A Mountain in Profile

Edward Whymper admired the curves running down the snow. They converged on a deep groove in the centre of a gully on the Matterhorn. From where he stood, the passage seemed to offer a way into the upper mountain.

Then small stones began to slide down it. Whymper watched a larger stone follow, and another. He said nothing to his companions at first, reasoning that the sides would keep them clear. Christian Almer was cutting slices from a leg of mutton when rocks came round a bend high above them, struck the opposite wall and rebounded across the gully.

Everyone took shelter. The mutton was dropped; wine ran from the open bag. Whymper found a cleft for himself. The stones deepened the tracks he had been admiring. His account in Scrambles Amongst the Alps, published in 1871, preserves both the observation and the misjudgement.

This attempt ended on 21 June 1865. The party abandoned the gully, and subsequent obstacles and falling snow sent them off the mountain. Less than a month later, Whymper reached the summit by another approach. The drawings through which he explained that success also reveal how difficult it had been to decide what the Matterhorn's surfaces meant.

Looking for a climbable face

Whymper had first gone to the Alps to make pictures. In 1860, aged twenty, he accepted a London publisher's commission for sketches, although he had never seen a mountain. Watching English climbers prepare an attempt on Mont Pelvoux helped draw him into climbing himself. He returned the following year and joined an ascent.

The Matterhorn stood on the frontier between Switzerland and Italy, above Zermatt on one side and the Val Tournanche on the other. Its tapering ridges made it look exceptionally resistant to climbers. Whymper repeatedly tried the south-western approach from Italy, working with guides including Jean-Antoine Carrel, whose ambition was to reach the summit from his own valley.

The eastern face gradually attracted Whymper's attention. From the Riffelberg it looked about seventy degrees steep to him; from the Theodule Pass, nearly perpendicular. Those impressions depended on looking towards a slope whose depth was compressed into a flat view. A face can appear to rise almost vertically when much of its actual length runs away from the observer.

Whymper walked round to examine the mountain in profile. Above Staffel, between the Zmutt and Matterhorn glaciers, he estimated the eastern slope at about forty degrees. The change in viewpoint made a possible route easier to imagine.

Snow supplied another clue. Broad patches survived on portions of the face that looked impossibly steep from elsewhere. Whymper reasoned that they needed surfaces on which to rest. Their persistence encouraged him to distrust the forbidding outline.

His book set two views beside that argument: the Matterhorn from the Theodule Pass and from the north-east. Fine parallel red lines cross the mountain. The printed explanation relates their spacing to vertical height, while warning that foreshortening changes the intervals near the top. The page gives a reader a way to question an impression of steepness rather than simply accepting the mountain's silhouette.

Rock structure mattered as well as angle. Whymper described beds dipping towards the west-south-west. On the south-western approach, they could expose downward-sloping surfaces towards the climber. On the eastern side, the same inclination could provide inward-tilting ledges: places to stand rather than surfaces sloping away beneath the feet. Earlier observers, including Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and James David Forbes, had noticed the inclination. Whymper's practical question was what it might permit a climbing party to do.

None of this guaranteed a continuous route. The June gully offered a particularly clear correction. Its bend sent falling stones across the space where Whymper had expected the sides to be safe. A useful drawing could organise a hypothesis; somebody still had to approach the rock.

The people who tested it

Michel-Auguste Croz, the Chamonix guide, understood Whymper's proposed gully route and joined the attempt. He also helped end it. After the stonefall, Whymper tried rocks above their position and was stopped. Croz called him down. Later, with the eastern approach still possible in principle, Croz pointed out the days they would lose and his commitment to be back at Chamonix on the 27th. Snow settled the retreat.

In July the men met again at Zermatt. The eventual summit party brought together Whymper; the experienced English climber Charles Hudson; Hudson's much less experienced companion Douglas Hadow; Lord Francis Douglas; Croz; and two local guides, Peter Taugwalder and his son, also Peter. Hudson shared the planning with Whymper. The party's competence was consequently a matter of how different people would work together, rather than of one leader's confidence.

The elder Taugwalder was not simply a silent member of an agreed plan. In the official inquiry after the accident, he said he had objected that there were too few guides for the number of travellers. His account records Hudson and Whymper replying that they could climb as well as guides. That exchange complicates the confidence of the later published ascent narrative.

They left Zermatt on 13 July with an additional Taugwalder son carrying supplies. He would turn back the next morning, leaving seven to climb. At their high camp, while the others prepared the tent platform, Croz and young Peter went ahead to reconnoitre. They returned with encouraging news about the ground above.

On 14 July, the party followed ledges on the eastern face, frequently keeping away from the ridge itself. Higher up they moved onto the northern side. Here the climbing became harder, and Croz led. Hadow needed assistance. What had looked like a slope from a distance was now a succession of individual holds, awkward passages and decisions about who should move first.

They reached the summit at 1.40 in the afternoon. Whymper and Croz checked the southern end of the ridge for traces of an earlier party. Croz planted a tent pole in the snow and fastened his blouse to it as a flag. The summit visit lasted about an hour.

A sketch and a broken line

Whymper was drawing the summit while the others arranged themselves for the descent. He then wrote their names to be left in a bottle. He also brought away a small piece of the highest rock, which he identified as mica-schist. Its shape reminded him of the mountain itself. His book illustrates that fragment under the caption The Actual Summit of the Matterhorn in 1865: a piece of the peak that could be carried home.

The eventual order down was Croz, Hadow, Hudson, Douglas, the elder Taugwalder, Whymper and young Peter. Croz was placed at the front to help Hadow. Whymper described the guide positioning Hadow's feet, but qualified his reconstruction of the fatal moment: rock partly hid the two leading men from him. He believed Hadow slipped against Croz. The fall drew Hudson and Douglas off after them.

The rope between Douglas and the elder Taugwalder broke. Four men were already falling before that break separated them from the three above. Croz, Hadow, Hudson and Douglas died.

Whymper later identified the broken link as the weakest of the different ropes they had taken. He thought its use deeply suspicious. Yet he had been away while the central members of the party were tying on. The elder Taugwalder gave a practical explanation under questioning: Croz had tied the leading four together; the rope did not reach far enough for Taugwalder to join it, so he used another cord. He said he believed it adequate and would not knowingly have endangered Douglas or himself.

Taugwalder also described turning towards the mountain and getting the rope between himself and Whymper round a projecting rock. His actions helped the survivors hold their position. When questioned about differences in their accounts of the first seconds, he acknowledged Whymper's better viewpoint and the difficulty of reconstructing something that had happened so quickly.

The judicial inquiry found no basis for criminal proceedings. It did not establish deliberate sabotage. Whymper himself explicitly rejected the story that Taugwalder had cut the rope, either before the fall or during it. His suspicion that the weak link had been intentionally chosen was a different allegation, and it remained unproved.

The surviving rope can be examined; its fibres cannot explain a man's intention. Nor does a simple breaking-weight figure settle whether another rope would have held four falling people against three men braced on rock. In 1933, H. Edwards's detailed comparison of the accounts still found problems in reconstructing exactly how the available lengths had been distributed.

Six years on wood

Whymper devoted six years to preparing the illustrations for Scrambles. The list of contributors describes work drawn on wood by several artists and engraved by J. W. and Edward Whymper. In his preface he singled out James Mahoney, responsible for about fifty drawings, and Cyrus Johnston, for about twenty. His own field memoranda passed through other hands on the way to print.

Wood engraving allowed fine lines to survive that journey. Cutting into the end grain removed areas that would remain pale; the raised surface received the ink. Many small cuts could separate snow from rock, or a dark coat from the surrounding equipment. The block translated a drawn judgement into something the press could repeat.

Whymper used that repeatability for comparison as well as landscape. His illustrations of the different ropes were reduced photographically to a common scale before reproduction. Readers could inspect their relative construction alongside his account. Diagrams, portraits and topographical views gave the book an explanatory range that a written recollection alone could not offer.

It also preserved a correction to its author's judgement of a route. Looking down from the summit, Whymper had doubted that Carrel could complete the Italian approach. Carrel and Jean-Baptiste Bich reached the top from that side on 17 July. Whymper's later account acknowledged the difficulty of what they had done.