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Above the pastures of Switzerland, it was believed, dragons and ghosts inhabited the realms of ice and snow. No one in their right mind considered climbing into the Alps - and certainly not for pleasure.
In the late eighteenth century, however, scientific gentlemen began to turn their minds to these high places. What would the peaks tell us about the atmosphere, about weather, about glaciers? And so they set off, early pioneers like the Swiss geologist Saussure and his rival Bourrit, armed with gallons of wine, roast fowl, theodolites and barometers, walking in their ordinary clothes up the sheer rocks into the unknown.
When the British came on the scene, mountain-climbing as an obsession, an art form and a sport was born. Full of the imperial confidence that had already conquered so much of Asia and Africa, Britons set out to plant their flag on every peak in the Alps. These early Alpine adventurers were fanatically competitive climbers. They included John Tyndall, the famous physicist who wished to test theories about how glaciers were formed; showmen, like Albert Smith, the Victorian impresario who made a fortune putting the conquest of Mont Blanc onto the London stage and zealots, like Edward Whymper, the wood engraver turned monomaniacal mountaineer. They fought each other on the peaks and in print, their rivalries lasting for years, and entertained a vast public in the process.
The great mountains were conquered one by one, by insouciant public schoolboys and dogged tradesmen alike. The glaciers accumulated mangled bodies that made their way slowly down to the valleys. More and more tourists came; the dragons were dead. By the third decade of the twentieth century only the suicidally dangerous north faces of the Eiger and Matterhorn remained to be climbed by proteges of Hitler and Mussolini.
