The Matterhorn is a 4,478-metre rock pyramid standing alone at the head of the valley above Zermatt, its four faces lining up almost exactly with the points of the compass. Nothing beside it comes close to that shape, and it is the reason people fill the village simply to look at a mountain. Glaciers cut it: ice working on four sides at once ground a ridge down to this near-perfect point. It stands on the border — Swiss from Zermatt, Italian from Breuil-Cervinia, where it is called Monte Cervino — and both countries claim it. Its fame was sealed by a disaster. On 14 July 1865 Whymper's party, the first to reach the summit, lost four of its seven men when a rope snapped on the descent, and modern mountaineering was born and mourned on the same afternoon.
At the mountain's foot sits Zermatt, a village closed to petrol and diesel engines, where only electric buggies and horse-drawn carriages move through the lanes and the peak fills the end of the main street. From here a cog railway climbs to Gornergrat at 3,089 metres, where the Matterhorn rises across a sea of glacier ice among a ring of other 4,000-metre giants. Serious climbers still line up for the Hörnli ridge, the classic route first taken in 1865, and the mountain still claims lives most summers. But most people come simply to watch it. Some wait for the alpenglow, the few minutes at dawn when the first light sets the summit glowing pink then fiery red while the valley stays dark. Others walk up to little Lake Riffelsee and wait for a windless moment, when the whole pyramid turns upside down in the still water.