/ a film commenced to / move at one edge; atom / closed with atom ..." Tyndall himself does not appear so plainly in the six other poems that comprise this book, although references to Alpine climatology are woven throughout: sections of the poem "Preluminous" bear titles such as "Crystallization and Internal Liquefaction" and "My Guide of the
Finsteraarhorn," a reference to a peak in the Swiss Alps.
The first bothies, in the modern sense of the word, appeared in the 1860s, mostly along routes to 4,000-metre peaks--the Matterhorn, Weisshorn and the
Finsteraarhorn. The structures were basic and lacked modern comforts.
Near the western edge of the Aare massif, just east of the peak of the
Finsteraarhorn, the snouts of two glaciers, the Unteraargletscher and Oberaargletscher, point to the east and contribute meltwater to small glacial lakes.
The eldest child of Liverpool lead merchant Frank Walker, Lucy Walker started modestly with a crossing of the Monte Moro and Theodul passes - by 1862 she had climbed the
Finsteraarhorn, Monte Rosa, and Mont Blanc.
(She had given up mountain climbing when a bolt of lightning struck her ice pick as she was ascending the
Finsteraarhorn in a thunderstorm.) A man like Sykes could not compete, as he learned one year when she kept him out of Syria.
The Swiss had climbed some twenty of their own peaks before 1850, including Jungfrau,
Finsteraarhorn, Wildhorn and Piz Bernina.
Switzerland's Aletsch-Riederalp region has some of the country's highest peaks, including the Jungfrau (4,158m), the Aletschhorn (4,195m), the
Finsteraarhorn (4,274m) and the Eiger (3,970m).
