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Italy’s secondary provenance to the mountain. Even after the British chaps’ clear victory.”
    “Clear victory, oui… but so tragic,” says Jean-Claude.
    We walk back to where we’ve stowed our rucksacks against some boulders along the north end of the narrow summit ridge. Jean-Claude and I begin unpacking our lunch. This is to be our last day on the Matterhorn, and it may be our last day climbing together for some time…perhaps forever, although I desperately hope not. I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my European Wanderjahr climbing in the Alps with these new friends, but the Deacon has some business in England soon, and J.C. has to return to his Chamonix Guide duties and an annual assembly of Chamonix Guides in that tradition-haunted Chamonix Valley, with its sacred brotherhood of the rope.
    Shaking away any sad thoughts of endings or farewells, I pause in my unpacking to take in the view yet again. My eyes are hungrier than my belly.
    There is not a single cloud in the sky. The Maritime Alps, 130 miles away, are clearly visible. The Écrins, first climbed by Whymper and the guide Croz, bulk blankly against the sky like the sides of some great white sow. Turning slightly to look north, I see the high peaks of the Oberland on the far side of the Rhône. To the west, Mont Blanc rules over all lesser peaks, its summit snows blazing with reflected sunlight so blinding that I have to squint. Swiveling slightly to face the east, I can see peak after peak—some climbed by me during the last nine months with my new friends here, some waiting to be climbed, some never to be climbed—the stuttered and irregular array of white pinnacles diminishing to a mere bumpy horizon wreathed in the haze of distance.
    The Deacon and Jean-Claude are eating their sandwiches and sipping water. I snap myself out of my sightseeing and romantic reverie and begin to eat. The cold roast beef is delicious, the bread rich with a crust that makes me work at chewing. The horseradish makes my eyes water until Mont Blanc becomes even more of a white blur.
    Looking south, I celebrate the view that Whymper wrote about in his classic book Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–1869. I can clearly recall the words I read only the evening before, read by candlelight in my tent above Breuil, the words describing Edward Whymper’s first view from the summit of the Matterhorn on July 14, 1865 , this view that I’m devouring in late June of 1924:
    There were forests black and gloomy and meadows bright and lively, bounding waterfalls and tranquil lakes, fertile lands and savage wastes; sunny plains and frigid plateaux. There were the most rugged forms, and the most graceful outlines—bold, perpendicular cliffs, and gentle, undulating slopes; rocky mountains and snowy mountains, sombre and solemn, or glittering and white with walls—turrets—pinnacles—pyramids—domes—cones—and spires! There was every combination that the world can give, and every contrast that the heart could desire.
    Yes, you can tell that Edward Whymper was an absolute romantic, as were so many of the Golden Age climbers in the mid- and late 1800s. And his writing is flowery and old-fashioned by the lean, modern standards of 1924.
    But as to the charge of being a hopeless romantic, I confess that I am as well. It’s part of my nature. Perhaps it is my nature. And although I’d graduated from Harvard as an English major ready to write my own great travelogues and novels—all in the lean modern style, of course—I’m surprised to find that Edward Whymper’s nineteenth-century wording—flowery prose and all—has once again moved me to tears.
    So on this June day in 1924, my heart responds to the words written more than fifty years earlier, and my soul responds even more hopelessly to the view that prompted those words from the sentimental Edward Whymper. The great mountain climber was twenty-five years old when he first climbed the Matterhorn and saw this