“ Killing Dragons” is the most hair-raising, hilarious account of the birth of mountaineering ever written. Above the pastures of Switzerl&, it was long believed, dragons & ghosts inhabited the realms of ice & snow. No-one in their right mind considered climbing into these inhospitable regions
- & 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? & so they set off, armed with gallons of good wine, roast fowl, theodolites & barometers, walking in their ordinary clothes up the glaciers of Switzerland into the unknown. But then the British came on the scene, & mountain-climbing as an obsession, an art form & a sport was born. Public schoolboys, scientists, showmen, the daftly amateurish & the fiendishly competitive were all entranced by the majesty & 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 & Matterhorn remained to be climbed by protegés of Hitler & Mussolini.