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.