Together by Norman Douglas — Read

Now what may that old _Brunnenmacher_ have looked like? I never saw him. I only know that, like my friend his son, he was the official water-expert of the town of Bludenz, that he was older than my father, and every bit as incurable a _Bergfex_ -- mountain-maniac. His nick-name, "Bühel-Toni," suffices to prove this. Those two were always doing impossible things up there at the risk of their lives (it was thus, indeed, that my father was killed) either together, or alone, secretly, in emulation of each other. For in those days the whole of this province was virgin soil, so far as climbing was concerned, and numberless are the peaks they are supposed to have scaled for the first time. Yet neither of them, it seems, had ever tackled the Zimba, the noblest of those pinnacles of the Rhetikon group which I can see from this window, out there, on the other side of the valley, covered with fresh snow wherever snow can come to lie among its crags.

The Zimba rises to a height of 2640 meters and was regarded as inaccessible by local chamois hunters who, for the rest, were under no obligation to scramble up places of this kind, their game being abundant lower down. Inaccessible! That annoyed these two _Bergfexes_ all the more.