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."[1] 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.
Shortly after this Professor Tyndall gave, in his little tract Mountaineering in 1861, an account of the reason why he had left Breil, in August 1861, without doing anything.[2] It seems that he sent his guide Bennen to reconnoitre, and that the latter made the following report to his employer:—"Herr, I have examined the mountain carefully, and find it more difficult and dangerous than I had imagined. There is no place upon it where we could well pass the night. We might do so on yonder Col upon the snow, but there we should be almost frozen to death, and totally unfit for the work of the next day. On the rocks there is no ledge or cranny which could give us proper harbourage; and starting from Breuil it is certainly impossible to reach the summit in a single day." "I was entirely taken aback," says Tyndall, "by this report. I felt like a man whose grip had given way, and who was dropping through the air. . . . Bennen was evidently dead against any attempt upon the mountain. 'We can, at all events, reach the lower of the two summits,' I remarked. ' Even that is difficult,' he replied; 'but when you have reached it, what then? The peak has neither name nor fame.'"[3]
- ↑ Alpine Journal, 1863, p. 82.
- ↑ See p. 87.
- ↑ Mountaineering in 1861, pp. 86-7. Tyndall and Bennen were mistaken in supposing that the mountain has two summits; it has only one. They seem to have been deceived by the appearance of that part of the south-west ridge which is called "the shoulder" (l'épaule), as seen from Breil. Viewed from that place, its southern end has certainly, through foreshortening, the semblance of a peak; but when one regards it from the Col Theodule, or from any place in the same direction, the delusion is at once apparent.
