Turning over some prints which long have lain on one side, a wave of recollection brings before me some especially happy days on snowy peaks, and makes me long to bring a breath of Alpine air to the cities, where for so much of the year dwell many of my brother and sister climbers.
With the help of the accompanying photographs, which will serve to generally illustrate my remarks, let me relate what befell me during an ascent of the Schallihorn—a peak some twelve thousand and odd feet high, in the neighbourhood of Zermatt.
Now, although Zermatt is a very familiar playground for mountaineers, yet even as late as ten years ago one or two virgin peaks and a fair number of new and undesirable routes up others were still to be found. I had had my share of success on the former, and was at the time of which I write looking about for an interesting and moderately safe way, hitherto untrodden, up one of the lesser-known mountains in the district. My guide and my friend of many years, Joseph Imboden, racked his brains for a suitable novelty, and at length suggested that as no one had hitherto attacked the south-east face of the Schallihorn we might as well see if it could be ascended. He added that he was not at all sure if it was possible—a remark I have known him to make on more than one peak in far away Arctic Norway, when the obvious facility of an ascent had robbed it of half its interest. However, in those days I still rose satisfactorily to observations of that sort, and was at once all eagerness to set out. We were fortunate in securing as our second guide Imboden's brilliant son Roman, who happened to be disengaged just then. A further and little dreamed-of honour was in store for us, as on our endeavouring to hire a porter to take our things to the bivouac from the tiny village of Taesch no less a person than the mayor volunteered to accompany us in that capacity.
Mr Whymper. Zermatt, 1896.
Mrs Aubrey Le Blond on a Mountain Top.
Photographed by her Guide, Joseph Imboden
