The most amazing book I ever read about Alpine travel was by Alexandre Dumas, pere called Impressions de voyage: En Suisse (Travel Impressions: In Switzerland , 1834). I read this book when I was in my teens while I sat at home dreaming of adventure and yearning to see the world. This book made a huge impression on me, and later I found out that he embellished some of the stories, such as the one about wild bear steaks. But no matter, his writing style was so wonderful and evocative, it makes you want to follow in his footsteps, to feel the fresh air and taste his perfectly prepared omelettes.

I should have caught this on one of my dozen prior re-readings, but the Rhone river is, of course, flowing *west* by the time it reaches Montreux and empties into Lake Geneva, resuming its course in Geneva and then into France. For some reason I had it the other way round.

Yet another novel well worth tracking down -- THE COLOURS OF VAUD by Bryher (1969), about revolutionary Switzerland. Bryher (nee Annie Winifred Ellerman) was a highly regarded English historical novelist who is best known now as HD's inamorata. Bryher's main residence from 1922 until her death in 1983 was in Vaud. (Villa Kenwin is her Bauhaus-style home in Burier.) Bryher and her first husband Robert McAlmon's Contact Press (in Paris) published Hemingway's first book, THREE STORIES & TEN POEMS.

i

As per author's note, the direction of the Rhone river has been corrected.

Also, for those poetically inclined, a tour of the Chamonix region of the French Alps will bring you ineluctably under the spell of the towering Mount Blanc, the title of P.B. Shelley's towering poem of the same name.

I knew the story of Whymper when I was little -- my mother told me about it so early that I can't remember when it was. I always knew that my mom had wanted to see the Matterhorn from when she was little. I had seen the mountain when I was young, and it was not as exciting to me as it had been to her some 15 years earlier. But she communicated her amazement and attraction to the mountains to me by then. Neither she nor I have ever wanted to go mountain climbing (at least that she would admit!) ourselves, but reading about it has been a shared experience. I had never thought of the idea that it wasn't automatic that people had to climb mountains. Of course people wanted to go to the top of the world!

But I recommend the book by Fergus Fleming: Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps. It presents the development of the idea that one might want to climb through the story of the Alpine mountaineers. Really riveting read. And it has pictures of the dragons that people thought once lived up there!