Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Karl Robert von Planitz, J. M. W. Turner and Giovanni Segantini. Eight attempts and the ninth, in July 1865, when four of the seven men who reached the summit fell to their deaths on the descent because a rope broke. Whymper was twenty-five and led the party; his account of the accident and of the inquiry afterwards is the most famous passage in mountaineering literature. Fifty-four plates of Alpine painting, from Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner to Giovanni Segantini, track the mountain's hold on the imagination across three centuries.