Rock-climbing as a fine art was really undreamt of till long after the Matterhorn had been conquered. The layman is apt to conceive all Alpine climbs as a succession of dizzy precipices. To a man brought up on Alpine classics, there are few things more disappointing than the ease of his first big peak. The rock work on the average Oberland or Zermat peaks by the ordinary route is simple, straightforward scrambling up slopes whose average inclination is nearer thirty than sixty degrees. It is the sort of thing that the ordinary man can do by the light of Nature. Rock-climbing, in the sense in which the Dolomite or lake climber uses the term, is an art which calls for high qualities of nerve and physique. Such rock climbing was almost unknown till some time after the close of this period. No modern cragsman would consider the Matterhorn, even if robbed of its fixed ropes, as anything but a straightforward piece of interesting rock work, unless he was unlucky enough to find it in bad condition. All this we may frankly admit. Mountaineering as an art was only in its infancy when the Matterhorn was climbed. And yet the Englishmen whom we have mentioned in this chapter did more for mountaineering than any of their successors or predecessors. Bourrit, De Saussure, Beck, Placidus à Spescha, and the other pioneers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, deserve the greatest credit. But their spirited example gave no general impetus to the sport. They were single-handed mountaineers; and somehow they never managed to fire the world with their own enthusiasm. The Englishmen arrived late on the scene. The great giants of more than one district had been climbed. And yet mountaineering was still the pursuit of a few isolated men who knew little or nothing of their brother climbers, who came and struggled and passed away uncheered by the inspiring freemasonry of a band of workers aiming at the same end. It was left to the English to transform mountaineering into a popular sport. Judged even by modern standards some of these men were fine mountaineers, none the less independent because the fashion of the day decreed that guides should be taken on difficult expeditions. But even those who owed the greater part of their success to their guides were inspired by the same enthusiasm which, unlike the lonely watchfires of the earlier pioneers, kindled a general conflagration. CHAPTER VIII THE STORY OF THE MATTERHORN The history of mountaineering contains nothing more dramatic than the epic of the Matterhorn. There is no mountain which appeals so readily to the imagination. Its unique form has drawn poetic rhapsodies from the most prosaic. “Men,” says Mr. Whymper, “who ordinarily spoke or wrote like rational beings when they came under its power seemed to quit their senses, and ranted, and rhapsodied, losing for a time all common forms of speech. Even the sober De Saussure was moved to enthusiasm.”