The Matterhorn is a 4,478-metre pyramid of rock standing on its own above the village of Zermatt, in Switzerland. Modern mountaineering was born on it and lost four men on the same afternoon. Edward Whymper's party reached the top from the Zermatt side on 14 July 1865. On the way down one of them slipped and pulled three others after him. The rope parted under the load, and four of the seven fell. That rope is in a case in the village museum, and a glance shows what went wrong: it is the oldest and thinnest of the ones they carried. Three days later Jean-Antoine Carrel reached the summit from the Italian side. He had been Whymper's climbing partner for years before they fell out, and had been racing him up the opposite ridge the whole time.
The open cogwheel railway climbs out of Zermatt to Gornergrat at 3,089 metres, where the pyramid stands across the valley with the Gorner Glacier sweeping round below it like a frozen sea. On the way down the train stops at Rotenboden, and a short walk from the platform brings you to the small Riffelsee, which turns the whole mountain upside down on a windless morning. The other hour worth the alarm is dawn, when the first light lands on the summit alone and works down the pyramid from pink to red while the valley is still dark. Down in the village there is nothing to hear. Zermatt allows no petrol or diesel engines, so you arrive by train and the lanes carry electric taxis and horse-drawn carriages, the pyramid closing the end of the main street. The rock up at the top is not from this continent: the summit block is African gneiss, shoved over European rock when the two plates met. From the street outside the museum you can follow the Hörnli ridge with your eye all the way up, the line they climbed and the line they were on when the rope went.