It was one of the severest climbs that Whymper ever had in his career, full of peril and physical suffering. The party reached the summit by the glacier of the Ancula. Bead again Whymper's description of this glacier:
Imagine a triangular plane 700 or 800 feet high, set at an angle exceeding 50 degrees; let it be smooth, glassy; let the uppermost edges be cut into spikes and teeth, and let them be bent some one way, some another. Let the glassy face be covered with minute fragments of rock, scarcely attached, but varnished with ice. Imagine this, and then you will have a very faint idea of the face of the Ecrins, on which we stood. It was not possible to avoid detaching stones, which, as they fell, caused words unmentionable to rise. The greatest friends would have reviled each other in such a situation.
A few days afterward he climbed the Aiguille VeTte, a considerable feat in itself, though "Whymper, in his modesty, makes little of it. This was the first of the great Chamonix Aiguilles to be ascended.
It was not until his eighth attempt on the 13th of July, 1865, that Whymper finally attained the summit of the Matterhorn. He left Zermatt at 5:30 in the morning with three guides, Michel-Auguste Croz, whom Whymper loved as a brother, old Peter and young Peter Taugwalder, Lord Francis Douglas, the Rev. Charles Hudson and Mr. Hadow, a young man of nineteen. After long study, Whymper had rejected the usual route up the Matterhorn by the southwest or Italian ridge. Professor John Tyndall and he, in their fruitless emulation of each other, had stuck to this traditional route. Mr. Whymper now determined to try the eastern face, convinced, as he says, that its almost perpendicular appearance from Zermatt was an optical illusion and that the dip of the strata, which on the Italian side formed a continuous series of over-hangs—"ghastly precipices"—on the opposite side would become a great natural staircase with steps inclining inward. This apparently trivial deduction was the key to the ascent of the Matterhorn, and this route has since become the usual one.
All readers of adventure are familiar with this ascent. Sleeping over-night on the mountain, they reached the summit, with severe rockwork just before the finish. On the descent, however, came what is perhaps the most sensational accident, everything considered, in the history of mountain climbing. Let us quote Whymper's own words:
