Eighteen sixty-five was the year in which Alice in Wonderland was published and the year in which the American Civil War came to an end. It was the year in which the first complete dodo skeleton was discovered and the year in which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. It was also the year in which, shortly after 3.00 p.m. on 14 July, a small boy rushed into the Monte Rosa Hotel with the news that he’d seen an avalanche on the north face of the Matterhorn. He was given a clip round the ear and told not to be so silly. No avalanche had fallen, or they would have heard it. But the boy wasn’t entirely silly. Something had fallen down the Matterhorn.
Twenty minutes before the boy’s report, Hudson and Whymper had agreed on their order of descent. Croz would go first, with Hadow after him. Hudson, who had an eye out for his boy, would go next, then Douglas, old Peter Taugwalder, Whymper and, finally, young Peter Taugwalder. They had plenty of rope: there were two 100-foot lengths of standard Manilla, another 150 feet of a stronger variety and more than 200 feet of a much slighter brand, all of which Whymper had brought from London, home suppliers being infinitely preferable to Swiss ones in his opinion. While they were roping up, Whymper spent a last few minutes sketching the summit and then, darting back up to put their names in a bottle, he took his place in the chain.
The adrenalin which had carried them to the top was gone, leaving them shaky-legged and exhausted. They knew this and acted accordingly, taking exaggerated care on the rocks they had bounded up so eagerly that morning. Only one man moved at a time and not until he was safely anchored would the next in line leave his position. On ice slopes, the more experienced helped the less. Hadow, who was the weariest of them all, had his feet guided into position by Croz. Their precautions were standard practice for any well-guided party coming home after a new conquest save for one important difference - although the leaders were tied to one of the stronger ropes, Old Peter and Douglas were linked by the weakest of the lot.
At 3.00 p.m. Croz put his axe to one side so that he could assist Hadow on a tricky slope. What occurred next could only be guessed at. Whymper’s theory was that Croz had helped Hadow into a safe position and had then turned round to pick up his ice axe. As he did so, Hadow slipped and knocked Croz over. Whymper did not see it happen, his view being blocked momentarily by a rock, but he witnessed every moment of the subsequent tragedy.
I heard one startled exclamation from Croz, then saw him and Mr. Hadow flying downwards; in another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps, and Lord F. Douglas immediately after him. All this was the work of a moment. Immediately we heard Croz’s exclamation, old Peter and I planted ourselves as firmly as the rocks would permit: the rope was taut between us and the jerk came on us both as one man. We held; but the rope broke midway between Taugwalder and Lord Francis Douglas. For a few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downwards on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on to the Matterhorngletscher below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet in height. From the moment the rope broke it was impossible to help them.1
Whymper and the two Taugwalders did not move for half an hour. Old Peter burst into tears. Young Peter cried, ‘We are lost! We are lost!’2 Young Peter’s despair infected Old Peter and soon he too was crying that they were lost. Caught between the two, Whymper stared down the slope, helpless. Of the three, only Whymper was in control of himself. Neither Taugwalder was willing to move. With difficulty the 25-year-old Londoner broke the stasis. He persuaded Young Peter to leave his perch - they were still roped together and unless he moved they were stuck - then guided father and son back to Zermatt. They went down slowly and carefully, searching for their companions’ bodies as they went, sometimes calling out in the vain hope that one of them might have survived. No voices came in return; instead the Matterhorn offered a silent reply of its own. At 6.30 p.m., when they had cleared the most dangerous part of the descent, an enormous arc of light rose in the sky. Tale, colourless and noiseless, but perfectly sharp and defined, except where it was lost in the clouds, this unearthly apparition seemed like a vision from another world; and, almost appalled, we watched with amazement the gradual development of two vast crosses, one on either side. If the Taugwalders had not been the first to perceive it,’ wrote Whymper, ‘I should have doubted my senses.’3 He recognised it as a solar fogbow, a rare but not unheard-of phenomenon. The Taugwalders, however, saw it as a heavenly manifestation and despite his knowledge to the contrary Whymper was also touched by superstition. ‘It was a fearful and wonderful sight; unique in my experience, and impressive beyond description, coming at such a moment.’4
Until then the Taugwalders had been in a state of shock, Old Peter crying ‘I cannot! I cannot!’5 as Whymper coaxed him over the rocks. ‘Very seldom indeed in my life have I experienced so vividly what it is to have a step between myself and death as I did on this most terrible occasion,’ Whymper later wrote to a friend. ‘For two hours after the accident I thought every moment that the next would be my last … the two guides were unnerved to such an extent that I suspected every minute one or the other would have slipped, and then it would have been all over.’6 Oddly, however, the sight of the crosses seemed to restore their senses. The Taugwalders now began to talk about their wages. Who would pay them, they wondered, now that Douglas was dead? Whymper retorted that he would pay them, of course. After a brief consultation, Young Peter said that they would prefer it if Whymper paid them nothing and to put the fact in writing, both in his journal and in the hotel book. Astonished, Whymper asked why. Because, Young Peter explained, next year there would be lots of visitors to Zermatt and they would get more work if it was felt they had been poorly treated. Whymper was appalled by their attitude. He made no reply, nor did he speak to them afterwards, unless it was absolutely necessary, but ‘tore down the cliff, madly and recklessly, in a way that caused them, more than once, to inquire if I wished to kill them’.7
Now it was Whymper who was the person in shock. His body still functioned but his mind began to swirl. At 9.30 p.m. he chose ‘a wretched slab, barely large enough to hold the three’,8 on which to spend the night. Dismayed, the Taugwalders suggested they continue by moonlight. Whymper saw this as a deliberate attempt to force him into a fatal accident, after which the only account of the disaster would be the one the Taugwalders concocted between them. Later, when they urged him to go to sleep, he feared they might murder him. Little of this made its way into his journal, but in a memorandum to the Alpine Club he later described how Young Peter ‘broke out into frightful levity, displaying the most brutal insensitiv-ity - eating - drinking - smoking - laughing - vociferating … that their demeanour gradually became, and continued to be, suggestive of personal danger’.9 According to another account, Whymper did not sleep but spent the night with his back against the cliff, axe at the ready, as the Taugwalders leered ghoulishly, waiting for their chance, on a slip of rock thousands of feet above home.
Six hours later there was enough light for them to continue the descent and the danger passed. They went down in silence, met the first chalets, and then ran all the way to Zermatt. Whymper burst into the Monte Rosa Hotel and made for his room, pursued by an inquisitive landlord. As he closed the door he announced ‘The Taugwalders and I have returned.’10 The landlord understood perfectly. Within the hour he had roused the village and twenty men were on their way to spy out the terrain. They returned, having spotted the bodies at the base of the north face.
Hudson’s friend McCormick had ignored the offer to join the Matterhorn team and instead had climbed the nearby Gornergrat. On Saturday, 15 July, Whymper sent a note alerting him to Hudson’s death: ‘A party of guides has been sent immediately from here to search for him, and I follow them; but I wish particularly to have an Englishmen with me, and I therefore beg, if you can possibly return here by 4.30 p.m., to do so, in order to go with me.’11 McCormick received the message too late to be of any assistance that day, but joined Whymper in a rescue mission on Sunday, 16 July. The Zermatt guides could not help, having been threatened with excommunication if they missed early Mass, but there were plenty of others willing to join the team. The Revd J. Robertson and J. Philpotts enlisted with their guide Franz Andermatten. Another English visitor offered his guides Joseph and Alexandre Lochmatter. Two Chamoniards, Frédéric Payot and Jean Tairraz, made up the party. They left Zermatt at 2.00 a.m. on the 16th and by 8.30 were within sight of the bodies. ‘As we saw one weatherbeaten man after another raise the telescope, turn deadly pale, and pass it on without a word to the next,’ wrote Whymper, ‘we knew that all hope was lost.’12
The view from afar was nothing compared to what awaited. When they reached the scene they found Croz and Hadow lying next to each other on the snow, with Hudson some 50 yards distant. The bodies had been stripped almost naked during the fall and were so battered that they were barely recognisable - Croz, for example, was missing the top half of his head and was identified only by his beard and by a rosary cross which the Revd Robertson dug out of his jaw with a penknife. Their boots, the last items to be torn off, lay next to them alongside a pathetic collection of personal belongings. ‘I have never seen anything like it before or since,’ Whymper wrote, ‘and do not wish to see such a sight again.’13 Of Douglas there was no trace, save a pair of gloves, a belt and a boot. His body had either caught on a ledge or had been shredded as it bounced from rock to rock. Apart from a single coat sleeve, nothing more was ever found of him.
They buried the bodies where they found them. McCormick tried to read the funeral service from Hudson’s prayer book, which had survived the fall and lay a short distance from his boots, but it was an abridged version so he had to make do with reciting Psalm 90. ‘Imagine us standing,’ he later wrote, ‘with our bronze-faced guides, leaning on our axes or alpenstocks around that newly-made and singular grave, in the centre of a snow-field, perhaps never trodden by man, with that awful mountain frowning above us, under a cloudless sky.’14 Then they returned to Zermatt where the authorities insisted the bodies be disinterred and brought back for a Christian burial. On 19 July, twenty-one local guides went back to the site and dug the corpses out. As they were doing so, a Rugby schoolmaster named Knyvett Wilson fell off the Riffelhorn and died.
Hudson, Hadow and Wilson were shovelled into a joint grave, covered by two, bland, Victorian coffin stones. Croz was given an upstanding, granite memorial. Hudson was later removed and laid to rest in Zermatt’s English church.
The news broke slowly, inaccurately and piecemeal. Whymper wrote a description of the tragedy in the visitors’ book of the Monte Rosa Hotel, which was stolen almost immediately, but it was 8 August before he published a definitive account in The Times. Until then, wild rumours circulated that made Zermatt, briefly, the most famous place in Europe. Climbers from every nation rushed to the village, impelled by the desire to help, to offer condolences or simply to gawp. The greatest attraction for ghouls was the story - put about by the Zermatt guides - that Old Peter had cut the rope. Whymper dismissed this firmly: the piece of rope was in his possession and it had clearly not been cut either before or during the accident; indeed, given the circumstances, it was plainly impossible for Old Peter to have done so. But the tale persisted, and Taugwalder was reduced to the status of a medieval flagellant, displaying to all and sundry the wounds he had suffered as he took the strain. ‘Mr. Robertson,’ he beseeched the vicar, ‘they say I cut the rope! Look at my fingers!’15 One arrival, a German student named Güssfeldt, went so far as to try and persuade old Peter Taugwalder to guide him to the scene of the disaster: ‘But he was terrified, and tried to dissuade me, showing me the scars which the rope had left on the wrist round which the broken rope had been wound.’16* On 19 July the British Consul in Geneva sent his chaplain to conduct a private inquiry and on 21 July Zermatt opened its own inquest. Midway through its deliberations a wrench-ingly ignorant telegram arrived from Douglas’s mother, Lady Queensbury: ‘Is it not possible to seek in the rocks above or to let down food?’17
As all this was happening, Tyndall was making his way to the Matterhorn for a final try via Breuil. The first he knew of the disaster was when a traveller stopped him on a pass and asked if he’d heard the news. Professor Tyndall was no more. He had tried to climb the unclimbable and had fallen to his death. Tyndall hastened to Zermatt to see what was going on.
When he learned the truth he immediately started a rescue operation to recover Douglas’s remains. ‘The idea of leaving the body to bleach upon the crags of the Matterhorn was abhorrent to me. Many people deemed it a noble resting place. I did not and I cannot explain why I did not.’18 On his way he had been struck by the abilities of Swiss road-makers, who could drill a foot-deep hole in solid granite within an hour. It occurred to him that a few metal pegs driven into the cliff could support him as he climbed down the track of the falling bodies. None of the Zermatt guides would accompany him, so he hired one of the Lochmatters from St Nicholas and then sent him to Geneva to pick up 3,000 feet of rope. Lochmatter returned with the rope, straggled over a team of mules, plus hammers, steel punches and a tent. The cargo was hauled up to a suitable depot where it waited until the weather was right. Alas, the weather was never right. For twenty days the Matterhorn was hidden by clouds and, eventually, Tyndall gave up. A contemporary put it in a slightly different fashion: ‘the Syndic of Zermatt fortunately found out what was going on, and sent him and his ropes away; they had had plenty of Englishmen killed there; they did not want any more.’19 Whatever the reason for Tyndall’s withdrawal, he left in the comforting knowledge that Douglas had died painlessly. ‘No death,’ he wrote, ‘has probably less of agony in it than that caused by a fall upon a mountain. Expected it would be terrible, but unexpected, not.’20
(This opinion, which might not have been shared by those who saw the bodies, was given pseudo-scientific validation in 1892. In one of the first examinations of near-death experiences, an Austrian named Albert von St Gallen Heim interviewed a number of people who had survived falls in the Alps.
In nearly 95 per cent of the victims there occurred, independent of the degree of their education, thoroughly similar phenomena experienced with only slight differences. In practically all individuals who faced death through accidental falls a similar mental state developed. It represented quite a different state than that experienced in the face of less suddenly occurring mortal dangers. It may be briefly characterised in the following way: no grief was felt, nor was there paralyzing fright of the sort that can happen in instances of lesser danger (e.g. outbreak of fire). There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain; but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety. Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundredfold velocity or intensity. The relationship of events and their probable outcomes were overviewed with objective clarity. No confusion entered at all. Time became greatly expanded. The individual acted with lightning quickness in accord with his accurate judgement of his situation. In many cases there followed a sudden review of the individual’s entire past; and finally, the person falling often heard beautiful music and fell in a superbly blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets. Then consciousness was permanently extinguished, usually at the moment of impact, and the impact was at most heard but never painfully felt. Apparently hearing is the last of the senses to be extinguished.21
St Gallen Heim had himself fallen off an Alp, and the music and roseate clouds were probably extrapolated from his own experience. But the numbing immediacy of shock was exactly as he described. When one of his interviewees, an eight-year-old boy, fell off a cliff he worried only that the penknife his father had given him might slip out of his pocket. St Gallen Heim offered no explanation for his findings. He used them only to comfort the bereaved.)
Meanwhile, Whymper was giving his deposition to the local court. He told everything as it had happened - omitting the Taugwalders’ subsequent behaviour - and blamed the fall entirely on the use of the weak rope. Looking at the piece he had retained as evidence, the officials accepted his deposition without question. It had clearly snapped and no wonder - it was flimsy beyond belief.* The verdict was accidental death.
What was not explained (or asked), however, was why the weak rope had been used in the first place. Croz and Old Peter may have paid the matter no attention, guides being notoriously dismissive of such unmanly aids. Hadow and Douglas might have been too inexperienced to know or care what they were tied to. But surely Hudson, one of Europe’s most experienced climbers, would have noticed what was going on. The possibility emerged that Old Peter, nominally their head guide, had deliberately sanctioned the use of the weak rope so that if the lower members fell he would not be dragged after them. ‘The rumour is absolutely without foundation,’22 Whymper said. In his denial of Taugwalder’s culpability, however, he may also have been trying to save his own neck.
According to Whymper the weak rope was employed only between Old Peter and Douglas; he had been 100 feet distant when the group roped up and had been unaware of the precarious arrangement. Yet, by his own admission, there were 250 feet of good rope free as they started the descent. This indicated that the leading members had been joined by 100 feet of Manilla, with the other 100 feet plus the 150 feet of the stronger make being wound round the shoulders of either Croz or Young Peter. That at least one stretch of good rope was in Young Peter’s possession was confirmed by Whymper’s statement that they had tied sections of it to the rocks to help them during their descent. The implication, therefore, is that Douglas, Old Peter, Whymper and Young Peter were all linked by the weaker rope. Even had Whymper not been tied to the weaker rope, he must have been blind not to see that it linked Old Peter and Douglas. Maybe it was nerves, maybe it was confusion, maybe it was the excitement of having conquered the Matterhorn, but one thing is certain: Whymper had to have known that the poorest rope was being used, did nothing about it and was therefore partially to blame. The one mitigating factor was ignorance: contrary to his later statements Whymper did not at the time think the rope was too weak; until the creation of new ropes woven to Alpine Club specifications, he had always used the weak variety on his climbs; Taugwalder also stated that he had considered the rope strong enough, adding in his evidence to the court that had he not thought so he would never have let it be taken up the mountain in the first place. Taugwalder’s opinion may not have been valid: most guides thought a rope was simply a rope, whatever its strength; as one British climber wrote, ‘I have absolutely known a man propose to take the line from the laundry ground at the Riffelberg.’23 All the same, the incident did not show Whymper in a good light. Nor did the fact that all the ropes subsequently vanished except for the piece he retained as evidence.
He threw out diversionary leads, blaming Hudson for having allowed Hadow to be a member of the party and hinting at a conspiracy within Zermatt’s judicial system. ‘I handed in a number of questions which were framed so as to afford old Peter an opportunity of exculpating himself from the grave suspicions which at once fell upon him,’ he wrote in 1871. ‘The questions, I was told, were put and answered; but the answers, although promised, have never reached me.’24 He had a go at M. Clemenz, the presiding official - ‘It is greatly to be regretted that he does not feel that the suppression of the truth is equally against the interests of travellers and of the guides.’25 When the transcript was finally made public in 1917, several differences between Whymper’s and Old Peter’s versions of events became apparent. None was very germane to the issue of who was to blame, but they shared an interesting characteristic: when Taugwalder said something that differed from Whymper’s statement, and was then questioned about it, he retracted his words with the admission that Whymper knew best. At the time Whymper praised Old Peter for his fortitude and his honesty. Six years later he wrote that the man was teetering on the brink of insanity - ‘I am told he is now nearly incapable for work - not absolutely mad, but with intellect gone and almost crazy; which is not to be wondered at.’26* In the same breath he spat on Young Peter, who had vanished two days after the accident: ‘Whatever may be his abilities as a guide, he is not one to whom I would ever trust my life, or afford any countenance.’27 Whymper was revolted to learn that he returned to Zermatt the following year and, despite having been paid more than the going rate for his Matterhorn climb, was importuning tourists as a luckless beggar who had yet to receive his fee.**
Despite his smokescreens, not everyone saw Whymper as a blameless participant. T. S. Kennedy, one of Hudson’s few invitees not to have turned up for the Matterhorn that season, wrote that the accident resulted from having taken too large a group and from carelessness induced by the euphoria of conquest. He also said, however, that ‘A man who has spent only three or four years on the Alps is not and cannot be a first-rate mountaineer.’30 His words were aimed at Hadow and Douglas, but Whymper, who had first seen the Alps in 1860, was barely outside the bracket. Similarly, one of the Parker brothers, who had seen the possibilities of the Zermatt route as early as 1860, was asked by Old Peter - who claimed that he had not been paid enough by Whymper - to conduct a private investigation into the matter. Parker’s cautious assessment, transmitted privately to his father, was that ‘Taugwalder is a very good cragsman & Whymper is said to be a bad one.’31
Hadow’s father thought Whymper had gone too far in abrogating all responsibility. ‘We have been greatly distressed at Mr. Whymper’s letter in the ‘Times’ and the leading article which I was sure would follow,’ he wrote to McCormick on 10 August. ‘He might have spared those unnecessary remarks about poor Hudson, which have brought blame on him for want of prudence and caution.’32 Emily Hudson, Charles Hudson’s wife, felt the same. Lurid reports were already circulating and she was angry that Whymper should have cast her husband as the wrongdoer. ‘I cannot tell you how it has distressed me,’ she wrote to McCormick. ‘I am very much surprised that Mr. Whymper should have been a party to it. Of course one knows the craving there is in the public mind for the sensational, in any form; but it really makes me sick to think of such a subject being used to gratify their tastes. Do you think it would be possible to stop it?’33
The one positive aspect of 1865 was that Jean-Antoine Carrel managed to climb the Matterhorn from Breuil. When Giordano heard of Whymper’s success he had been downcast. ‘Despite the fact that everyone did his duty, this has been a lost battle,’ he reported to Sella. ‘And I am upset beyond words by it. I believe, however, that revenge would still be in order.’34 The revenge he envisaged was an immediate conquest of the Matterhorn from the Italian side. At first, nobody was willing to try it except Carrel. But an Italian priest who was also a climber and who had been given leave from his seminary to try the Alps arrived in time to stir the faint hearts. He rallied them with patriotic sentiments. How could they expect to be paid for such a job? National honour was at stake. He himself would go with them. So, on 16 July, while the search parties were leaving Zermatt, Carrel, the priest and two others went up the Matterhorn from Breuil. ‘We were going of our own will, for the honour and the vengeance of our country,’35 the priest wrote. They did not take Giordano because ‘Carrel bluntly declared that he did not for the present feel like taking a tourist’.36
They passed all the perils on the Italian ridge before sliding around to the Swiss side where they followed Whymper’s path to the summit. Whymper was impressed. He had always wanted Carrel to get to the top from Breuil simply because he was so determined to do so. ‘He was the man,’ he explained, ‘of all those who attempted the ascent of the Matterhorn, who most deserved to be the first upon its summit. He was the first to doubt its inaccessibility, and he was the only man who persisted in believing that its ascent would be accomplished.’37 It was ‘the most desperate piece of mountain-scrambling upon record,’38 Whymper wrote. It was true. The little wrinkle of rock by which they crossed from west to east is still known as Carrel’s Corridor. When Whymper asked him about it five years later, Carrel replied: ‘Man cannot do anything much more difficult than that!’39
Whymper was prone to occasional dramatisation but in this instance he was, if anything, underplaying Carrel’s achievement if a future President of the Alpine Club was to be believed. ‘Harder gymnastic climbs have no doubt been done,’ Sir Edward Davidson wrote in 1897, ‘but as a traverse over treacherous & difficult rock affording most indifferent foot and handhold & requiring perfect steadiness on the part of the whole party, I cannot recall anything worse in my experience.’40
And what of Tyndall? He was downcast: the mountain’s forgotten supplicant, he had been beaten on all fronts. But he was not yet defeated, as he proved on 29 July 1868 when he completed the first traverse of the Matterhorn, climbing to the summit from Breuil and descending via Whymper’s route to Zermatt. He did it in habitual style. ‘I did not touch food preparing to reach the top … in a spirit of prayer and fasting,’41 he told an old friend. He reached Zermatt after nineteen and a half hours and wrote immediately to Huxley, his pen wobbling with exhaustion. ‘Many years ago you spoke to me jokingly about making a pass across the Matterhorn from Breuil to Zermatt. This I have just accomplished with great labour & some danger … I shall now give up this break-neck work … I had committed myself, and could not rest contented until I had accomplished what I had begun.’42
The ascent moved him deeply. Whereas Whymper had exulted in the number of peaks he could see from the summit, Tyndall was depressed. ‘Hardly two things can be more different than the two aspects of the mountain from above and below,’ he recorded. ‘Seen from the Riffel, or Zermatt, it presents itself as a compact pyramid, smooth and steep, and defiant of the weathering air. From above, it seems torn to pieces by the frosts of ages, while its vast facettes are so foreshortened as to stretch out into the distance like plains … There is something chilling in the contemplation of the irresistible and remorseless character of those infinitesimal forces, whose integration through the ages pulls down even the Matterhorn. Hacked and hurt by time, the aspect of the mountain from its higher crags saddened me.’43
Throughout his life Tyndall had sought in the Alps a cure for the ailments which dogged him. Subconsciously, he linked physical illness to spiritual angst and hoped that by conquering the Matterhorn he would find relief from both. He was disappointed.
This notion of decay implied a reference to a period when the Matterhorn was in the full strength of mountainhood. My thoughts naturally ran back to its possible growth and origin. Nor did they halt there, but wandered on through molten worlds to that nebulous haze which philosophers have regarded, and with good reason, as the proximate source of all material things … Did that formless fog contain potentially the sadness with which I regarded the Matterhorn? Did the thought which now ran back to it simply return to its ancestral home?… When I look at the heavens and the earth, at my own body, at my strengths and weakness of mind, even at these ponderings, and ask myself, Is there no being or thing in the universe that knows more about these matters than I do? -what is my answer?44
There was no answer. Tyndall continued to climb mountains but did so with less and less enthusiasm. ‘In 1868 I had been so much broken down on going to the Alps,’ he wrote, ‘that even amongst them I found it difficult to recover energy.’45 In 1869 he scaled the Aletschhorn in order to study the colouration of the sky but by 1870, following a nasty slip that resulted in blood poisoning, he was ready to give up. The Alps agreed with him. That year, lightning ignited two forests, one of which burned for several days and nights. Tyndall watched with fascination as clumps of trees exploded into flame. A heavy bout of rain extinguished the fire and also doused Tyndall’s career in the Alps. In 1877, having finally found a wife, he built a holiday home in Bel Alp, from which he led guests on gentle jaunts across the glaciers. People spoke of him with awe, the Matterhorn’s lower peak was named Pic Tyndall in his honour and the Emperor of Brazil asked for two signed photographs, but never again did he climb a mountain.
Whymper was released from the inquest on 22 July 1865 and hurried down to Visp, from where he went on to Interlaken and wrote an angry note to McCormick asking how much he could claim from the Zermatt authorities for his ‘detention’46 during the trial and apologising for having borrowed his handkerchief (retrievable at 20 Canterbury Place, Lambeth Road). From Interlaken he travelled to Geneva and thence to Calais, the object of everybody’s brightest interest. ‘The manner in which I was persecuted by impertinent people on my way home passes all belief,’47 he told Robertson. He came home to find himself the most talked-about person in London. A fellow Alpine Club member wrote that he was ‘most truly to be pitied, for his name is so connected with the Matterhorn, and rather wild designs upon it, that people are sure to blame him for the accident’.48
The Matterhorn shaped the remainder of his life. Never the most sociable of people, he withdrew still further, confining himself to the family home for several years. According to his sister, ‘his unfortunate habit of sleeplessness had become fixed, and he practically turned night into day’.49 He ate supper at 10.00 p.m. when everyone else was asleep, went to bed at 3.00 a.m., breakfasted at 11.00 a.m. on his own, and lunched at 2.00 p.m. ‘or later, but on no account at the same time as any family meal’.50 Sometimes he allowed his youngest sister to run errands, occasionally he played bagatelle with his father, but his main preoccupation was writing up his journals for publication. At dusk - generally in autumn and winter - he would disappear on long tramps, returning for a late tea and toast, when he might speak a few words before spreading his papers across the table in dismissal.
Whymper did not stop exploring: he made two expeditions to Greenland, he climbed new peaks in the Andes and the Rockies with select Swiss guides - among them Carrel - and, his funds having been exhausted by these forays, wrote guidebooks to Zermatt and Chamonix. His achievements were impressive in a quiet way: in Greenland he drove across the glaciers on a dog sled (in those days a rare skill for a European) and collected an array of geological specimens unequalled outside Copenhagen; in the Andes he made important observations on the effects of altitude on the human frame when he climbed Mount Chimborazo, at 20,561 feet the highest mountain in Ecuador; his travels through the Rockies took him over scores of untrodden mountains and passes; his Alpine guidebooks were well researched and well received; he received the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal and was proposed for - but was not granted - membership of the Royal Society. Tellingly, however, he avoided the high Alps. He went back to them, he wrote about them, he conducted glacial experiments on them, he walked across them but hardly ever did he actually climb them. ‘I have done with the Alps now,’ he told a fellow climber, ‘having, as you may suppose, not quite so much appetite for this sort of thing as I had.’51 As with Tyndall, the Matterhorn had finished him.
Whymper’s shunning of the Alps has been interpreted in numerous ways. The most lurid version is that he dared not face the ghosts of his lost companions. Immediate accounts tell of his being in a terrible state after the fall, weeping constantly, sitting up all night in fellow climbers’ rooms fixing the details in his mind. He later wrote to McCormick begging an example of Hudson’s signature as a memento. Certainly the disaster was a topic he returned to again and again in lecture halls, magazine articles and private correspondence for the forty-six years until his death. On the other hand, when he did address the subject he seemed interested only in proving that he was not to blame. In letters to a Swiss colleague - now displayed in Zermatt’s Alpine Museum - he displayed, for example, only conventional regret at the deaths and dwelled far more heavily on whether or not the right decisions had been taken during the climb (he would take them again if he had to, he said defiantly). Similarly, when he reclimbed the Matterhorn to take photographs from the summit in 1874 he passed over the very spot where the disaster had occurred without even a passing mention of it in his journal. The truth is probably that he did feel some remorse, but it had nothing to do with his avoidance of the Alps. He had stalked the Matterhorn for five years, making smash-and-grab raids on lesser peaks as he did so, and in 1865 he considered his work over. At Breuil, Girdlestone had noted that Whymper ‘was resolved to do the Matterhorn, and equally resolved, that when that was done, to give up mountaineering, because there were no more new great mountains to be conquered’.52 In his single-minded manner, Whymper saw no reason to go back over old ground. The Alps were done, they were finished, he had conquered them. As he wrote in 1871, ‘The play is over, and the curtain is about to fall.’53 For any who wished to emulate him he had wise but depressing advice: ‘Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.’54