what lay in store was a sudden gust of cold air. It did not blow as a normal wind, Whymper noted with amazement, but simply dropped from above, as if they had walked under a cold shower. They looked around, but saw only clear skies. ‘There was a dead calm,’ Whymper wrote, ‘and not a speck of cloud to be seen anywhere. But we did not remain very long in this state. The cold air came again, and this time it was difficult to say where it did not come from. We jammed down our hats as it beat against the ridge, and screamed amongst the crags.’15 Small patches of mist formed above and below. With incredible rapidity the patches united until ‘the whole heavens were filled with whirling, boiling clouds’.16 Seconds later, a blizzard blew in from the east. In the time it took for them to unshoulder their packs the ridge was inches deep in snow.
For two hours they worked against wind and snow to construct a platform capable of supporting their tent. Hardly had they put up the canvas and crawled inside than the blizzard turned into a thunderstorm. Whymper was horrified: ‘Forked lightning shot out at the turrets above and the crags below. It was so close that we quailed at its darts. It seemed to scorch us - we were in the very focus of the storm. The thunder was simultaneous with the flashes; short and sharp, and more like the noise of a door that is violently slammed, multiplied a thousand-fold, than any noise to which I can compare it.’17 The wind was so fierce that they crawled out between blasts to erect a wall of rocks. Without this protection, Whymper was certain, the tent and they within it would have been blown over the edge.
The storm raged through the night, its riot augmented by the crash of tumbling boulders. Having recovered from his initial shock, Whymper tried to make light of it: ‘We passed the night comfortably - even luxuriously - in our blanket bags, but there was little chance of sleeping, between the noise of the wind, the thunder, and of the falling rocks. I forgave the thunder for the sake of the lightning. A more splendid spectacle than its illumination of the Matterhorn crags I do not expect to see.’18 Certainly it must have been an impressive sight, but it was also a dismaying one. When Whymper turned out at 3.30 the following morning he was forced back into the tent by driving snow. It was another six hours before a feeble glimmer of light penetrated the clouds and they felt secure enough to continue.
By 11.00 a.m. they had climbed a paltry 300 feet and the snow had started to fall again. By Whymper’s reckoning it would be another four or five hours before they reached Tyndall’s abandoned rope and were in a position to cross the first notch. And if they did get that far, there yet remained several hundred feet of ice-plastered rock before they reached the second notch; and beyond the second notch lay the summit which harboured God knew what perils and where the weather might be more awful still. Possibly they could have waited out the storm in their tent, but they did not have the provisions and Whymper did not have the time; he was due in London by the end of the week. He decided to retreat.
Their descent was as rapid as their advance had been slow. They were in Breuil that same afternoon, where their story was greeted with mild derision. As they recounted the difficulties of the climb, their innkeeper raised an eyebrow. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘we have had no snow; it has been fine all the time you have been absent, and there has been only that small cloud on the mountain.’19 Nothing could persuade him that the small cloud had contained terrors beyond his ken. Whymper paid his men and left for home, ‘defeated and disconsolate; but like a gambler who loses each throw, only the more eager to have another try, to see if the luck would change … ready to devise fresh combinations, and to form new plans’.20 His last act before quitting Breuil was to weigh Meynet’s clothes; they were worth Is. 5d.
Whymper returned to the attack in 1864. He did not immediately head for the Matterhorn, however, but chose to warm up with a few other unclimbed peaks. First in his sights was the Pointe des Écrins, one of the highest mountains in the Dauphiné. He had first spotted it from the top of Mont Pelvoux, at the beginning of his climbing career, and it had niggled at him ever since, like a childhood memory of a lost toy. ‘I was troubled in spirit about this mountain,’ he admitted, ‘and my thoughts often reverted to the great wall-sided peak, second in apparent inaccessibility only to the Matterhorn.’21 Two parties had tried to climb it - one of them led by the disaster-prone Tuckett - but both had failed, leaving Whymper with just the situation he liked: the chance to climb a new peak and prove himself better than others.
He took two fellow Alpine Club members - A. W. Moore and Horace Walker - plus two of the best guides on offer: Christian Aimer and Michel Croz. Aimer was a sturdy, unflappable Oberlander who had already proved himself on the Wetterhorn and other heights. Croz was a bold, risk-taking Chamoniard, who had yet to carve himself a reputation. Of the two, Whymper was most impressed by Croz:
Places where you and I would ‘toil and sweat, and yet be freezing cold’, were bagatelles to him, and it was only when he got above the range of ordinary mortals, and was required to employ his magnifient strength, and to draw upon his unsurpassed knowledge of ice and snow, that he could be said to be really and truly happy. Of all the guides with whom I have travelled, Michel Croz was the man most after my own heart. He did not work like a blunt razor, and take to his toil unkindly. He did not need urging, or to be told a second time to do anything. You had but to say what was to be done, and how it was to be done, and the work was done, if it was possible. Such men are not common, and when they are known they are valued.22
Whymper had planned a circuitous approach to the Pointe des Écrins to stiffen them for the climb and, importantly, to spy out the terrain from as many angles as possible. ‘All mountaineers know how invaluable it is to study beforehand an intended route over new ground from a height at some distance,’ he said, sniping at Tyndall’s confusion over the Matterhorn’s notches. ‘None but blunderers fail to do so.’23
His route took them over as much unconquered territory as possible. On 21 June 1864 they attempted, but failed, to climb the central pinnacle of the Aiguilles d’Arves. After that they made for the Meije, an impressive mountain of 13,067 feet, the very sight of which sent Whymper into raptures. ‘One can hardly speak in exaggerated terms of its jagged ridges, torrential glaciers, and tremendous precipices … were I to discourse upon these things without the aid of pictures, or to endeavour to convey in words a sense of the lovelines of curves, or the beauty of colour, or the harmonies of sound, I should try to accomplish that which is impossible.’24 Whymper had no plans to take the Meije this season, but he did consider its western shoulder, the Breche de la Meije, a possibility. The great guide Melchior Anderegg had stated that it was difficult but not impracticable, and Whymper took this as an invitation. Anderegg, an Oberlander, was one of the most respected figures in the Alps, renowned for his surety of foot, his uncanny, instinctive knowledge of what was climbable and what was not, and for the fact that he had led countless parties to success without the loss of a single life. As Whymper wrote, he was ‘a very prince among guides. His empire is among the “eternal snows” - his sceptre is an ice-axe.’25
Unlike Anderegg, the locals of La Grave, a village below the northern face of the Meije - ‘noted equally for the splendour of its view and for the infinity and voracity of its flies’26 - believed an ascent of the Breche impossible. Undeterred, Whymper left La Grave early on the morning of 22 June, and scaled 6,500 feet in five and a quarter hours to reach the top of the pass, where the whole party screamed in triumph. Their success was not enough for Whymper. Peak-bagger that he was, he had no patience for the Breche once he had climbed it. The Pointe des Écrins still beckoned and he became increasingly irritable as he walked down the other side of the Meije. The scenery was ‘a howling wilderness, the abomination of desolation; destitute alike of animal or vegetable life; pathless, of course; suggestive of chaos but little else; covered almost throughout its entire length with debris from the size of a walnut to that of a house … Our tempers were soured by constant pitfalls … There was no end to it, and we became more savage at every step.’27
Whymper’s temper deteriorated as they made their way towards the Pointe des Écrins. Bivouacking on the Glacier de Bonne Pierre on 24 June, he discovered that their porter had smoked all their cigars. The man denied it, but as Whymper discovered, ‘he is reported to be the greatest liar in Dauphiné.’28 That night the porter drank most of their wine. ‘It was clear that there was no explanation of the phenomenon, but in the dryness of the air,’ Whymper wrote caustically. ‘Still, it is remarkable that the dryness of the air (or the evaporation of wine) is always greatest when a stranger is in one’s party - the dryness caused by the presence of even a single Chamonix porter is sometimes so great … that the entire quantity disappears. For a time I found difficulty in combating this phenomenon, but at last discovered that if I used the wine-flask as a pillow during the night, the evaporation was completely stopped.’29 Even the simple act of making soup elicited a sour note: ‘Fortnum and Mason’s portable soup was sliced up and brewed, and was excellent; but it should be said that before it was excellent, three times the quantity named in the directions had to be used.’30 When making this soup, he noted, always offer it to your friends first: it tended to burn the mouth on first sip and, besides, all the goodness was to be found at the bottom of the cup.
The Pointe des Écrins was surrounded by three faces: the Glacier Noir, one of the sheerest ice slopes in the Alps; the slightly shallower Glacier du Vallon; and the more amenable Glacier de I’Encula. They approached via the third, and easiest, face. But easy was a relative description. ‘Imagine a triangular plane, 700 or 800 feet high, set at an angle exceeding 50°,’ Whymper wrote, ‘let it be smooth and glassy; let the uppermost edges be cut into spikes and teeth, and let them be bent, some one way, some another. Let the glassy face be covered with minute fragments of rock, scarcely attached, but varnished with ice; imagine this, and then you will have a very faint idea of the face of the Écrins on which we stood.’31
Before they began, Whymper was feeling tired and cross. As they went on he became tireder and crosser and his mood infected the others. Each yard of progress took an age. Loose stones were dislodged by the leaders, causing oaths to rise from below. When one member complained about the time it was taking, Croz lost his temper and had to be restrained. Later, Aimer slipped and very nearly lost his life. They advanced, retreated, changed course, hacked up dangerous couloirs, struggled along treacherous ridges and, in Whymper’s words, became, ‘I am afraid, well-nigh worn out.’32 When, by 12.30 p.m., victory seemed within their grasp they were almost too tired to seize it: ‘Small, ridiculously small, as the distance was to the summit, we were occupied another hour before it was gained.’33
At the top Whymper pocketed a small piece of rock, as was his custom - such mementoes had the curious habit of replicating the shape of the mountain they came from, he observed - and wrote four, hackneyed sentences describing the view. Then, at 1.45 p.m. he wondered how they were to get down. Everybody refused to set another foot on the slopes they had ascended, so they opted for a descent via a series of aretes, ‘so narrow, so thin that it was often a matter of speculation on which side an unstable rock would fall’.34 Whymper was unaccustomedly nervous:
Had any one then said to me, ‘You are a great fool for coming here,’ I should have answered with humility, ‘It is too true.’ And had my monitor gone on to say, ‘Swear you will never ascend another mountain if you get down safely,’ I am inclined to think I should have taken the oath. The guides felt it as well as ourselves, and Aimer remarked, with more piety than logic, ‘The good God has brought us up, and he will take us down in safety,’ which showed pretty well what he was thinking about.35
They were right to be nervous, for the rocks were rotten and the precipices on either side sheer. Moore froze with vertigo as he straddled a knife edge of rock 4,000 feet above the Glacier du Vallon and only with difficulty could he be persuaded to move. It was a ‘fiendish place,’ he wrote. ‘We had, for half an hour, without exception the most perilous climbing I ever did.’36 At one particular point, the arête was split by a deep chasm which could only be crossed by jumping an eight-foot gap from one unstable boulder to another. Interestingly, it was the reticent Aimer rather than daredevil Croz who made the leap. Although the rock teetered, Aimer got a secure handhold and was able to help his companions across the gap. Whymper found that if he ignored the drop below it was easy enough. Croz, who had been muttering that they were all doomed, said nothing. By 4.45 p.m., they were on the relative safety of a glacier and four hours later they were on solid ground. With the appetite of stress, they cut up and ate the last item of food they possessed - a strip of pig fat they had been using to waterproof their boots.
Whymper considered it the ugliest climb he had ever made. His journal contained a notable lack of self-congratulation, and the single positive thing he had to say about the experience was that the summit had been snow-free. ‘So far am I from desiring to tempt any one to repeat the expedition,’ he warned, ‘that I put it on record as my belief, however sad or miserable a man may have been, if he is found on the summit of the Pointe des Écrins after a fall of new snow, he is likely to experience misery far deeper than anything with which he has been hitherto acquainted.’37
He continued through the Dauphiné, never achieving anything so memorable as the conquest of the Pointe des Écrins* but nevertheless forging new passes and crossing unknown, unnamed glaciers. He also scrounged up a bit of humour to compensate for his nervousness on the Écrins. The butt was a Frenchman named Reynaud, whom he had invited to accompany him up the unclimbed Col de Pilate. Reynaud carried a pocketful of books, a knapsack of scientfic instruments and a small larder of food, all of which Whymper considered derisory. ‘His shoulders were ornamented with a huge nimbus of bread,’ he wrote, ‘and a leg of mutton swung behind from his knapsack, looking like an overgrown tail. Like a good-hearted fellow, he had brought this food, thinking we might be in need of it.’38 The unfortunate Reynaud was sniggered at all the way up the Col and all the way down. Whymper found him particularly amusing when they reached a bergschrund (the first, huge crack that a glacier makes when it tears away from the mountain) whose upper lip drooped pendu-lously, and dangerously, over its lower.
As on the Écrins, a leap was necessary. Croz went first, then Whymper. Reynaud, however, dithered. ‘He came to the edge and made declarations,’ Whymper wrote. ‘I do not believe he was a whit more reluctant to pass the place than we others, but he was infinitely more demonstrative - in a word, he was French. He wrung his hands, “Oh what a diable of a place!” - “It is nothing, Reynaud,” I said, “it is nothing.” - “Jump,” cried the others, “jump.” But he turned round, as far as one can do such a thing on an ice-step, and covered his face with his hands, ejaculating, “Upon my word, it is not possible. No! no!! no!!! it is not possible.’”39
What happened next was recorded only by Whymper:
How he came over I scarcely know. We saw a toe … we saw Reynaud a flying body, coming down as if taking a header into water - with arms and legs all abroad, his leg of mutton flying in the air, his baton escaped from his grasp; and then we heard a thud as if a bundle of carpets had been pitched out of a window. When set upon his feet he was a sorry spectacle; his head was a great snowball; brandy was trickling out of one side of the knapsack, chartreuse out of the other - we bemoaned its loss, but we roared with laughter.40
The Col de Pilate was Whymper’s last conquest in the Dauphiné. From there he walked to Chamonix where he had agreed to assist the Irish cartographer Anthony Adams-Reilly in mapping the Mont Blanc chain. It was now some twenty years since Sir John Barrow had first railed against the deficiencies of Alpine maps, and the Swiss government had gone a long way to remedy the problem. Four-fifths of the Mont Blanc range, however, lay within France and the various restorations which had clung to power since 1816 had more pressing concerns than mapping the Alps. Forbes’s survey of the Mer de Glace remained an oasis of sanity in an atlas where mountains were misplaced, mismeasured and, at times, invented or omitted. When Adams-Reilly’s first map of the region came out in 1863, Whymper was deeply impressed. Here was a ‘man of wonderful determination and perseverance’.41 Here, too, was a man whose presence would be invaluable on the top of the Matterhorn.
Whymper, despite his accomplishments, was still regarded as something of a johnny-come-lately. The Alpine Club may have been a brotherhood of equals but some members were more equal than others, however well they climbed. Compared to people like the erudite Leslie Stephen, Whymper was still a printer’s son who dropped his aitches. He was aware of this. He was aware, too, that he was ill-qualified to explain Alpine phenomena in anything but the most basic terms - he made a few brave forays into the field, but produced only bland, long-winded tracts on the progress of glaciers and the configuration of mountains. He had none of the sensitivity of Leslie Stephen and none of the scientific clout of John Tyndall. He was a peak-bagger, pure and simple. But if he could bag the Matterhorn and at the same time show that he had done so in a good cause his standing would soar. Adams-Reilly was the answer. Conveniently, he disliked Tyndall, being a protégé of Forbes and, in due course, his biographer. Whymper offered to help him map the remaining portions of the Mont Blanc range if, in return, he would climb the Matterhorn. Adams-Reilly was initially doubtful: ‘When I found Whymper just arrived from Dauphiné with a great bag of peaks and passes, I confess my feelings towards him were a compound of envy, malice, and all uncharitableness - unchristian but sincere.’42 When Adams-Reilly finally agreed, Whymper was delighted. ‘The unwritten contract,’ he wrote, ‘took this form: - I will help you to carry out your desires, and you shall assist me to carry out mine. I eagerly closed with an arrangement in which all the advantages were upon my side.’43
Whymper was not overly fond of the Mont Blanc range. ‘It has neitther the beauty of the Oberland nor the sublimity of Dauphiné,’ he wrote. ‘But it attracts the vulgar by possession of the highest summit in the Alps.’44 Vulgar was a word which he used with revealing frequency in his diaries and journals. Fearing that in the eyes of some his background might place him on the fringes of vulgarity, he saw more that was vulgar and condemned it with greater disgust -another favourite word - than most of his fellows. Mont Blanc’s perceived vulgarity, however, could be endured for the opportunity of getting Adams-Reilly to climb the Matterhorn. In addition, several peaks in the chain had yet to be climbed, and Whymper was able to forgive a mountain anything if he was the first up it. (Many of these peaks were also very beautiful, but this was an adjective that Whymper did not use much; he preferred his hills to be terrifying, fierce, jagged, difficult and, in general, to reflect upon his achievement in climbing them.)
Whymper had Croz as his guide, Adams-Reilly a Chamoniard named François Couttet. For a brief period they were also accompanied by Moore and Aimer. Their first target was the Aiguille d’Argentière, which they approached on 6 July. They were unsuccessful. On their initial attempt they were driven back by a wind so strong that they were barely able to stand upright; and on a second try - during which Couttet cut no less than 700 steps up an ice slope - conditions were so bad that they had to retreat within less than 30 yards of the summit. Two days later, however, they became the first people to cross the Col de Triolet and on 9 July they conquered Mont Dolent. On 12 July they added the Aiguille de Trélatête to their tally of firsts. Finally, on 15 July, they returned to their starting point and completed the Aiguille d’Argentière. It was a tour de force both in the number of new peaks taken in so short a time, and in the amount of cartographic work completed. A likeable man with a dry sense of humour, Adams-Reilly presented an idle face on the mountain. At rest stops he was usually to be seen lying against a rock, smoking his pipe and reading a yellow-backed thriller. Belying this casual veneer was the quantity of sketches and measurements he made. They were fast, accurate and incontestably authoritative. Whymper was impressed:
Under the most adverse conditions, and in the most trying situations, Mr. Reilly’s brain and fingers were always at work,’ he wrote. ‘Throughout all he was ever alike; the same, genial, equable-tempered companon, whether victorious or defeated; always ready to sacrifice his own desires to suit our comfort and convenience. By a happy union of audacity and prudence, combined with untiring perseverance, he eventually completed his self-imposed task - a work which would have been intolerable except as a labour of love - and which, for a single individual might well-nigh be termed Herculean.45
Whymper was also slightly relieved: Adams-Reilly was not sufficiently intrepid to climb the Matterhorn without his assistance; when the moment came, therefore, the credit would be mostly his.