Matterhorn (Switzerland and Italy); Mountaineering
“’Tis a lesson you should heed,
Try, try, try again.
If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try, try again.
Then your courage should appear,
For if you will persevere
You will conquer, never fear.
Try, try, try again.”
HICKSON.
The year 1862 was still young, and the Matterhorn, clad in its wintry
garb, bore but little resemblance to the Matterhorn of the summer, when a
new force came to do battle with the mountain, from another direction. Mr.
T. S. Kennedy of Leeds conceived the extraordinary idea that the peak
might prove less impracticable in January than in June, and arrived at
Zermatt in the former month to put his conception to the test. With stout
Peter Perrn and sturdy Peter Taugwalder he slept in the little chapel at
the Schwarzensee, and on the next morning, like the Messrs. Parker,
followed the ridge between the peak called Hörnli and the great mountain.
But they found that snow in winter obeyed the ordinary laws, and that the
wind and frost were not less unkind than in summer. “The wind whirled up
the snow and spiculæ of ice into our faces like needles, and flat pieces
of ice a foot in diameter, carried up from the glacier below, went flying
past. Still no one seemed to like to be the first to give in, till a gust
fiercer than usual forced us to shelter for a time behind a rock.
Immediately it was tacitly understood that our expedition must now end;
but we determined to leave some memento of our visit, and, after
descending a considerable distance, we found a suitable place with loose
stones of which to build a cairn. In half-an-hour a tower six feet high
was erected; a bottle, with the date, was placed inside, and we retreated
as rapidly as possible.”(48) This cairn was placed at the spot marked upon
Dufour’s Map of Switzerland 10,820 feet (3298 mètres), and the highest
point attained by Mr. Kennedy was not, I imagine, more than two or three
hundred feet above it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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