In the mid-1860s, he turned his attention to the Matterhorn. He tried and failed on eight attempts. Time was pressing. The Italians on the other side of what they call Monte Cervino were organizing a major expedition to bag the peak. In the summer of 1865, in the company of three guides and three British gentlemen, one of whom was no mountaineer, the fearless engraver made a dash for the summit. He reached it on 14 July 1865. His companions may have gone up with a Whymper, but, unfortunately, they went out with a bang. On the descent, perhaps due to some bumbling by the novice climber, the rope snapped and four of the party hurtled hundreds of meters to their death. One of the unfortunates was Michel Croz, a guide from Chamonix; the other three were Britons: Reverend Charles Hudson; the neophyte, Douglas Robert Hadow; and a Scot, Lord Francis Douglas, whose body has never been found. The last two men were aged nineteen and eighteen, respectively. Whymper was the only Briton to have survived.
The English press bayed for his head. The dead had been the flower of the gentry: Why let young gentlemen take such mad risks? Weren’t the hounds and the hunt enough? The pretense of scientific inquiry had long since been abandoned in mountaineering circles, Saussure’s measuring instruments a distant, oddball memory. Whymper and his ilk were in it for the thrill, and for the glory. Even Queen Victoria weighed in, deploring the loss of life.
A parliamentary investigation cleared Whymper of any wrongdoing. He set about to repair his reputation by penning an outstanding memoir, Scrambles Among the Alps, in which he speaks plainly of his great distress at the memory of seeing his companions fall down the mountain. He spoke of many other things of interest also—Whymper is the English traveler cited about the cretins of Aosta—and he used his illustrator’s flair to guarantee the work’s success. In spite of his appetite for risk, the great daredevil died of natural causes at the age of seventy-one. He is buried in Chamonix.
The Whymper sanctum of the Zermatt museum is remarkable for its religiosity. On one wall, explicitly marked as a reliquary (Reliquien der Matterhorn—Unglucks v. 14. Juli 1865), objects belonging to the fatal four are on display: Croz’s hat and rosary beads, Hadow’s shoe, Douglas’s shoe, and Hudson’s breviary. Yet the votive object that trumps all others is The Rope. In a glass case in the center of the room, illumined by reverential overhead track lighting, Whymper’s severed rope sits on a red cushion. The yellow coil is a few feet long, surprisingly narrow in diameter. But at one end, the rope is splayed into multiple strands, resembling centrifugal fusilli pasta. It is the somber centerpiece of the museum, a relic as worthy of worship as a saint’s fibula or, for that matter, the Shroud of Turin.
Out on the surface once again, I squint in the sunshine. Sunshine?! The dance of the seven veils is over, the clouds have vanished. I turn and look for the mountain. I can see nothing but condo chalets, until I notice that a small crowd has gathered in one corner of the square, looking upward. And there it is, the Matterhorn, a stupendous snow-flecked gray tower to the south. It is so steep, so dru, that it appears to be an optical illusion fashioned by the gods. Its famed tapering toward the summit seems unearthly, like some sort of extraterrestrial stalagmite. John Ruskin, Britain’s foremost arbiter of taste in the nineteenth century and an ardent lover of the Alps, declared that “the effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is so great that even the greatest philosophers cannot resist it.”
I think back on the past few days, about the religious overtones that seem to haunt this range of the Alps. Anselm, St. Bernard, the Saracens, Mayeul, even the religions of soccer, hockey, and the devotion to beauty and Fanny Urinia. And finally Zermatt, the Wailing Wall of mountaineering, with its Whymper’s Rope.
I look around me. Everywhere there are people going in and out of shops, garish posters, display windows, mannequins, stuff. Why, this is a bazaar, a souk of Western consumerism. And, towering above it all, attracting all regards, is this visitor from another continent, commanding respect and attention. The Matterhorn is, in fact, Europe’s minaret.
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* Carlo Alberto was the king who gave his name to Albertville, France.
† A 2011 Hungarian film, The Turin Horse, places the incident outside 8 via Carlo Alberto.
‡ Immanuel Kant gave this name to Anselm’s argument. Anselm wrote that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Therefore God exists. [Hint: Existence is greater than nonexistence.] Discuss. You have 1,000 words and one hour.
§ Switzerland’s other two official languages are Italian and Romansh.
6. FURKA AND GOTTHARD PASSES
THE PRETTY AND GRITTY town of Brig seems an unlikely place to have given the world a word for luxury. Yet César Ritz commenced his career here as a sommelier and left it in the 1860s for greener—as in money—pastures. Not that Brig is a pauper—for a millennium and more, the place has profited from its location as the jumping-off point on the route to the Simplon Pass, linking Switzerland and Italy. My route will not take me there today, as I have decided to stay, momentarily, on what I consider to be the wrong side of the lard line. Last night’s dinner in Brig proved that assessment right. Although I’m an adventurous diner, the national dish of the Swiss Germans, the rösti, left me reeling with its pig-rich sloppy joe of bacon, potatoes, and cream. In this Swiss concoction, Quebec’s poutine may have met its match for causing intestinal fisticuffs. Rösti can be many things, but never ritzy. Significantly, the linguistic divide I crossed at the brook called La Ripaille, at the Valais/Wallis boundary, is what the Swiss Germans jokingly term the Röstigraben (“the rösti ditch”).
Recovered from the digestive apocalypse, I set off toward the uppermost reaches of the Rhône Valley. Or not. The road seems to be heading straight into a mountain, but my faith in Swiss highway engineering is such that I know somehow we will get around it. As usual, there is a lot of roadwork to slow progress. In the Swiss variant, tall red-and-white-striped poles, not unlike the supports of a steeplechase gate, have been erected on both sides of the roadway, warning motorists of construction ahead. There seems to be more of this going on in Switzerland than in France and Italy, even though the Swiss roads appear to be the ones least in need of repair.
The valley contracts, and soon there is room only for road, rail, and river. The white waters of the Rhône thunder loudly in the late morning sun. Unexpectedly, we climb into a high valley. Alpine chalets dot the meadows; snowbound giants block the horizon. I stop at a place called Fiesch. Drifting in the skies above it, dozens of multicolored paragliders catch the shifting air currents, like a shower of rainbow confetti thrown at a gay wedding. Beyond them rises a massive peak called the Eggishorn, which thousands ascend every year for a view of the Aletsch Glacier, Europe’s largest, on the other side of the mountain.
I head for the aerial tramway, which, like the one at the Aiguille du Midi, goes up in two stages. As the trees swim beneath us, a young couple holds hands in anticipation of adventure. She, a tiny thing, is saddled with a Babar-size backpack; he, of medium stature, shoulders an even bigger one. They look as if they’re going to live in the wilderness for years. The tramway attendant gives them, then me, the once-over; at least he’s not reading American Psycho. As we near the transfer point, an arresting sight spreads out below: In a very steeply pitched clearing in the conifer forest, cattle are grazing lazily and wandering about, bovine dahus expert in keeping their balance.
The first stage finishes, and the heavily laden couple drift off into the meadows above the tree line. The sole passenger on the second stage, I am now wise enough to keep my gaze locked on the rockface in front of me. On leaving the station, I climb a small incline to the crest of the summit ridge. The view to the north is staggering. Unlike the Mer de Glace, Chamonix’s glacier, the Aletsch does not disappoint.
The glacier is an enormous off-white flood, seemingly frozen in time, its ice rippling in hundreds of horizontal striations. It is twenty-three kilometers long and nearly one kilometer thick. The day has turned peculiar. We can reach
up and almost touch the long gray cloud above us, yet on its extremities there are shafts of brilliant sun, staging a strange play of ice, snow, and light over such distant peaks as the Eiger and the Matterhorn.
Manic Japanese tourists cavort in the snow. These are not the stolid Tokyo suburbanites seen alighting at the Täsch rail station after a visit to Zermatt. These young people are more hip, sporting strange hats and winsome outerwear adorned with colorful fur balls. One girl has gone far down the slope toward the glacier and is now stuck in a snowdrift up to her waist. She giggles and chatters excitedly to her companions. They laugh and chatter back, then scramble down the ridge to join her. Not certain I want to see how this is going to end, I head to the snack bar on the ridge to get a warming cup of coffee. It is closed from noon to one o’clock so that the employees can eat their lunch. Switzerland.
I return to my vantage point to look out at the glacier, my eyes not believing that such a tremendous mass of ice could be rapidly shrinking, backing up more than a hundred meters a year. Far below, the Japanese frolic just at the edge of the glacier. They are positioned in about the same locale where six hundred naked white people first posed for American photographer Spencer Tunick before heading out onto the ice surface itself. The 2007 shoot was a spectacular stunt intended to raise awareness of global warming and its contribution to the accelerating retreat of Swiss glaciers.
The theme is taken up in a bilingual French/German display in an outbuilding near the Eggishorn cable-car station. It sounds the alarm and underscores Switzerland’s particular vulnerability. Twentieth-century temperatures here rose twice as fast as they did elsewhere, and projections show that, by 2050, average Swiss Alpine temperatures are expected to be up 2.5 degrees Celsius in the winter and a whopping 4.5 degrees Celsius in the summer. No wonder the Swiss are alarmed.
It is perhaps fitting then that Eggishorn’s other offering concerns therapy, in the form of happy rocks. There is a bowl of them in a jar. Apparently, you are to think of what worries you most and then leave the stone on the mountain. As the instructional poster explains, “Leave your worries behind on the mountain. You can deposit the stones [at Eggishorn] as a symbolic act to leave problems and worries behind you. We promise you that you will return home less burdened and feeling relieved.” It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, but I think “aerial tramway ride downward” and place the rock on the ground.
A young German woman did not get the memo. As the descent gets underway, she stretches out and lies on her back on the hard floor of the gondola, so that she won’t see the sickness-making views of the abyss out the window. She affably explains her reasons to her fellow passengers, while her boyfriend, a six-foot-five bodybuilder, tries to cajole her to get up. At last he succeeds. She stands, eyes glued to the floor, but when we rock past a pylon, she freaks out and dives back down, whimpering. I begin to sense a kindred spirit.
In Fiesch, I head for a restaurant that is open during the lunch hour. As I eat my non-rösti salad on the terrace, I witness a constant parade of cars pulling up in front of an upright cylinder of a building and disgorging teenagers dressed to the nines. The boys are half boy-band, half Tarantino antiheroes: black suits, multihued sunglasses, colorful shirts and ties. As for the girls, let us just say that sexual differentiation runs at Mach speed in Fiesch. Whereas hands and face are the only exposed flesh for the boys, the girls are so skimpily clad that they could have posed on the Aletsch Glacier in the naked photo shoot. They also labor under the disadvantage of walking on the stiletto Matterhorn heels first glimpsed in Zermatt, an impairment made worse as the entrance to the cylinder building is up a flight of stairs formed of metallic grates. Invalids of fashion, the wobbling girls have to be helped up the stairs by the sure-footed boys, which may be the whole point of the dress code.
A SLEEK RED TRAIN zips across the flank of a sloping green dale and disappears into an unseen tunnel, like Alice’s rabbit vanishing down the hole. The train’s destination is impossible to divine, as Switzerland presents a warren—a Swiss cheese—of tunnels, road tunnels, rail tunnels, pedestrian tunnels. Some expressway tunnels have exits that are themselves radiating tunnels. And most cities have long road and rail tunnels running underneath them: To exit town in a car, you simply look for an autobahn green arrow, then take a ramp downward, usually well within the city center. What follows are miles and miles of underground driving. When you finally emerge into the sunshine, the city is ten or fifteen minutes behind you. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, may have been Swedish, but he surely belongs on Swiss bank notes.
East of Fiesch, the valley opens somewhat, and chalets and wildflowers blanket the upland meadows. I roll down the window to be serenaded by cowbells. The unbearably beautiful hamlet of Biel passes by, its church steeple slender, its wooden houses and granges stained a warm dark brown, its surrounding fields covered in a down of Alpine blooms. The valley widens further, so much so that it accommodates an airstrip. But this proves to be the Rhône Valley’s last hurrah—the end rises before me, a solid wall of green and gray.
The road climbs and climbs. At first the ascent is as reassuringly sylvan as driving up and over the tree-rich Berkshires of western Massachusetts. But within minutes that metaphor is comprehensively dead. Above the tree line, the bleak and barren Alpine tundra stretches in all directions, especially upward. On one switchback, I peer across a gorge at the rockface opposite and see a road zigzagging back and forth across it like a jagged scar. Oh my God, that is where I am heading.
I round a bend and there, in a gully, stands a forlorn Alpine settlement. This is Gletsch, a rail junction dominated by deserted multistory buildings possessing the air of abandoned orphanages. It is also a road junction—the jagged-scar roadway from which I averted my eyes is not, in fact, where I am headed. That leads to the north, to the Grimsel Pass, which crosses the Bernese Alps. A sign for my destination, the Furka Pass, instructs me to go right at Gletsch and start climbing. I look up and see the roadway up ahead. Jesus! It is far worse than the approach to the Grimsel. Dozens of switchbacks curl up the mountain; worse yet, the distant viaducts over the void are visible, their supporting pillars looking like flimsy toothpicks. I put the car in gear and hit the accelerator. The first road sign I encounter is not in German, French, or Italian; it is in English and reads: THINK! Above the lettering is a horrifying, photoshopped picture of a motorcycle and its rider hurtling over a guardrail toward oblivion. Somehow this is not reassuring.
I continue ascending the mountainside, around hair-raising bends and ever upward. One hundred fifty years ago, this roadway would have been an impossibility, as the Rhône Glacier, the source of the river of the same name, spilled all the way down into Gletsch. It has been retreating at a gallop since then. Every summer, Swiss environmentalists trek to the great ice mass, laden with hundreds of tarpaulins that they spread over the glacier’s leading edge to keep the heat out and thus limit the melt. But few predict the glacier’s survival into the next century.
A schnitzel of Austrian bikers roars past me on successive hairpins. They don’t seem to “think!” One turn yields a surprise, an old five-story structure perched at the edge of the void, with a sign reading HOTEL BELVEDERE. This easily could have been the template for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. There are, of course, others of its ilk scattered around the dizzying heights of Switzerland, grand hotels located in the most unlikely places, restaurants in the clouds. The most famous is the Rigi Kulm, high above Lake Lucerne in the center of the country. Mark Twain, in A Tramp Abroad, wrote amusingly of his stay there. In Tartarin sur les Alpes, French humorist Alphonse Daudet had his blowhard Provençal hero, Tartarin, undergo serial misadventures while lodged at the Rigi Kulm.
I pass a parked tour bus at a widening in the road, then round a hairpin in the ascent toward the Hotel Belvedere. On my right, a truly ancient couple struggle uphill with their rolling luggage. They look so old they could be Minoans. I brake and gesture for them to hop in my car for the
final hundred meters. A great scowl forms on the face of the venerable gent, and he waves me on with an impressively hostile fist. These two are apparently very independent tourists.
A little way up, stopped at the next turn. I can see the doughty couple a long way down the slope, but it is the hotel, specifically this view of it, that interests me most. In the movie Goldfinger, this is the shot that opens the memorable chase sequence over the Furka Pass. Auric Goldfinger’s vintage yellow Rolls-Royce, with Oddjob at the wheel, tootles past the Hotel Belvedere, soon to be followed by James Bond in a silver Aston Martin, then Tilly Masterson in a white Ford Mustang. Tilly is the sister of the naked girl suffocated by gold paint, the film’s iconic image. Tilly and Bond, not knowing they are on the same side, then engage in the famous cat-and-mouse race across the Furka.
I am not feeling very Bondian as the journey into the sky continues. This pass is truly treacherous, of the type I had been dreading when I first left Geneva. Off to the left, across a gorge, a fearsome white limestone cliff appears, its particularity a peek-a-boo waterfall. A great mass of water surges from a spot near the top and then disappears, only to spring up again a hundred meters lower and thirty meters to the right before disappearing again and then reappearing in another unlikely location. The roar of the cascade deafens.
The Alps Page 12