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Updated: June 8, 2025
No man had ever accomplished the ascent before, though the attempts had been numerous. MR. WHYMPER'S NARRATIVE We started from Zermatt on the 13th of July, at half past five, on a brilliant and perfectly cloudless morning. Hadow, Rev. Mr. Hudson, and I. To insure steady motion, one tourist and one native walked together. The youngest Taugwalder fell to my share.
The three other victims fell nearly four thousand feet, and their bodies lay together upon the glacier when found by Mr. Whymper and the other searchers the next morning. Their graves are beside the little church in Zermatt. Switzerland is simply a large, humpy, solid rock, with a thin skin of grass stretched over it. Consequently, they do not dig graves, they blast them out with powder and fuse.
However, we were grateful, for the rock was gone. Its place was occupied by a new cellar, about thirty feet across, by fifteen feet deep. The explosion was heard as far as Zermatt; and an hour and a half afterward, many citizens of that town were knocked down and quite seriously injured by descending portions of mule meat, frozen solid.
I have pretty effectually throttled these errors by sending him the following demonstrated facts: 1. Distance from Zermatt to Riffelberg Hotel, 7 days. 2. The road CAN be mistaken. If I am the first that did it, I want the credit of it, too. 3. Guides ARE necessary, for none but a native can read those finger-boards. 4.
So we thought the best way was to clear out by the early train next morning, and I guess he was jolly blue when he found us gone. I send with this a faint sketch of some of the natives! What do you say to their rig? It was a pretty good grind up to Zermatt, and we walked it up the valley. There wasn't much to see on the way, and it's a frightfully stony road.
In six hours we were off the cliffs, and by half past three we had let ourselves down, inch by inch, to Zermatt, a distance of nine thousand four hundred feet. Looking up to the Matterhorn this next morning after the climb, I feel for it a personal affection. It has put more pictures of grandeur into my being than ever entered in such a way before. It is grand enough to bear acquaintance.
The last of these occasions followed Benham's convalescence at Montana and his struggle with the Bisse; the two went to Zermatt and did several peaks and crossed the Theodule, and it was clear that their joint expeditions were a strain upon both of them.
She nibbled her leisurely way downhill till it was near milking-time, then she struck for home and towed him into Zermatt. We went into camp on that wild spot to which that ram had brought us. The men were greatly fatigued.
But I told him to retain the guides and order them to follow us to Zermatt, because I meant to use them there. I said I could feel the spirit of adventure beginning to stir in me, and was sure that the fell fascination of Alp-climbing would soon be upon me.
We bore away nearly horizontally for about four hundred feet, then ascended directly toward the summit for about sixty feet, then doubled back to the ridge which descends toward Zermatt. A long stride round a rather awkward corner brought us to snow once more. That last doubt vanished! The Matterhorn was ours! Nothing but two hundred feet of easy snow remained to be surmounted.
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