Marching over the mountains from Visp, in Switzerland, Tyndall was in jovial mood. ‘The Matterhorn was our temple,’ he wrote, ‘and we approached it with feelings not unworthy of so great a shrine.’ At Breuil he was appalled that Whymper had been attacking ‘his’ mountain, but pleased to discover that the enemy – as he now called him – had not reached the summit. When he left, with Carrel and another equally capable guide he had brought from Switzerland, he did so with confidence: he would conquer the Matterhorn this time; failing that, he would at least go further than anyone else. Whymper offered him the use of his tent, damned him privately, ‘with envy and all uncharitableness’, and then as soon as he had left remembered he needed one or two essentials that he had left behind at camp. For the fourth time that year he went up the Matterhorn, climbing skilfully and swiftly past the rival party, showering them with rocks in the process, then descended to congratulate Tyndall on his laggardly progress.
Tyndall went on. ‘We worked up bit by bit, holding on almost by our eyelids.’ Clambering ever upwards, they paused only for a second at Whymper’s cliffs. ‘It was these precipices that stopped Whymper,’ Tyndall wrote. ‘Well, we scaled them.’ On they went until, with the summit in sight, and while edging their way along a ridge, they were blocked by a notch several hundred feet deep. If only they could cross this obstacle, Tyndall was certain, the Matterhorn would be theirs. But there was no way over. From whatever angle they looked at it the problem was insoluble. They descended the mountain, battered by an abrupt and vengeful shower of hail. The Matterhorn, Tyndall finally admitted, was inaccessible. ‘This defeat has fallen upon us like the chill of age,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Well... goodbye to my climbing. For there is nothing else in the Alps that I should care to do.’
Whymper, too, was ‘almost inclined’ to believe the Matterhorn was unconquerable. That did not stop him returning to Breuil in 1863, when he was driven back by bad weather, and again in 1864, when hardly had he put his boots on than he was recalled to London by urgent business. He was back yet again in 1865, having taken the precaution of pre-booking Jean-Antoine Carrel the previous year. But this time Whymper was fighting not only the mountain but, unbeknown to him, the forces of nationalism. The Italian government had decided that as the Matterhorn lay half in Italy it was only right that an Italian should be the first to the top of it. A man named Felice Giordano was duly appointed as the Matterhorn’s conqueror, and when Whymper arrived that season he found that Giordano had not only poached Carrel but had made sure that every other guide – every porter even – was unavailable for the duration of his stay. It had been arranged so skilfully that Whymper did not realize he had been ‘bamboozled and humbugged’ until Giordano and Carrel were well into their ascent.
Whymper had one chance: Giordano’s party was large and unwieldy; it would take them at least three days to reach the summit; if he could find a guide he might yet be able to beat them. But there were no guides; Giordano had seen to that. Then, as if by divine providence, the 18-year-old Lord Francis Douglas arrived in Breuil. He remarked that his guides, a fatherand-son team both named Peter Taugwalder, had scouted the Matterhorn’s north-east ridge and were confident that the mountain could be climbed from the Swiss side. Casually, he said that he had hired them for an attempt in two days’ time. Whymper took charge. The next day all four were in Zermatt preparing for the ascent.
No sooner had they arrived than Whymper encountered a new threat: an English vicar, the Revd Charles Hudson, was also planning an attack on the Matterhorn. Hudson was an experienced climber – perhaps not in the same class as Whymper, but good enough. He also had the services of a famous Chamonix guide, Michel Croz. By unspoken etiquette, two Englishmen did not climb the same mountain by the same route on the same day. In this case, Hudson had priority. Whymper suggested they combine parties. Hudson happily agreed, adding as an aside that there was a third member of his group, a youngster named Douglas Hadow, who was a decent chap but not quite as accomplished a mountaineer as himself or Croz. When Whymper questioned him as to Hadow’s fitness Hudson replied that he had recently climbed Mont Blanc in record time and was quite competent for an assault on the Matterhorn. Hudson and Whymper shook hands.
The enlarged group of three guides and four Englishmen left Zermatt in the early hours of 13 July 1865. To their delight, the north-eastern ridge was perfectly feasible. It was not exactly easy, presenting difficult traverses and at points being unpleasantly exposed. But it was indescribably nicer than the ascent from Breuil – so much so that Hudson and Whymper overtook their guides and forged ahead on their own. Even when the going became hard, and Croz and Old Taugwalder took the lead, all they had to do was lend an occasional hand to their employers. The group spent one night on the ridge, and then on 14 July scrambled to the summit. ‘At 1.40 pm the world was at our feet,’ wrote Whymper, ‘and the Matterhorn was conquered.’
There remained one thing to do. On the other side of the mountain, 1,250 feet below them, like a column of ants, the Italian party crawled slowly over the rocks. Whymper and Croz waved and shouted to get their attention. When that did not work they hurled boulders down the slope at them. ‘There was no doubt about it this time,’ Whymper jubilated. ‘The Italians turned and fled.’ Whymper’s party spent an hour on the summit, then started on the descent. After their rapid, adrenalin-filled climb they were now exhausted. Moreover, their limbs were unaccustomed to the strange sensation of moving downhill. It was a mental and physical turnaround they had all experienced before, one that could lead to accidents, so they took every precaution as they left the summit. Croz went first, followed by Hadow. After Hadow came Hudson, with Douglas above him. Last in line were the two Taugwalders, with Whymper roped between them. They moved slowly, Croz helping Hadow, and Hudson helping Douglas, taking care that no more than one man moved at a time when they reached steep or icy patches. It was a perfectly planned and competently executed descent, save for one thing: from Croz to Douglas the party was linked by sturdy ropes; from Old Taugwalder to Young Taugwalder it was the same; yet, for some unfathomable reason, Douglas and Old Taugwalder were linked by a length of much weaker sashcord. To their knowledge there was nothing inherently wrong with this type of rope; they had used it before, and Whymper had employed it on some of his most perilous climbs. That it was called sashcord, however, gave a hint as to its limitations: in normal circumstances it was used to suspend the lead counterbalances in sash windows.
At 3.00 p.m. on 14 July Croz put aside his ice-axe to guide Hadow’s feet into the notches he had just cut. Hadow slipped, knocking Croz over. The combined weight of their two bodies pulled first Hudson and then Douglas off their feet. As all four men fell, Old Taugwalder wound the rope around his arm and braced himself against a rock. Behind him, Whymper and Young Taugwalder also took the strain. Their combined strength might possibly have halted the fall, had the sashcord not snapped. For a moment the four men tried to find a grip in the ice, but slowly at first, then with gathering speed, they slid downhill. One after another they vanished from sight, to land on the glacier 4,000 feet below.
For half an hour Whymper and the two Taugwalders were transfixed by shock. When at last they continued the descent they did so like automata. Every now and then they would call for their companions, but no answer came back. By 6.30 p.m. they were on relatively easy ground when an arc of light illuminated the clouds. Within the arc three crosses became clearly visible. Whymper recognized it as a solar fogbow, a not unheard-of phenomenon but one which at that particular time filled him with superstitious dread. They spent a sleepless night on a small slab of rock, and the following morning ran for Zermatt.
Whymper’s triumph was overwhelmed by the disaster. Never in alpine history had so many men died in a single accident. And never had they fallen so far and so horribly. When Whymper took a rescue party to find the bodies he was sickened. Croz, Hudson and Hadow had been stripped naked, various limbs were missing, their skulls had been broken and, in the case of Cr
oz, the top of his head had been sliced off, leaving only a jawbone in which was embedded his rosary cross. Of Douglas there remained nothing whatsoever, save a pair of gloves, a belt and a boot. His body was never found. It was assumed that he had either caught on the rocks or, more likely, had been shredded during his mile-long plummet. Whymper oversaw their burial in the glacier on which they had met their end. Later the three bodies were disinterred and relocated to a churchyard in Zermatt.
The Matterhorn’s conquest brought the Golden Age of Mountaineering to a lurid and very public climax. The British press seethed with speculation: a vicar and a peer of the realm had died. Why? And how? There was talk of Old Taugwalder having cut the rope to prevent himself being dragged after them, or having weakened it in anticipation of their fall. Whymper and Taugwalder denied the accusations, but nothing they said could halt the gossip. In France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and, above all, Britain, the Matterhorn dominated the news. Men and women from all walks of life wrote to the papers, condemning every form of alpinism. Those who had the means flocked to Zermatt from where they could better condemn – and better relish – the tragedy. A subculture of’penny-dreadful’ novels flourished around the image of the cut rope: was the cutter or the cuttee to be pitied most? Whymper stood firm. He answered the questions put to him by an official inquiry, and by the blunt directness of his responses ensured that nobody was found responsible for the deaths. It had been an accident – appalling but unforeseeable. Amidst the furore it went almost unnoticed when later in the season Jean-Antoine Carrel succeeded in climbing the Matterhorn from Breuil, an ascent that was hailed by experts as one of the most accomplished feats of mountaineering on record.
Whymper fled to the obscurity of his print works in Southwark, where he sank into depression. He later went to the Andes and the Rockies, and led two expeditions to Greenland, but he rarely climbed in the Alps again. Never able to escape his double-edged fame, he lived for the rest of his life with the Matterhorn disaster, in whose shadow he grew grimmer by the year. As for Tyndall, he at last climbed the mountain in 1868 and was likewise disheartened. ‘Hardly two things can be more different than the two aspects of the mountain from above and below,’ he wrote. ‘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 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.’ As with Whymper, the ascent marked the effective closure of his alpine career.
The conquest of the Matterhorn was one of the definitive events in 19th-century exploration. Like Sir John Franklin’s disappearance in search of the North-West Passage, it shaped the mythology of an age – indeed, of an empire. It also brought to an end the glory days of alpine exploration. In the last ten or so years virtually every major peak in the Alps had been climbed and the last major blank on the map of Europe had been filled. People would continue to visit the mountains, to find new and ever harder routes to their summits, but they were no longer the mystery they had once been.
THE GREAT SURVEY
The Pundits (1865–1902)
The Great Survey of India, which had occupied British cartographers since 1800, was not restricted solely to mapping the subcontinent. Its secondary function was to provide the military with topographical intelligence on the surrounding countries of Afghanistan, Turkestan and Tibet, possession of which (or at least the neutrality of which) was considered vital to India’s security. If Russia was to invade these border regions, or if Britain was to make a preemptive invasion, it was vital to have reliable maps. Unfortunately, these were not places where British surveyors could march about, as they had done in the past, with gigantic theodolites and teams of porters. Not only were they likely to be murdered by bandits, but their presence could possibly spark a war with Russia. Moreover, the country of Tibet, in which Britain was most interested, was fraught with hazards of every description: it was topographically hostile, being the highest, coldest, most mountainous nation in the world; its government (theoretically in thrall to China) had closed its borders to Westerners, threatening dire penalties for trespassers; and the border regions were lawless and insecure. With very good reason, therefore, the Viceroy of India had stated expressly that British officers were not to cross the frontier. Yet the maps had to be made.
It was Captain Thomas Montgomerie, currently triangulating Kashmir, who came up with a solution. Instead of sending British surveyors, why not send native ones? And, anticipating the response that mapmakers of any nationality would be killed, he suggested they go in disguise; even if they were uncovered, it would be a lot less embarrassing than if they had been British. Surprisingly, his bold and unconventional plan was taken up, and so, at Dehra Dun in the shadow of Sir George Everest’s headquarters, Montgomerie began training his band of spies.
He chose the candidates carefully, selecting only hillmen of exceptional stamina and intelligence. Their first task was to measure the length of their pace and then practice taking the same stride whether walking uphill, downhill or on the flat. Next they were taught how to use a compass, how to measure altitude by means of a thermometer and how to take bearings with a sextant – a business that required advanced mathematical skills. Their agreed disguise was that of Buddhist pilgrims, not just because such pilgrims were common, but because they carried several items that were ideal for Montgomerie’s purpose: a stick, a rosary, a trunk, a begging bowl and a cylindrical prayer-wheel whose top could be removed to give access to the prayer scrolls within. The stick was hollowed out to contain a thermometer, the rosaries were used to record paces (a bead would be slipped for every 100 paces) and at the end of the day the results could be recorded on the scrolls inside the prayer-wheel. The compass was hidden in the top of the prayer-wheel and a false bottom was built in to each trunk to conceal the sextant. Mercury was contained in cowrie shells and then poured into the begging bowl to make an artificial horizon for use with the sextant. The equipment was prepared at the Dehra Dun workshops in conditions of great secrecy. In fact, the whole operation was so clandestine that even within the Survey Montgomerie’s men were known only by numbers or initials. As a group, they called themselves ‘pundits’, or teachers.
In 1865 pundit ‘No. 1’ (a.k.a. Nain Singh) travelled across the Himalayas to Tibet. He returned 18 months later, having taken the bearings of the capital, Lhasa, having mapped mountains, glaciers, rivers and valleys, and having covered in the process 1,250 miles. On his rosary he had recorded two and a half million paces of precisely 33 inches. ‘No. 1’ subsequently explored the region north of the Indus to chart, and to report on, Tibet’s fabled goldmines. Once again he did his job splendidly, returning with a prayer-wheel full of fascinating information: the route had taken him over suspension bridges whose great iron chains were rust-proofed annually with yak butter; the mines, he said, were operated on an open-cast system by several thousand freelance prospectors who dug pits 20 feet deep and panned the spoil for gold dust in a nearby stream; the miners believed that nuggets were alive and gave birth to gold dust, so they reburied those they found, including one monster that Nain Singh reckoned at more than two pounds in weight; there were more miners in winter than in summer, because the pits tended to collapse without warning in the warmth; and the place was so cold, even in summer, that people dug their tents eight feet underground and slept under a mound of furs on their knees and elbows in order to minimize contact with the frozen soil. Off ‘No. 1’ went again in 1874, this time walking from Ladakh to Lhasa via the 16,500-foot-high Chang Thang plateau. This freezing, windblown, foodless expanse, dotted with lakes 50 miles long (unnavigable due to violent, unpredictable gales and too brackish for drinking), was truly desolate: it was possible for a traveller to go 80 days without meeting another human being. ‘No. 1’ paced through it insouciantly – he described it as ea
sy enough, if a touch barren – sighting en route a new range of mountains whose highest peak he measured at 25,000 feet.
Again and again ‘No. 1’ went out, sometimes on his own, sometimes accompanied by others, including his cousin ‘No. 2’ (T. K. Singh). But by this time other pundits had graduated from Dehra Dun and were making their own methodical way into the unknown. In 1878, shortly after ‘No. 1’s’ return, pundit ‘A. K.’ (Kishen Singh, no relation) struck north across Tibet for Mongolia. He was robbed, imprisoned and forced to work as a herdsman and a lama’s servant, but managed nevertheless to cross the Gobi Desert and return to Tibet, where he was imprisoned yet again. In 1882, by which time his masters assumed he was dead, ‘A. K.’ staggered back to India with information on 4,750 miles of unknown territory.
The British treated ‘No. 1’, ‘A. K.’ and their companions in a remarkably cavalier manner. Although their programme was meant to be secret, every detail was published in the Royal Geographical Society’s journal from 1865 onwards. Fortunately, Lhasa did not subscribe to the journal. But after a particularly successful pundit, Sarat Chandra Das, had made two journeys into Tibet, in 1879 and 1881, news of the subterfuge leaked out. As they had promised, the Tibetans visited a dire vengeance on those involved. The lama who had unwittingly allowed him into the country was flogged, bound and thrown into the Tsangpo River. The lama’s servants had their eyes burned out, and their hands and feet cut off, before being left to die. The responsible border officials were imprisoned; 19 years later they were still chained in a Lhasa dungeon. Blithely, the British continued to send pundits into Tibet; and remarkably, the pundits agreed to go.
While ‘A. K.’ was still in the field, the Great Survey despatched its most bizarre agents yet – a Mongolian lama and his Sikkimese porter ‘K. P.’, or Kintup. The lama was not a pundit, just a hired hand, and ‘K. P.’, although capable and intelligent, could neither read nor write, so they were given a task that did not require mathematics or the use of abstruse instruments. What the Survey wanted to know was whether the Tsangpo River, which ran through the Himalayas, dropping 5,000 feet along the way, connected with the Brahmaputra in Bengal. To this end, the lama was paid to fell trees which would be cut into 500 one-foot-long logs that he would drop into the Tsangpo at the point where it entered the mountains. Fifty logs per day were to be thrown into the river, each one being tagged with the date and place it was deposited. Officers from the Survey would be waiting to record their exit. The lama proved an unreliable spy: he spent the money on women and drink, and sold ‘K. P.’ as a slave, before returning to Mongolia. But ‘K. P.’ managed to escape and, despite a period in jail, was felling the trees four months later. It took him a further three months to travel to Lhasa, where he dictated a letter to the Survey alerting them to be on the look-out at a specified date. Nine months later he released the 500 logs. Alas, the officer who had given him his instructions had since returned to England, and the messenger who was to carry ‘K. P.”s letter died on the way, so the logs wallowed downriver to the Brahmaputra and floated unnoticed out to sea. When ‘K. P.’ made his way back to India, he found that the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra question had already been answered by ‘A. K.’ All his efforts had been in vain, and nobody believed his story. He sank into obscurity and died, some 30 years later, working as a tailor in Darjeeling.
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