CLIMBING THE IRON PATH

It was not the hidden summit of Schwarzhorn that sucked the moisture from my mouth, leaving my tongue and lips dry. Rather, it was the sight of the ladders. Even this far away, they induced mild panic. There was a string of them reaching improbably skyward, and their aluminium contrasted, distinct and sharp, against the drab but sheer rock wall they were bolted against. Up they rose, disappearing into the swirling mists, to a summit I hoped I would soon be standing on.

But it would not be climbing the ladders alone that induced my profound fear of vertigo. That would come far earlier. Ahead lay a boulder field—broken, shattered, snow-covered—through which meandered the trail to come, and then, beyond that, running to the base of the cliff, a spine of solid stone. Strung along the ridge was a steel cable. And it would be here, clipping into this, that the first real jolts of panic began.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have panicked. It wasn’t just that the 2928m Schwarzhorn, lying deep in the Alps of central Switzerland, was dwarfed by its close siblings: Schreckhorn (4078m); Mönch (4107m); Jungfrau (4158m); and the most famous of them all, The Eiger (3970m). No, it was that unlike those other mountains, (which require not merely climbing