Furthermore, instead of skilled fellow-mountaineers on the climbing team, as was the case before commercial expeditions, the adventure climbing companies have had to attract paying clients with low climbing skills. The study claims that there was a dangerous personality type in some of these clients. The type is described as possessing pathologically self-inflated narcissism, with a higher potential for denial, rationalisation and self-aggrandisement, combined with feelings of self-entitlement. This heady brew, the authors suggest, would have been caused by inadequate mothering.
The result of this personality type getting high on the mountain was that in 1996 a number of clients abandoned responsibility for their climbing decisions and followed their guides like sheep. When the storm came in they were suddenly on their own. Certainly my experience of commercial expeditions bears a lot of this out, particularly the pressures on the leader and the type of clients they sign up.
There are difficult personalities in all walks of life, but the rise of the commercial expedition has brought more of them to Mount Everest. Money has perverted the spirit of mountaineering just as it has perverted so many other things. Real climbers follow their passion well away from Mount Everest.
I’m only sad that my boyhood dream of an impossibly remote Himalayan peak has evaporated like the clouds that embraced George Mallory.
15
Why Do You Climb?
Whilst giving a talk at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in 2000 I was approached by an elderly gentleman who had been a librarian at the House of Representatives. He told me that he’d had a friend who went to Mallory’s talk in New York in 1923, and well remembered the quote attributed to him. When asked ‘Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?’ Mallory had replied ‘Because it is there.’
This remark appeared in the New York Times the following day and has been laden with Zen-like significance ever since. It has been used to suggest that Mallory had a deeply philosophical approach to the sport.
This gentleman, though, was adamant. ‘It was a brush-off,’ he insisted. The questioner had been pushy, and it was not supposed to be a considered reply. In one of his articles Mallory wrote:
In practice I find that few men ever want to discuss mountaineering seriously. I suppose they imagine a discussion with me would be unprofitable; and I must confess that if anyone does open the question my impulse is to put him off. I can assume a vague disdain for civilisation, and I can make phrases about beautiful surroundings, and puff them out, as one who has a secret and does not care to reveal it because no one would understand …1
‘Because it is there’ is no answer at all, of course, and is sufficiently vague, like the circumstances of Mallory’s death, to have all sorts of constructions placed upon it.
His reply reflects the difficulty of explaining why we climb to those who don’t. John Hoyland, in a mature piece of writing for an 18-year-old, explained the love of hills in this way. He was alone in the Carneddau hills of North Wales in Easter 1933, gazing at Carnedd Daffyd:
For some time I lay back, propped against a stone. The grandeur of the view seemed to lift one out of oneself on to a higher plane, where one’s only feelings were a profound peace, coupled with admiration and wonder. For one such moment as this all hardships are a thousand times worthwhile: in fact, without them one cannot experience to the full the tremendous elation which comes at moments such as this. It is one of the answers to the ever-lasting question of ‘Why do you climb?’2
Inevitably the stories we bring back from the heights seem full of horrors, but it is so hard to explain the intangible delights of the sport. The views are stupendous. The surroundings are pristine. The battle upwards is absorbing. The summit is literally the pinnacle of achievement, and Mount Everest’s summit is the ultimate pinnacle: you cannot climb any higher. For the pioneers this must have been a heady mix. Add to this national and personal prestige, and surely one can begin to understand the fatal attraction of this mountain.
‘There are only three sports – bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.’ This quotation is attributed to Hemingway but cannot be substantiated. It may not be his, as he called bullfighting a tragedy, not a sport. But the meaning is clear: all these activities include the possibility of violent death. Bullfighting and motor racing are now relatively safe, but mountaineering remains an activity that can kill or injure you. This puts it in an unusual place in the pantheon of human activities. So why do it?
Evolutionary psychology is the cruellest science, peeling away our apparently civilised skin to reveal a Stone Age brain beneath. It is not politically correct, and seems to reduce us to the state of amoral animals. As a result many non-scientists do not want to give it any credence. But Charles Darwin, who had a couple of good ideas about evolution, anticipated evolutionary psychology in his later work. Could it have an answer for us?
Our brains certainly evolved to cope with the environment in which early humans lived, but are we condemned to dwell for ever in a lost landscape? We appeared around two million years ago at the beginning of the Pleistocene, and many of our psychological mechanisms are adapted to dealing with the survival and reproductive problems encountered during that time. Since we first jogged across the African savannah, human beings have displayed overweening and ineradicable impulses for food, sex and highs. But human evolution is slow, and our brains haven’t caught up with the extraordinary pace of technology. As a result we are imperfectly adapted to a world filled with easily gathered sweet and fatty foods, pornography and drugs. Those individuals who sought rare fats and sugars in a Stone Age environment survived to pass on genes that lead us to desire them at a time when their easy availability is killing us. Our brains lag behind in other ways: many of us are terrified of spiders and snakes when we ought to be more frightened of cars.
These observations, however, don’t seem to explain phenomena that do not appear to favour breeding success, such as weeping over music, or feelings of spiritual uplift when seeing a high mountain.
Evolutionary psychology claims to help towards an understanding. After his work on natural selection, Darwin turned to the study of animal emotions and psychology. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872 he dealt with what he had seen coming when he wrote in On the Origin of Species in 1859:
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.3
Darwin was curious about the peacock’s tail. On the face of it this ludicrous appendage makes the male bird easier to be caught by predators, and costs a great deal of energy to grow and display. However, its attractiveness to the female means that these disadvantages are outweighed by the male’s increased success in breeding. In a nutshell, this concept can be used to explain some human behaviour, such as why rich old men end up with beautiful young women. But can it really explain the phenomenon of mountain-climbers?
Darwin realised that in species such as ours females make a greater parental investment and are therefore fussier than males when it comes to choice of mate. The reproductive success of males depends on their ability to compete for the females either by displaying better resources, or fighting other males. This means that genes that favour risk-taking and competitive ability in males tend to survive at the expense of disease and parasite prevention, and repair capacity.4 This is why the females of most animal species live longer. It also shows how Darwin’s natural selection maximises the survival of certain genes rather than the survival of certain individuals. The thoughtful modern individual may deliberately practise contraception to improve her personal life, but she may still experience Stone Age impulses.
Could it be that mountain climbing is an activity that demonstrates fitness? Perhaps also mixed with quasi-religious feelings? Climbing Mount Everest does seem to be a predom
inantly male activity.
In the Scottish St Kilda archipelago, those young men wishing to marry first had to prove their ability to support a family with birds captured on the lofty cliffs. They demonstrated their mastery over vertigo by balancing across the edge of the Lovers’ Stone, a rock protruding over a huge drop. They had to stand on the very edge with their left foot, put the right foot in front of it, bend down and place a fist over the foot which was now standing on thin air. This would appear to be taking Darwin’s theory of the selection of the fittest rather too literally.
The ‘costly signalling theory’ suggests that women prefer physical risk-takers over risk-avoiders as long-term mates. However, just when I thought that I had found the reason why young men climb – to impress young women – along came another study. The article was titled ‘Is risk taking used as a cue in mate choice?’5 and the simple answer was no, not really. It seems that the young men in the study thought that their risky behaviour was impressing potential partners, but the young women in the study were actually not impressed if the behaviour was perceived as unnecessarily risky.
Another related study confirmed the theory for heroic acts that were altruistic, such as rescuing a child from a burning building (or collecting birds’ eggs for food), but not for non-heroic acts that were brave but not altruistic (such as climbing mountains).6 In other words, women’s concerns about risk to their mates overrode any positive feelings about their men’s risk-taking when these acts were highly risky and of no practical use.
But this all seems too reductive: we are not machines. Professor Steve Jones is sceptical of the way evolutionary psychology is trotted out to explain all human behaviour, and has suggested that the whole point of having a large, complex brain is to fine-tune our behaviour.7 Our environment has always been changing, he says, and indeed we ourselves are still evolving.
Having known hundreds of mountaineers, my feeling about why people climb is that it is similar to the desire for fighting, or for competitive sports.
My personal guess is that men (and some women) need to fight, and when there isn’t a war to fight they wage substitute war with tribal games such as football or mountain climbing. These games are addictive, and the high of surmounting a difficult obstacle is swiftly followed by the low of everyday life. For some of us the activity even becomes a substitute for religion. The fact is, we are very complicated creatures. In the same way that a footpath between villages becomes a cart-track, which then becomes a crowded motorway, so human characteristics that evolved on the savannahs of Africa may now look very different.
While we are on the subject of sex and Mount Everest, a Professor Ralph Pettman of Victoria University in New Zealand attempted to stop climbers and tourists having sex on the mountain. Pettman raised $2,000 to create a website he hoped would bring the issue to people’s attention. Sherpas, he claimed, were bothered by people having sex at Base Camp because they consider it a sacred place. Some Sherpas alleged that it was the sexual antics of one famous socialite there in 1996 that brought on that year’s disaster, although others among us think it was probably the bad weather. Orgasms are reported to be more intense at altitude, perhaps due to hypoxia. I had one girlfriend who claimed to have had successful sex on the South Col, thus setting a world record at five miles high. Knowing the lady (and gentleman) in question I have no doubt that this is true.
Our final thought on why we climb comes from John Hoyland. He is lying in his tent, which has collapsed on him under a weight of wet snow:
Thus it always is in the mountains: at one moment life is too glorious to be described, at the next it is too miserable. One who has not tasted both extremes knows nothing of the mountains and the great sense of friendship they can offer. All who climb are convinced that climbing is the finest sport there is. A sport, and yet it is more than a sport. Most men need some outlet for the fighting instincts; some fight mentally and some physically, and those who attack the most difficult climbs do not attack them to get to the summit or to see the view. They feel they must have something to fight against and find in the mountains something that will tax them to the uttermost and kill them if it can, and yet whose reward is great.8
16
What Does Mount Everest Mean?
Borobudur is a man-made mountain in Java, Indonesia. It rises from a volcanic plain and was built from one and a half million blocks of stone in the 9th century. Java had come under British administration in 1811, and its governor-general was Thomas Stamford Raffles, who became fascinated by Javanese history and culture. He knew India and her Buddhists well, and when he was informed by the native Javanese of a great Buddhist monument overgrown by jungle he commissioned an expedition to find it.
Borobudur had lain deserted since the 10th century, possibly as result of volcanic eruptions, and since the conversion of the Javanese inhabitants to Islam in the 15th century it had become a place of bad omen. Raffles would have none of that, and ordered it to be uncovered and documented.
The builders were Mahayana Buddhists, who intended it to be a place of pilgrimage and an architectural aid to spiritual practice. Borobudur consists of terraced platforms topped by a domed stupa at the summit. As pilgrims ascended this sacred man-made mountain they climbed through the three levels of Buddhist cosmology, represented by stone-relief panels illustrating the world of desire (Kāmadhātu), the world of forms (Rupadhatu) and the world of formlessness (Arupadhatu). At the summit stupa there is – nothing.
The pyramids of Egypt and Mexico are other examples of man-made mountains with a spiritual meaning. The great European cathedrals have strong vertical components in their architecture and many of them, such as Paris’s Notre Dame or Salisbury Cathedral, look like stylised dreams of fantasy mountain peaks. Even the ‘Mersey Funnel’, officially known as the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, built in 1967, has white flanks and icy-looking pinnacles.
I am convinced that buried in our psyche is the feeling that high places are rich with spiritual significance. When nations have the leisure and manpower to indulge these feelings their rulers build pyramids or monuments such as Borobudur. If we are leisured individuals with ambivalent ideas about religion, perhaps some of us transfer our spiritual drives into climbing mountains.
The memorial window to Mallory in his father’s church of St Wilfrid’s in Mobberley, clinging to a Christian explanation for a pointless death, tells us this:
All his life he sought after whatsoever things are Pure and High and Eternal. At last in the flower of his perfect manhood he was lost to human sight between Earth and Heaven on the topmost peak of Mount Everest.
There is more at work here. We humans seem to need to make patterns and meanings out of the shapeless, death-dealing universe. We have already seen how Robert Burns seemed to ignore a view of the Isle of Arran that poets would now find beautiful. So perhaps mountains have no intrinsic meaning at all? Simon Schama in his Landscape and Memory offers a convincing explanation of the way we invent beauty:
Even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product … The brilliant meadow-floor [at Yosemite] which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants. So while we acknowledge (as we must) that the impact of humanity on the earth’s ecology has not been an unmixed blessing, neither has the long relationship between nature and culture been an unrelieved and predetermined calamity. At the very least, it seems right to acknowledge that it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape … What lies beyond the windowpane of our apprehension, says Magritte, needs a design before we can properly discern form, let alone derive pleasure from its perception. And it is culture, convention, and cognition that make that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty.1
In the same way, the English countryside, with its chequerboard of fields and hedges that we find so beau
tiful and natural, is in fact almost completely artificial; the ancient Wildwood that our Mesolithic ancestors found here was cleared 7,000 years ago. Our culture tells us that the present landscape is beautiful, and that mountains are spectacular, and we find them so. This is challenging stuff; are our feelings merely products of our culture? I suspect that we have vague, powerful feelings and we attach them to forms such as gods, people and Mount Everest.
In my reading around the subject I have been struck by the spiritual language employed by the pioneers who first approached the mountain. Odell called the summit ‘that most sacred and highest place of all’.2 Younghusband said the summit was ‘poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world’. When I first saw the summit through the trees on the climb up to Namche Bazaar I remember lifting my eyes impossibly high and being struck by feelings of ethereal beauty, immaculate whiteness and purity. It seemed to me that if I could stand up there my spiritual self would be cleansed of worldly longing. In the event it did nothing of the sort, but perhaps I came to a kind of understanding.
There is danger in the worship of mountains. John Buchan, popular author of thrillers such as The Thirty-Nine Steps, as head of British propaganda during the First World War helped to hide the true horror of the war from the British public. After the war he urged support for the Everest expeditions. They would be ‘a vindication of the essential idealism of the human spirit’. He saw warfare and mountain climbing as compatible spiritual quests.
The Nazis were fascinated with alpinism, and applauded Heinrich Harrer’s conquest of the north face of the Eiger in 1938. There have been attempts to deny his membership of the party, but the facts are that he flew a Nazi swastika from his tent, and was photographed in his SS uniform at his wedding. This is not to denigrate one of the most remarkable climbers of the century. Hitler posed in front of his beloved mountains at his Berchtesgaden Berghof, and his favourite film-maker Leni Riefenstahl made mountain films. Audrey Salkeld writes of ‘the usefulness of Alpinism to the Nazi cause …’ – the mountain films being ‘a German equivalent of the Western, with their emphasis on tested loyalties, rivalry, struggle for homeland and the sheer power of nature’.3 Alpine climbers were Nietzschean supermen, seeking purity in the high, thin air. But British climbers didn’t engage with fascism, perhaps because they considered it ridiculous. Oswald Mosley, the nearest thing we had to a fascist dictator, wore the obligatory Nazi-chic military uniform. A Conservative MP, observing this, commented, ‘I see jodhpurs. I see riding boots. But I see no horse.’
Last Hours on Everest Page 20