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Show 119 was dramatized when King reached the summit of his first Sierran conquest: "I rang my hammer upon the topmost rock; we grasped hands, and I reverently named the grand peak MOUNT TYNDALL." King was following the tradition of scientist-mountaineers. All of the early mountaineers in the Alps had been scientists, the pioneers being Saussure, Forbes, and Tyndall. On the other hand, the literature of Victorian mountaineering which began to appear in the late sixties and early seventies was equally divided between the scientific books such as John Tyndall's Hours of Exercise in the Alps or The Glaciers of the Alps, and classics written in an aesthetic tradition, such as Edward Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps, or Leslie Stephen's The Playgrounds of Europe. Certainly King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada was consciously written in awareness of the issues raised by both traditions, and so too Muir's narratives of mountaineering show his own debt to the literary tradition. It is well to remember that the culmination of the Golden Age in the Alps was a disaster, at least in the eyes of the British public. Four men were killed in the descent from the Matterhorn, and the reaction in England was dramatic. The Times called into question the sense of such activity, and saw climbers as "accepting the equal alternatives of idle boast and a horrible death." The Times taunted, "it is magnificient. But is it life? Is it duty? Is it common sense?" And so climbers are still occasionally viewed by civilized commentators as "dilettantes of suicide." But there was a deeper and more |