Killing Dragons

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  • Author: Fergus Fleming
  • Publisher: Granta Books
  • Catalogue: 100270
  • Size: 13x19cm
“Killing Dragons” is the most hair-raising, hilarious account of the birth of mountaineering ever written.

Above the pastures of Switzerland, it was long believed, dragons and ghosts inhabited the realms of ice and snow. No-one in their right mind considered climbing into these inhospitable regions - and certainly not for pleasure. In the late enlightenment period, however, certain scientific gentlemen began to turn their minds to the highest places. What would they tell us about our atmosphere, about weather, about glaciers? And so they set off, armed with gallons of good wine, roast fowl, theodolites and barometers, walking in their ordinary clothes up the glaciers of Switzerland into the unknown.

But then the British came on the scene, and mountain-climbing as an obsession, an art form and a sport was born. Public schoolboys, scientists, showmen, the daftly amateurish and the fiendishly competitive were all entranced by the majesty and challenge of the great mountains, which they vanquished peak by peak. By the end of the century only the suicidally dangerous north faces of the Eiger and Matterhorn remained to be climbed by protegés of Hitler and Mussolini.