The Ascent of Man
Taki
The Ascent of Man FERGUS FLEMING KILLING DRAGONS: THE CONQUEST OF THE ALPS Well into the 18th century it was an undisputed fact that dragons lived in Alpine caves. Not only did the first...
...It was the only unconquered peak in the Alps...
...It was a perpendicular iceberg," wrote Smith later...
...Pilatus, a mountain near Geneva, held a pond full of biblical terror...
...Killing Dragons is a hell of a tale...
...Up with him went 60 bottles of Vin Ordinair, 6 bottles of Bordeaux, 10 bottles of St...
...In an ironic twist of fate, the brother of Lord Alfred Douglas, of Oscar Wilde infamy, was among the victims...
...The guides return, their bodies ending up naked and in little pieces from the violence of their fall...
...Herzog lost most of his toes and fingers, and part of his nose, but lived to become Charles De Gaulle's minister of sport, and is still very much around to this day, an extremely good-looking gentleman of the old school, and one who congratulated me after I had come in dead last in the world skiing downhill championships of 1962 in Chamonix, France...
...Seven men made it to the top, but four were killed on the all sports combined and then some...
...if, say, Bill Clinton was tossed into a lake, Hillary would, for good measure, be sure and follow...
...Jean, 3 bottles of Cognac, and so on...
...Not only did the first explorers face the icy terrors, precipices, mind-numbing cold, constant fear of sudden and violent death, but they also had to contend with centuries-old beliefs that violent ghosts inhabited the frozen wilderness...
...Still, he inspired people to think of mountains in semi-religious, transcendent terms, like the Romantics before him...
...I was short-roped to a sherpa and still I couldn't make it...
...Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Wagner composed in the shadow of the 102 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 hills...
...Edward Whymper, an Englishman, played Captain Ahab to the Matterhorn's Moby Dick...
...Atlantic Monthly Press, 416 pages, $26 103 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001RICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001...
...In the vanguard of Alpine exploration came a professor of natural history, Horace Benedict de Saussure, a Genevan who became obsessed with Mont Blanc and its conquest...
...Imagine going up a place full of dragons and ghosts dressed in woolies with normal walking shoes and without maps or a guide...
...He milked his climb with consummate professionalism and the play ran for years and years...
...After that the Alps flourished, attracting more tourists than ever before, especially nobility from France, Poland, Russia, and Germany...
...The Matterhorn is rock-climbing at its most severe, as savage a spot as anyone had ever encountered at the time, with narrow ridges flanked by "ghastly abysses," a pyramid of a mountain made of slippery rock, ice, and snow...
...Having lived in Switzerland these past forty-five years, I have climbed some easy mountains in my time...
...It was known as the only unconquered and unconquerable peak in the Alps...
...In their infinite wisdom, the ancients knew that a wife is as responsible as her husband where evil is concerned...
...Obsessed to the point of madness, Whymper tried for years, and when he finally made it, the Matterhorn took its revenge...
...Now and then over the centuries an intrepid traveller might acquire a dragon stone, which could cure poisoning as well as the plague...
...According to legend, Pontius Pilate was dumped into this lake after his burial in the Tiber had brought the most atrocious weather in Roman memory...
...I am strictly an amateur...
...Down by the foothills waited a young man who was to be the judge in the Wilde trial thirty years later...
...By the time poor Pontius was weighed down and thrown into the mountain lake, his wife, Procla, was also tossed in for good measure, yet the storms raged unabated...
...The Matterhorn defeated me through a severe case of vertigo...
...The Matterhorn, lying on the boundary between Switzerland and Italy, was considered until 1865—the year it was finally conquered—beyond the bounds of human capability...
...Letters from the period read like "a marriage between Burke's Peerage and the Almanach de Gotha...
...I like to think I'm a brave man, but reading the book showed me I am nothing of the kind...
...Weaving an entertaining tale of the first men—and one woman—to conquer the Alps, Fleming nicely captures Europe's most majestic mountain range, including hundreds of peaks higher than 10,000 feet, dozens higher than 13,000 feet, and Mont Blanc, the highest in western Europe at 15,771 feet...
...Ditto when his body was removed and dumped into the Rhone, near Vienna...
...Albert Smith, a flamboyant Englishman, climbed Mont Blanc and crushed its myth...
...After years of heartbreaking efforts, trials and tribulations, not to mention death-defying near misses, he was beaten to it by a short, boastful farmer-cum-crystal-gatherer, Jacques Balmat—a supremely fit peasant who decided to reach the summit in order to earn Saussure's reward...
...The Himalayas now claim the most lives, although three years ago the Alps saw at least one hundred amateurs die because of avalanches and crevasses...
...dragged him once they were past the snowline...
...Alpine accidents have claimed more lives than The Matterhorn is rock-climbing at its most severe, as savage a spot as anyone had ever encountered, with narrow ridges flanked by "ghastly abysses/' a pyramid of a mountain made of slippery rock, ice, and snow...
...And like him, I cried uncle...
...Three years ago, having made it up a very steep rock, I decided it was time for Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn...
...Hundreds of thousands went home feeling they had conquered Mont Blanc...
...Fergus Fleming manages to write both about mountains and climbers...
...On August 8,1786, and after having fought gales, altitude sickness, and snow blindness, two men, Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Balmat, had claimed the bounty...
...The first one I ever read where the mountain took and held center stage was Annapurna, the magnificent and enchanting tale of Maurice Herzog's triumph in 1950...
...Not many tried...
...The Matterhorn has claimed the most, though Mont Blanc is not far behind...
...Actually, Mont Blanc is a relatively easy mountain to climb...
...Brits predominated, with the Romantics—starting with Shelley and Byron—gasping for words to describe the majesty and mystery of the Alps...
...In Mont Blanc it was altitude sickness...
...Gasping for breath, dehydrated, and trembling violently, I felt like Bill Clinton did when faced with the Vietnam draft...
...This miraculous stone could only be obtained by cutting open the forehead of the dragon as it slept in its lair...
...Thousands have died since...
...For awhile the horrors overcame him, but looking very ill indeed, he was hauled up by a rope, and crawling on his hands and knees he finally reached the summit...
...Alas, I failed both times...
...He never made it...
...Writers and painters sought inspiration in the Alps...
...Killing Dragons brought back many memories...
...Once all the peaks had been reached, explorers and climbers went elsewhere...
...Ruskin complained bitterly that the Alps were being vulgarized, with the railroad opening Europe up to the middle classes and to the tourist invasion...
...Some even managed to make money from the Alps...
...George, 15 bottles of St...
...He went up with twenty porters and four guides for each of his companions...
...He wrote a play about it and audiences flocked to see it...
...We'll make it up," said Cubby, my guide, "but you'll never make it back down...
...Most books about mountains are concerned with the men who climb them...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
