The geographical conquest of the Alps ended effectively with the Meije. There were other places yet to be discovered, but though they were beautiful and interesting they were straws at which the Alpine Club grasped with increasing desperation. By 1885 the Alps were deemed to have been done. The last dragons had been slain and there was little more to be found. What else was there to do? as more than one President asked his members in the dog years of the nineteenth century.
There was quite a lot more to do. The Alpine Club encouraged members to climb mountains in different, more difficult ways. A. F. Mummery exemplified the new approach. Outwardly the feeblest of specimens, he was so stringy that his feet touched the ground when he rode on a donkey; when found in anything but an erect posture he looked like a pile of sticks on which a passer-by had thrown some old tweed. Yet he was possessed of enormous power and his spidery limbs allowed him to crawl up sheer faces, his whole body expanding and contracting like a hand measuring the length of a table. He wedged himself into tiny fissures, he hung from crags and he eased himself round perilous boulders. His published journals contained photograph after photograph of unthinkably nasty pinnacles and of precipices that had once been thought unclimbable. His writing, couched in the jocular ‘oh-it-was-nothing’ tone that had become fashionable, described scenes of casual terror - as, for example, when contemplating his next move, he looked to one side and found that the ice outcrop to which he clung was so thin that he could see every feature of the valley below. For a long time he was blackballed by the Alpine Club - he was a tanner, which upset some of the stuffier members - but when finally he was admitted he instigated a new trend in mountaineering.
Another new trend came with the advent of women climbers. Women were perfectly capable of climbing mountains, as Marie Paradis and Henriette D’Angeville had shown in the first half of the century; in the 1860s and 1870s other women had come forward, such as Lucy Walker, Meta Brevoort and the redoubtable Katherine Richardson who became the first woman to climb the Meije. Until the 1880s, however, women featured mostly as observers, whose honeymoons were spent waiting for their husbands to return from the hill, and whose subsequent summers were passed in similar fashion. Women were not allowed to join the Alpine Club - although it was agreed they had the necessary qualifications - and if they submitted an article to the Alpine Journal they had to persuade a man to put his name to it. Continental clubs were less exclusive - France prided itself on including women from the start - but it was still unusual for females to stray from the lower slopes. They were treated with dangerous condescension. In 1870, a Mrs Marke had sought assistance from her guide while crossing a glacier at Chamonix. The guide, quite understanding her fears, had taken her by the elbow and offered to lead her home. Unroped, they both fell into a crevasse and died.
Mrs Mummery was one of the first to scoff at the Alpine Club’s exclusivity. ‘The masculine mind is, with rare exceptions, imbued with the idea that a woman is not a fit comrade for steep ice or precipitous rock, and, in consequence,’ she wrote, ‘should be satisfied with watching through a telescope some weedy and invertebrate masher being hauled up a steep peak by a couple of burly guides, or by listening to this same masher when, on his return, he lisps out with a sickening drawl the many perils he has encountered.’1 She forced her husband to take her up mountains with him. Her example was followed by scores of others, notably Miss Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed from Killancrick, a feisty person who became first Mrs Burnaby, then Mrs Main and then Mrs Aubrey Le Blond. She was so energetic that her mother received the following telegram: ‘Stop her climbing mountains! She is scandalising all London and looks like a Red Indian.’2 Miss Elizabeth took no notice. Her only concession to femininity was to cover her climbing trousers with a skirt that she removed once out of sight of civilisation, and to have her maid accompany as high as possible to help her with her boots. Her example was followed by others. One woman climber became so enamoured of the Alps that she married her guide, a move that took everyone by surprise.
Explorers who could not find satisfaction in the Alps went elsewhere. They went to the Caucasus, they went to Greenland, Spitsbergen and the Himalayas, taking their expertise and their guides with them. Sometimes they did not return: Mummery vanished in 1895 on the face of Nanga Parbat. But sometimes they did: Sir Martin Conway climbed the Alps from west to east in a three-month, 1,000-mile hike accompanied by two Ghurkas whom he wanted to train as instructors for Indian mountain regiments. When he went back to the Himalayas the Alps followed him. On one mountain he wrote:
I was sitting alone in the tent door, with a marvellous view stretching before me from the great featureless snow-field down the long valley - fifty or sixty miles long - up which we had come. All was perfectly still about me and there was not a soul in sight. I was awaiting the arrival of the rest of the men, and my mind was a blank. It surprised me then to see a queer white thing like some sort of animal dancing toward me over the snow-field as intermittent puffs of wind carried it. It danced a few yards and stopped; then it danced again, and so on. I could not make out what it was till at last, with a final jump, it landed in my lap. It was a torn fragment of newspaper.3
It had been part of his expedition’s packaging and had inexplicably been blown miles over the Himalayas in his wake. When he read it, he found it contained a lecture given by a member of the Alpine Club.
Conway was an art critic and mystic who managed to rescue the Alps from the spiritual battering they had received at the hands of Whymper and other peak-bagging toughs. He was like Ruskin in many respects, proselytising for both the beauty of the mountains and the benefits that beauty could confer on mankind. Unlike Ruskin, however, he did not stand back waving his hands in horror, but marched forward to find what beauty meant at close quarters. Every inch the late Victorian explorer, from his turban and moustache to his tweeds and sturdy boots, he asked people not to understand the mountains but to understand themselves by means of the mountains. He saw his transalpine tramp as a process of spiritual initiation, an engagement of mind, body and nature that led to a higher state of being. As he wrote, ‘It is not Nature that illuminates the mind, but the mind that glorifies Nature. The beauty that we behold must first arise in ourselves. It is born for the most part in suffering.’4 Others felt the same way, and by the beginning of the twentieth century Alpine exploration had taken a new twist. One could climb any cliff, forge any glacier, stand on any peak and no matter how well-trodden they were, one could claim a discovery not of topography but of self. Similar sentiments had been expressed before; but now, with everything having been ‘done’, they became more pertinent. Poetical climbers like Geoffrey Winthrop Young revelled in the Alps for no reason other than personal inspiration; so did George Mallory who started climbing in the 1900s and when asked why he went to the mountains replied ‘because they are there’ - to which was added the unspoken words ‘and so am I’.
Conway and his followers succeeded in recapturing the spiritual impetus of the early days. Science, however, which had been such a distinguishing feature of early Alpine exploration, became increasingly irrelevant. Scientists who now trod the hills did so in a state of resignation. Typical of the period was a French astronomer, Dr Janssen, who erected a wooden observatory with great difficulty on the top of Mont Blanc where, according to Whymper, there was a complete absence of building materials - ‘nothing even as big as the stone of a prune’.5 The cold froze the instruments; lightning struck the shed, killing one observer; then it sank into the ice, hastened in 1907 by an earthquake. The instruments were dug out and the remaining planks were used as fuel. Janssen, old and crippled, visited his creation only three times, on each occasion being hauled up on a sledge. Nothing illustrated the gap between science and mountaineering better than the behaviour of Janssen and Whymper, who once found themselves marooned in a hotel by bad weather. For three whole days they scowled across the fire without speaking, each considering it the other’s duty to pay the first respects. When the weather cleared they went their separate ways, not having exchanged a word.
Not everybody shared Conway’s vision of the mountains. In 1894 the English writer Samuel Butler went up the Rigi accompanied by Alfred, his manservant. Surrounded by stupendous scenery, Alfred had only this to say: ‘now if you please Sir, I should like to lie down on the grass here and have a read of Tit-Bits.6 On a deeper and more disturbing level was the reaction of the guide Melchior Anderegg whom Leslie Stephen invited to London one year to see the industrial horrors that drove himself and fellow Britons to the Alps every summer. Stephen took him to a point where they could see ‘the dreary expanse of chimney-pots through which the South-Western railway escapes from this dingy metropolis’.7 ‘That is not so fine a view as we have seen together from the top of Mont Blanc,’ he said in comradely fashion. ‘Ah, Sir!’ replied Anderegg. ‘It is far finer!’8 Anderegg’s statement pained Stephen. He later redeemed himself by preferring Madame Tussaud’s waxworks to the splendours of Westminster Abbey, but his words hung in Stephen’s memory as the point at which Romanticism finally broke. Whether it be a manservant hankering after home comforts, or a guide yearning for material progress, opinion now favoured the speediest possible access of modernity to the Alps.
Many of the old Alpine stalwarts built themselves houses near their favourite peaks. Wills, for example, presided over The Eagle’s Nest at Sixt; Tyndall could be found every summer in a hideous structure at Bel Alp; Coolidge would eventually retire to a chalet in Grindelwald; even Ruskin tried to purchase a plot but was thwarted by local regulations. As these semi-retired explorers gazed over the Alps they must have been conscious of the extent to which the mountains had changed since they first visited them. Witches, goblins and dragons had vanished, along with a whole world. The last lammergeier was shot in the 1860s. The Bouquetin ibex, plentiful at the start of the century, was by the 1870s reduced to a rump of some 400. The chamois, which once could be encountered on the Mer de Glace, now hid nervously on the peaks. Even the cretins and goitre sufferers were disappearing, with the discovery that iodine could alleviate their conditions.* Just as Ruskin had feared, industry was on the up and nature on the down. In 1860, the burghers of Grindelwald had begun to hack away at their glaciers. In 1866, 100,000 francs’ worth of ice were packed in straw and sent, dripping, to restaurants in Paris and beyond. By the turn of the century a stone chute, several hundred yards long, had been constructed to facilitate the flow -workers were warned on pain of dismissal not to hitch a ride down it - and ice had become a major export. Similarly, in the 1890s, work started on a funicular railway that wound its way from Grindelwald to the Jungfraujoch, burrowing en route through the Eiger. The line, completed in the early 1900s, ended at the highest station in Europe and was linked to Switzerland’s main railway system so that, if anyone was so inclined, they could catch a train from Geneva and in a matter of hours be almost within touching distance of a cumulus cloud drifting past the Mönch. Similar projects were planned for the Matterhorn and other mountains but they were halted by overwhelming protest. When the British Minister to Switzerland made a speech at the opening of the Jungfraujoch railway, he did so in diplomatic terms, but his real feelings on mountain-top railways were this: ‘I sincerely hope that this insensate scheme has since been abandoned, and the process of vulgarising the “playground of Europe” has been abandoned.’10
Railways were the emissaries of industry. They were also conduits for a new breed of tourist: the living dead. For decades tuberculosis had been the scourge of industrial societies. It was a hideous disease, which involved the steady and irreversible collapse by haemorrhage and ulceration of whatever part of the body it affected. It could strike anywhere - tuberculosis of the leg, arm and neck were common - but most dramatically it hit the lungs, creating little pockets of infection that incubated without symptom until they burst, releasing a flood of tubercules. The first sign would be a cough, which produced pus. Later, as the tubercules spread and began to eat away at neighbouring sections of lung, the cough worsened. Blood appeared in the pus and the patient became anaemic, displaying characteristic pink cheeks on a pale face. The course of the disease was uncertain, unpredictable and unstoppable. For most, the end came without warning in a sudden, drowning haemorrhage. Tuberculosis was not the major killer in nineteenth-century Europe - it was outstripped by diphtheria, cholera, smallpox and typhoid - but it possessed a horrid fascination. It lingered like no other ailment. Once it took hold there was no telling when it might end - tomorrow, in a month’s time or ten years’ hence. Sufferers were recognisable physically and mentally: they were certain they would get better; they had a clearer insight into the world’s workings; and their imaginations became as flushed as their cheeks. It was an industrial disease that spread in the cities and especially - but not exclusively - in the poorer quarters inhabited by artists and writers. Keats died of tuberculosis, so did Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Aubrey Beardsley, two of the Brontë sisters and many others. If any disease could be described as à la mode, tuberculosis was it. In the 1860s, however, a refugee German doctor living in Davos, a high-altitude Swiss village, announced that he had found a cure.
Dr Spengler discovered his cure by political chance. Outlawed from Germany following the 1848 revolutions, he had settled in Davos. During his stay he had noticed that tuberculosis was rare in Swiss villages and that those who contracted it when they left were soon cured on their return. He put it down to low atmospheric pressure. The prevailing wisdom was that tuberculosis of the lung could be alleviated only by dry air and rest. Most tubercular patients therefore went to Egypt, if they could afford it, and lounged alongside the Nile. The Alps, however, also had dry air and their rarefied atmosphere offered weary lungs more chance of rest and recovery. It was cheaper for Europeans to go to the Alps than to Egypt and altitude did seem to have amazing results. Several famous people, including doctors, were supposedly cured by a summer in Davos. Davos sprouted hotels and so too did other villages. Soon the Alps were dotted with sanatoriums, large wedding-cake structures that differed from other hotels only in their medical facilities. They offered fine cuisine, concerts, parties, amateur theatricals, outdoor entertainments and expensive shopping. By the turn of the century they also offered a range of surgical delights: very popular was artificial pneumothorax, a procedure in which the lung was collapsed, and therefore rested, by injecting gas, wax or oil into the pleural sac; an uncomfortable variant, pneumoperitoneum, achieved the same result by pumping air into the abdomen; then there was so-called phrenic crush, in which the diaphragm was paralysed by smashing certain nerves in the neck; and finally, thoracoplasty, which collapsed the lung by removing the entire chest wall, ribs, muscles and all. None of these treatments was particularly successful and more people died from the shock of thoracoplasty than benefited from it. The surgeons who performed these monstrosities were themselves often tubercular.*
To begin with, Davos and its successors had a positive attitude. ‘Davos demands qualities the very opposite of resigned sentimental-ism,’ ran an 1880 guidebook. ‘Here is no place for weak and despairing resignation … here you are not pusillanimously helped to die.’11 Inevitably, though, many guests did die. Altitude was not the great cure-all that Spengler had envisaged. It was most effective when the disease was in its early stages (doctors, mindful of their reputations, were initially reluctant to admit any other case) and did little but retard the deterioration of those who rushed to the Alps in a last-minute grasp at life. Isolated amid the snows for much of the year, the resorts developed a death-fuelled licentiousness. ‘Some patients, especially hopeless cases, were tempted to plunge into a round of parties, drinking, gambling and worse,’ wrote a British doctor in 1888. ‘I had witnessed some terrible scenes in the winter.’12 The atmosphere was like that which prevailed at the fashionable Swiss spas in Saussure’s time but with an added frenzy. There was something typically fin-de-siècle in the knowledge that while the music played, the snow fell and the chocolates were passed only a few discreetly placed doors separated them from the crawling rubber hoses of pneumothorax, the mallets of phrenic crush, and the saws and scalpels of thoracoplasty. Being in a Swiss resort was akin to spending a luxurious stretch on death row.
Guests were able to leave any time they wished, but they did so at their own peril. Their consultants, who usually owned the sanatorium and profited from all those expensive meals - with tuberculosis it was necessary to build oneself up - were reluctant to discharge fee-payers. Additionally, many people became acclimatised to life at high altitude and dared not descend to the plains where remission might revert to a familiar cough. When their condition stabilised and their money began to run out, they moved to cheaper accommodation nearby. Soon, the hotels were surrounded by a melancholy banlieue of boarding houses.
During the long Alpine winter it was important for sanatoriums to keep their inmates occupied. The answer was winter sports. The origin of winter sports has been argued over endlessly. Persistently it has been ascribed to one Johannes Badrutt, a hotelier in St Moritz, a rival resort to Davos. In 1864 Badrutt told his summer guests that if they came back in winter and didn’t like it they could stay for free. The sun shone, he said, and they would be able to walk about in their shirtsleeves. Four people were reckless enough to accept his invitation. To their amazement everything Badrutt said was true. The sun did shine, they could walk around in their shirtsleeves. (Badrutt greeted them in summer clothes, despite grumblings from neighbours who said he would have worn summer clothes had the temperature been sub-zero, which it often was.) The four were deeply impressed. ‘On an average we were out 4 hours daily, walking, skating on the lakes, sleighing or sitting on the terrace reading,’ ran one entry in Badrutt’s guest book. ‘Twice in January we dined on the terrace, and on other days had picnics in our sledges. Whilst at St Moritz I was far stronger at the end of winter than at its commencement.’13 Badrutt quickly started buying land. Ten years later, St Moritz had more than three hundred winter visitors and he was a very wealthy man.
Badrutt’s may have been the first mention of winter sports in a touristic context but undoubtedly they already existed as a pastime for locals. In the winter of 1866, Alpine Club member A. W. Moore described the thrill of sledging down an icy road in Grindelwald in a twelve-man bobsleigh that travelled - as he calculated - at the terrifying speed of 20 m.p.h. ‘I believe that the Alps in winter offer as great attractions to the dilettante tourist who, in all sincerity, considers that going to the top of a mountain is a mistake, as to the enthusiast who cares more for the climbing, pure and simple, than for the picturesque,’ he wrote. ‘Given fine weather, I am satisfied that anyone who may try the experiment will return, as I did, anxious to repeat it at the earliest opportunity.’14
Bobsleighs were considered too hectic for invalids and for most tourists, for whom winter sports consisted initially of skating and sledging, the latter comprising a sedate, upright trundle down a gentle slope with much falling off. Not until 1884 did matters change when St Moritz unveiled the Cresta Run, with its head-first racing toboggans. Skiing was introduced from Norway in 1892 by the British travel agent Henry Lunn and rapidly gathered its own group of enthusiasts. Lunn was a major promoter of Alpine tourism - a cold weather Cook - and soon he was bringing 5,000 clients to the Alps every winter. Few of his people went skiing, however. In England it was a minority sport reserved for the elite - some clubs refused members who had not attended public school or been to university. Matters were little different on the continent: in 1904 Switzerland’s sixteen ski clubs mustered just 731 members between them. For a long while, up to the 1920s at least, winter sports retained the passivity of their tubercular origins. Skiing lagged in popularity behind sledging and above all ice sports, which by then included not only figure skating but curling (introduced by Scottish visitors who brought their own stones with them), ice hockey and the novel recreation of ice tennis.
Whether prompted by illness or health, tourism became a major part of the Alpine economy. A 1912 survey revealed that Switzerland contained 12,640 hotels, pensions and inns with a total of 384,744 beds - a 25 per cent increase over the previous seven years. Hotels were at saturation point all year round and earned 61.7 million francs net per annum as opposed to 16 million in 1880. They employed 43,136 staff, which made them Switzerland’s most labour-intensive business other than manufacturing. Capital invested since 1894 had risen by 119 per cent. The year 1912 was so busy that its intake of guests would not be equalled until the mid-1960s.
There were many who saw tourism as a damaging influence. Britons bemoaned the despoliation of their handy wilderness. The Swiss, meanwhile, feared the destruction of traditional values. Cautionary novels warned in French and German of the dangers presented by tourism. Foreigners who wished to purchase land were depicted as thieves - Jewish thieves at that. Easy money was frowned upon and villagers were advised not to sell their souls for lucre. Love was also condemned: several books expanded on the dangers presented to young men by glamorous foreign females. Skiing was considered exceptionally hazardous in this respect: instructors were advised to remain vigilant at all times. Unfortunately, the peasants at whom these books were aimed were mostly illiterate; and even if they weren’t they had an uncanny knack of being able to distinguish between a moralising tract and a pocketful of francs. The moralisers continued to preach, the villagers continued to ignore them and the tourists continued to come. The Alps were at last making money -Ruskin would have been pleased - and they were making it at a tremendous rate.