Whymper left Adams-Reilly to make his own way to the Matterhorn, and strode off to Zermatt via the Morning Pass -another first - with Croz, Moore and Aimer. As so often, he was disgusted. Of the Col de Forclaz, which he crossed en route, he wrote that ‘it is not creditable to Switzerland … mendicants permanently disfigure it’.1 The more vulgarity he saw the more disgusted he became.
We passed many tired pedestrians toiling up this oven, persecuted by trains of parasitic children. These children swarm there like maggots in a rotten cheese. They carry baskets of fruit with which to plague the weary tourist. They flit around him like flies; they thrust the fruit in his face; they pester him with their pertinacity. Beware of them! - taste, touch not their fruit. In the eyes of these children, each peach, each grape is worth a prince’s ransom. It is to no purpose to be angry; it is like flapping wasps - they only buzz the more. Whatever you do, or whatever you say, the end will be the same. ‘Give me something,’ is the alpha and the omega of all their addresses. They learn the phrase, it is said, before they are taught the alphabet. It is in all their mouths. From the tiny toddler up to the maiden of sixteen, there is nothing heard but one universal chorus of - ‘Give me something.2
Whymper’s vitriol was all-encompassing. On leaving the masses he sought refuge in a chalet - ‘surrounded by quagmires of ordure, and dirt of every description. A foul native invited us to enter …’3 -and forthwith found more to criticise. Others had been charmed by chalet life. Not Whymper. His palace, as he ironically described it, was 15 feet by 20, with a ceiling height that varied between five and seven feet. In one corner his host smoked a pipe and blew, in between puffs, into a vat of milk. ‘It accounts, perhaps, for the flavour possessed by certain Swiss cheeses,’4 he wrote pettishly. Others, too, found the area unpleasant but nobody went out of his way to condemn it so forcibly as Whymper.
To atone for his xenophobia - or perhaps to purge the incident from his mind - he flung himself at the Morning Pass, deliberately, it would seem, leading his party up the most dangerous slopes available. The following morning they climbed across an unstable ice face on the Schallhorn. ‘It was executing a flank movement in the face of an enemy by whom we might be attacked at any moment,’ he wrote. ‘The peril was obvious. It was monstrous folly. It was foolhardiness.’5 Moore was horrified: ‘I am not ashamed to confess that during the whole time we were crossing this slope my heart was in my mouth, and I never felt relieved from such a load of care as when … after, I suppose, a passage of about twenty minutes, we got onto the rocks and were in safety.’6 Aimer, who had never been known to swear, ran a commentary of the strongest oaths Moore had ever heard. They had barely crossed the face when an ice tower ‘at least as great as that of the Monument at London Bridge’7 heeled over as if on a hinge and collapsed on the slope they had just traversed, obliterating every atom of their track and turning the snow face into a sheet of glassy ice. The excuse Whymper offered for taking such a route was that the alternative would have involved spending another night in a chalet.
He then directed them along a horrible knife-edge between two crevasses. As Croz said, ‘Where snow lies fast, there man can go; where ice exists, a way may be cut; it is a question of power; I have the power - all you have to do is follow me.’8 They did follow Croz and none but Whymper was pleased to have done so. The passage was ‘one of the most nervous I have ever made,’ wrote Moore. ‘[It] was as bad a piece of ice-work as it is possible to imagine.’9 At length, however, they completed the first crossing of the Morning Pass and limped into Zermatt. Their journey had taken them twelve hours and had proved that, although the Morning Pass was the most direct route to Zermatt, it was easier, safer and not much slower to take a coach.
Zermatt had changed very little since its ‘discovery’ by Saussure more than seventy years before. It was rather like Chamonix, being a small village tucked into a tight valley. Unlike Chamonix, however, which had grown into a major tourist resort, Zermatt remained a simple place. Smallholders eked out a living on terraces that lay below the snowline. It had a church and two hotels: the Mont Cervin for tourists, which had a view of the Matterhorn; and the less expensive Monte Rosa for climbers which didn’t. Yet above Zermatt rose some of the most majestic mountains in the Alps: Monte Rosa, the Weisshorn and, of course, the Matterhorn. Free of the valley, climbers could see some of the most stunning Alpine vistas on offer.
Whymper painted a vivid picture of the scene that greeted new arrivals:
Two dozen guides - good, bad, and indifferent; French, Swiss and Italian - can commonly be seen sitting on the wall on the front of the Monte Rosa hotel: waiting on their employers, and looking for employers; watching new arrivals, and speculating on the number of francs that can be extricated from their pockets. The Messieurs - sometimes strangely and wonderfully dressed - stand about in groups, or lean back in chairs, or lounge on the benches which are placed by the door. They wear extraordinary boots, and still more remarkable headdresses. Their peeled, blistered, and swollen faces are worth studying. Some, by the exercise of watchfulness and unremitting care, have been fortunate enough to acquire a raw sienna complexion. But most of them have not been so happy. They have been scorched on rocks, and roasted on glaciers. Their cheeks - first puffed, then cracked - have exuded a turpentine-like matter, which has coursed down their faces, and has dried in patches like the resin on the trunks of pines. They have removed it, and at the same time have pulled off large flakes of their skin. They have gone from bad to worse -their case has become hopeless - knives and scissors have been called into play; tenderly, and daintily, they have endeavoured to reduce their cheeks to one, uniform hue. It is not to be done. But they have gone on, fascinated, and at last have brought their unhappy countenances to a state of helpless and complete ruin. Their lips are cracked; their cheeks are swollen; their noses are peeled and indescribable.
Such are the pleasures of the mountaineer! Scornfully and derisively the last comer compares the sight with his own flaccid face and dainty hands; unconscious that he too, perhaps, will be numbered with those whom he now ridicules.
There is a frankness of manner about these strangely-apparelled and queer-faced men, which does not remind one of drawing-room, or city life; and it is good to see - in this club-room of Zermatt - those cold bodies, our too frigid countrymen, regale together when brought into contact; and it is pleasant to witness the hearty welcome given to the newcomers by the host [Herr Seiler of the Monte Rosa] and his excellent wife.10
This was the world Whymper relished, a world where everyday cares were left behind, where social pretensions were subsumed in an equality of weeping flesh and knobbly boots, where greatness was measured by physical ability, and where, by that reckoning, he was one of the greatest alive. When he strode into town he knew what he was worth. And he knew that other people knew it too. As Whymper entered Zermatt with yet another clutch of firsts to his name, he was aware that the assembled Messieurs eyed him with respect - more so, perhaps, because he was there to conquer the Matterhorn.
Whymper could not climb the Matterhorn that year. On visiting the post office he was handed a letter that demanded his immediate presence in London for business matters. He offered Croz and the Matterhorn to Adams-Reilly, who was at that moment travelling to Zermatt with their supplies. As Whymper had suspected, Adams-Reilly declined: he was not up to the challenge, even with Croz. Whymper was annoyed that he could not make an ascent that year with such a strong party to hand: ‘Our career in 1864 had been one of unbroken success, but the great ascent upon which I had set my heart was not attempted, and, until it was accomplished, I was unsatisfied.’11 But he was happy on two counts: nobody else was trying the Matterhorn; and his arch-rival Tyndall was, by all accounts, out of the game.
The Matterhorn fiasco of 1862 almost ended Tyndall’s Alpine career. He climbed mountains for as long as he was able, but he was getting old. The new generation of Alpine Clubbers were young men -Whymper, for example, was still in his twenties. Moreover, from 1864 Tyndall no longer had Bennen to guide him. In that year, on a March morning, Tyndall was travelling by train from Chislehurst to London. A fellow passenger drew his attention to a notice in The Times giving details of a new avalanche disaster in the Alps. Such notices were by now rather common, and Tyndall commented severely that nobody in their right minds would trust the snow so early in the year. The next day he learned that Bennen had been one of the victims.
Bennen had been hired to take two climbers up the Haut de Cry -a Frenchman named Boissonnet and an Englishman named Gossett who was attached to the Swiss Topographical Survey. The Haut de Cry was not a big hill, nor was it a dificult one. But, like many hills in March, it was covered with fresh snow. Bennen had doubts. On approaching a couloir he asked whether it was free of avalanches. The three local guides whom Gossett had hired assured him it was perfectly safe. Bennen didn’t believe them. While the three locals ploughed through the snow, creating a furrow of exactly the kind that had caused the Hamel disaster, Bennen picked a higher route over firmer ground, beckoning his employers to follow. Gossett and Boisonnet did as they were instructed, and all three roped themselves together, Gossett taking middle position between Bennen and Boissonnet. There was a short stretch of soft snow to cross - perhaps 12 feet in all - but it was deep, rising above their elbows. They had gone only a few steps when they heard a deep cutting sound. ‘The snow-field split in two about fourteen or fifteen feet above us,’ Gossett recorded. ‘The cleft was at first quite narrow, not more than an inch broad. An awful silence ensued; it lasted but a few seconds, and then it was broken by Bennen’s voice, “Wir sind alle verloren.” His words were slow and solemn, and those who knew him felt what they really meant when spoken by such a man as Bennen. They were his last words.’12 Gossett drove his alpenstock into the snow as far as it would go - three inches protruded when it finally reached ice - and braced himself for the avalanche. In the remaining seconds of calm he looked up to see if Bennen had taken the same precaution. To his astonishment, Bennen dropped his alpenstock, turned to face the valley and spread his arms wide. Slowly at first, but with increasing momentum, the ground began to move.
Gossett had blurred memories of what followed. At one moment he was almost suffocated by snow; then, as a body to which he was roped caught on a rock, he was jerked to the surface and found himself riding the crest of the avalanche: ‘It was the most awful sight I ever witnessed.’13 Then he was back under the snow, swimming against the flow with his arms until, suddenly, the avalanche halted with a deep, creaking noise. Gossett was encased in hard-set snow, unable to move any part of his body save his hands, which were still above the surface. He was beginning to freeze, the pressure on his chest was intense and his air supply was limited. Using the tips of his fingers he scrabbled at the snow above his face. Soon he saw a glimmer of light. But his fingers could not reach far enough to remove the last crust. His only recourse was to blow hard and hope that his breath either melted the snow or blew it away. He was lucky. After several efforts, the crust collapsed - ‘it was time, for I could not have held out much longer’14 - leaving a little round hole through which he could see the sky. ‘A dead silence reigned around me,’ Gossett wrote. ‘I was so surprised to be alive, and so persuaded at the first moment that none of my fellow-sufferers had survived, that I did not even think of shouting for them. I then made vain efforts to extricate my arms, but found it impossible; the most I could do was join the ends of my fingers.’15
Minutes later he heard shouts. The three local guides were alive, one of them having escaped the avalanche completely, the others having come to rest on the surface. It took them almost an hour to dig Gossett out, during which time he could see, and actually touch, Boissonnet’s foot protruding from the snow near his head. Tantalisingly, Boissonnet might still have been alive at that time. Once Gossett had been freed it took minutes to clear his companion, but by then he was dead. As for Bennen, there was no hope. The rope led vertically down from the bottom of Gossett’s hole, ‘and showed us that there was the grave of the bravest guide the Valais ever had, and ever will have’.16 Five hours later the survivors hobbled to safety, their feet frostbitten and their bodies covered in bruises. Gossett was a broken man and never went climbing again.
It was three days before the bodies were recovered. The rescuers found Bennen lying horizontally under eight feet of snow, his head facing the valley. Remarkably, the body was intact. Avalanches are notorious for the way they mangle their victims but despite having carried Bennen 1,900 feet, according to Gossett’s estimate, this one had done nothing but tear his watch off its chain. It was recovered in October by a shepherd who had been amongst the rescuers. It worked perfectly.
Gossett sent Tyndall a letter of commiseration: ‘I know you were very much attached to Bennen; the same was the case with him in regard to you. An hour before his death the Matterhorn showed its black head over one of the arêtes of the Haut de Cry. I asked Bennen whether it would ever be ascended. His answer was a decided, “Yes!”’17 Tyndall, who knew that the Matterhorn could never be climbed, was impervious to posthumous encouragement. Strangely, he also seemed untouched by Bennen’s death. His journal - unusually threadbare for this year and the next - made no mention of the disaster. He subscribed to a monument but he did not write an obituary for the Alpine Journal, as was becoming increasingly common when favourite guides died, and it was not until 1871 that he published a small paragraph to Bennen’s memory. Blindly loyal to his old guide -but not extravagantly so; the paragraph occupied four and a half lines - he maintained that Bennen was unaccustomed to spring snow and had been misled by the advice of inferior, local guides. That was all.
Had Tyndall been a superstitious man he might have pondered on the odd coincidence of what happened next. On 30 July 1864 he left Pontresina to climb the Piz Morterasch with two companions, a Mr Hutchinson and a Mr Lee-Warner from Rugby. Their guides were Walter, Bennen’s erstwhile second-in-command on the Matterhorn, and a huge, stolid man called Jenni. Tyndall was impressed by Jenni. ‘[He] is the most daring man and powerful character among the guides of Pontresina,’ he wrote. ‘The manner in which he bears down on all the others in conversation, and imposes his own will upon them, shows that he is the dictator of the place. He is a large and rather an ugly man, and his progress up hill, though resistless, is slow.’18 He seemed keen to impress Tyndall with his abilities. Maybe he was angling for the position Bennen had left vacant. If so, he went about it the wrong way. ‘He accomplished two daring things,’ Tyndall wrote, ‘the one successfully, while the other was within a hair’s-breadth of a very shocking issue.’19
In Tyndall’s opinion the Piz Morterasch was ‘a very noble mountain, and, as we thought, safe and easy to ascend’.20 So it was. Having left Pontresina at 4.00 a.m., they were toasting their conquest with glasses of champagne mixed with snow at 12.30 p.m. Tyndall spent an hour admiring the clouds as they drifted opalescently across the peaks. ‘Clouds differ widely,’ he recorded, ‘but I had hardly seen them more beautiful than they appeared to-day, while their succession of surprises experienced through their changes were such as rarely fall to the lot even of an experienced mountaineer.’21 It was so splendid that Tyndall was transported to scientific delight, rhapsodising on the nature of vapour and the particles contained therein. Then he began the descent.
Coming down, they reached a bergschrund. It was the same kind of thing that Forbes had crossed with a ladder on his ascent of the Jungfrau. But in this case they had no ladder. Walter, who was in the lead, hesitated when he saw the crevasse. Jenni, however, offered an easy solution. He ‘came forward, and half by expostulation, half by command, caused him to sit down on the snow at some height above the fissure. I think, moreover, he helped him with a shove.’22 As soon as he sat, Walter slid down the slope, travelling so fast that he flew over the bergschrund and landed on the other side. One by one the others followed him until Jenni was the only one remaining. Contemptuously, Jenni manoeuvred himself until he was over the widest portion of crevasse and then slid over it, ‘lumbering like a behemoth down the snow-slope at the other side. It was an illustration of that practical knowledge which long residence in the mountains can alone impart, and in the possession of which our best English climbers fall far behind their guides.’23
That was Jenni’s first daring thing. His second was less fortunate. Having glissaded to the top of the Morterasch Glacier, the party was faced with a broad gully filled with snow that had melted and then refrozen to create a steep wall of ice. Jenni wanted them to cross it. Tyndall wanted them to take the safer option of climbing down the rocks. Jenni affected not to hear him and made for the couloir. At its brink, Tyndall remonstrated. ‘Jenni, you know where you are going,’ he said, ‘the slope is pure ice.’24 Jenni replied that he knew what he was doing: there were only one or two yards of ice, in which he would cut steps; beyond that there was snow. The snow would be safe.
Of all men Tyndall should have known that a slope covered with freshly frozen snow which had not firmed onto its underlying surface was an invitation to disaster. But he trusted in his guide. They roped up. ‘Keep carefully in the steps, gentlemen,’ Jenni called as they stepped across the ice, ‘a false step here might detach an avalanche.’25 The avalanche happpened without a false step being taken. There was no warning, no crack from above, just a sudden rush of snow and bodies that swept Tyndall off his feet. He tried to drive his alpenstock down but it bounced off rock, tossing him into the air. At that moment he was hit by Jenni and both of them lost their alpenstocks. They were driven down, striking the lower lip of a crevasse and bouncing over it. Tyndall and Jenni tried to right themselves. For a second it looked as if they might regain control, then they were swept across a second crevasse. Tyndall was carried over but Jenni, who weighed 13 stone, dropped deliberately into the fissure to halt the slide. The rope nearly squeezed him to death before he was plucked out again.
As they crashed down, and as Jenni tried repeatedly to slow their progress, crying, ‘Halt, Herr Jesus, halt!’,26 Tyndall’s mind became free: ‘A kind of condensed memory, such as that described by people who have narrowly escaped drowning, took possession of me, and my power of reasoning remained intact. I thought of Bennen on the Haut de Cry, and muttered, “It is now my turn.” … I experienced no intolerable dread. In fact, the start was too sudden and the excitement of the rush too great to permit the development of terror.’27 He saw their destination clearly: a gentler ledge, on which they would slow down, followed by a cliff that promised death. He tried to detach himself from the rope but was unable to do so. Dispassionately, he watched Hutchinson clutch Lee-Warner as they approached the final drop.
Then, on the lower gradient, Jenni’s scrabbling slowed their speed. Tyndall stood up and added his weight to the rope. The avalanche poured over the cliff but, thanks to Jenni and Tyndall, the others did not. It was close - three seconds more, by Tyndall’s calculation, and they would all have been dead. Hutchinson had a bleeding forehead, Jenni had lost a chunk of his hand, Tyndall had rope welts up his arm and they all ‘experienced a tingling sensation over the hands, like that induced by incipient frostbite, which continued for several days’.28 But they had survived.
Fresh snow, a treacherous slope, an avalanche … it could have been a refrain of Bennen’s accident except that this time everyone was alive. And there was one other thing: a strand of watch chain was wrapped around Tyndall’s neck; a few more links lay in his pocket; but the watch itself was lost. On 16 August Tyndall went back for it, accompanied by five friends. Tyndall had a theory that if the watch had fallen face down its back, being made of gold, would reflect the sun’s rays and therefore prevent it sinking into the snow as happened with darker objects. His theory was proved correct. Twenty minutes into the search the watch was spotted. It was dry, unbroken and like Bennen’s it worked perfectly. Tyndall treated it like a fellow survivor: ‘The little creature had continued to beat underneath the snow,’ he wrote. ‘I have put it in an inner pocket near my heart so that its present warmth may make amends for the tremendous cold it must have endured.’29 His sentimentality may have reflected a deep loneliness and a sense of despair that his climbing days were almost at an end.
Tyndall might not have considered the coincidence on the Morterasch of any importance, but it fitted into an odd current that was flowing through Switzerland that year. Richard Wagner, who had composed most of his operas within sight of the Alps and who had not visited them for five years, suddenly found himself thrown back there as a political fugitive. Johannes Brahms, likewise, was drawn to Basle, where he gave his first solo recital. Elizabeth Gaskell, who had never been to Switzerland before, inexplicably decided to write Wives and Daughters in a hotel at Pontresina. At Morzine, troops were summoned to put down an epidemic of insanity which had overtaken a congregation of a hundred young women. There was an air of expectancy which unnerved even the most seasoned and precise of Alpinists -while waiting for the weather to clear at Zinal, Leslie Stephen broke a chapel window playing street cricket. Something was about to happen.
Over it all, brooded the Matterhorn. ‘Magnificent rock,’ wrote a visitor to Zermatt that year, ‘with his broad breast fronting you, his back and loins covered with pure snow, and a glacier issuing from between his outstretched paws. There he reposes, standing out clear against the sky, like a colossal sphinx, calmly looking down on the world … I have seen the glories of the Indies, the bright calm beauty of inland China, the blue skies and rich landscapes of Italy, the purple hills and ruined temples of Greece, the virgin forests and park-like lands of Tartary, the wild grandeur of iceberg and glacier in Arctic seas, but [this] … outstrips them all.’30