Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  The opposition to Wegener’s theory, as to that of Burnet so many years earlier, was immediate and voluble (‘Utter, damned rot!’, said the president of the American Philosophical Society, eloquently). But Wegener, a stoic visionary, remained phlegmatic in the face of early antagonism. In 1915 he published The Origins of Continents and Oceans, a careful explanation of his theory, and in its way as apocalyptic a reimagining of the earth’s history as Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth or Hutton’s The Theory of the Earth. Between 1915 and 1929 Wegener revised his Origin three times to take into account advances in geology, but he was still ignored by the geological establishment. In 1930 he led another meteorological expedition to Greenland. Three days after his fiftieth birthday he and his team were caught in a severe Arctic blizzard, in which temperatures dropped to −60°F. Wegener became separated from his companions, and froze to death in the private wilderness of a white-out. His body was found by his colleagues when the storm receded. They entombed Wegener inside a mausoleum built of blocks of ice, topped with a twenty-foot iron cross. Within a year, the structure and its contents had disappeared into the interior of the glacier on which it was built – a means of burial that would no doubt have met with Wegener’s approval.

  It was not until the advent of the so-called New Geology during the 1960s that it was realized that Wegener had been at least half-right. As advances in bathysphere technology permitted the more systematized exploration of the ocean floor, it was discovered that the continents did indeed move and had indeed spun apart from a vast ur-continent. But the continents weren’t – as Wegener had thought – independent entities drifting over a sea of basalt, like icebergs in water. In fact, the surface of the globe was discovered to be composed of some twenty crustal segments or plates. The continents were simply the portions of the plates which were sufficiently elevated to protrude from the sea.

  These plates were named by the New Geologists. There was the African Plate, the Cocos Plate, the North American Plate, the Nazca Plate, the Iran Plate, the Antarctic Plate, the Juan de Fuca Plate, the Australian Plate, the Arabian Plate and the decidedly unfragile China Plates. Driven by convection currents or ‘cells’ within the semi-liquid mantle of the earth, and pulled by their own weight, these plates move around relative to each other. Where their edges meet beneath the ocean, either a mid-ocean ridge or a subduction zone is formed. At mid-ocean ridges the boundaries of two plates are continually being pushed apart by action in the mantle. Magma rises into the gap, and cools to form sea-floor basalt. Mid-ocean ridges are therefore raised above the surrounding ocean floor, like the seam on a cricket ball. A subduction zone, by contrast, is where the edges of two plates are forced together, and the less buoyant plate slides underneath the other. There, the rock of the subordinate plate is pushed down into the mantle, where it melts and comes bubbling back up in liquid form, causing super-heated wounds in the crust. These subduction zones form the oceanic trenches: the Aleutian Trench, the Java Trench, the Marianas Trench. At the bottom of these trenches – the Marianas Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is high – the atmospheric pressure is so enormous that, were you to materialize at that depth, your body would instantly be compacted to the size of a tin can.

  Most of the world’s mountain ranges have been thrown up by the jostling and collision of the continental plates. Thus, for example, the Alps were created when the Adriatic Plate (which carries Italy on its back) was driven into the Eurasian Plate. The oldest mountains are those which are now the lowest, for erosion has had time to reduce them. The blunted, rubbed-down spine of the Urals, for instance, speaks of great age. So too do the rounded forms of the Scottish Cairngorms. Perhaps surprisingly, among the youngest mountains on earth are the Himalaya, which began to form only 65 million years ago, when the Indian Plate motored northwards and smashed slowly into the Eurasian Plate – ducking underneath it and then butting it five-and-a-half miles upwards into the air. Compared to the earth’s venerable ranges, the Himalaya are adolescents, with sharp, punkish ridges instead of the bald and worn-down pates of older ranges.

  Like adolescents, too, they are still growing. Everest – which became the world’s highest mountain less than 200,000 years ago – shoots up by a precocious five millimetres or so a year. Give it a million years – the blink of an eye in geological terms – and the mountain could have almost doubled its height. Except of course that won’t happen, because gravity won’t tolerate such a structure. Something will give: the mountain will collapse under its own weight, or be shaken apart by one of the huge earthquakes which rack the Himalaya every few centuries.

  For years now I have gone to the mountains and been astonished by deep time. Once, halfway up the mica-rich peak of Ben Lawers in Scotland on a sunlit day, I found a square chest of sedimentary rock, hinged at its back with an overgrowth of moss and grass. Stepping back and looking at it from the side, I could see it was composed of hundreds of thin layers of grey rock, each one no thicker than a sheet. Each layer, I reckoned, was a paraphrase of 10,000 years – a hundred centuries abbreviated into three millimetres’ depth of rock.

  Between two of the grey layers I noticed a thin silvery stratum. I pushed the adze of my walking axe into the rock, and tried to lever the strata apart. The block cracked open, and I managed to get my fingers beneath the heavy top lid of rock. I lifted, and the rock opened. And there, between two layers of grey rock, was a square yard of silver mica, seething brightly in the sunlight – probably the first sunlight to strike it in millions of years. It was like opening up a chest filled to the brim with silver, like opening a book to find a mirror leafed inside it, or like opening a trapdoor to reveal a vault of time so dizzyingly deep that I might have fallen head-first into it.

  * Although, as Simon Winchester has recently pointed out, a 1991 poll returned that 100 million Americans believed God to have created man in his own image sometime in the last 10,000 years. The earth is thought by science to be around 5 billion years old; the first humans to have appeared circa 2 million years ago.

  * Geology remained a driving force in mountaineering until well into the twentieth century – the first three Everest expeditions (1921, 1922 and 1924) were funded in part as scientific expeditions aimed at bringing back geological (and botanical) knowledge of the Everest region.

  3

  The Pursuit of Fear

  That Alpine witchery still onward lures,

  Upwards, still upwards, till the fatal list

  Grows longer of the early mourned and missed.

  FRANCES RIDLEY HAVERGAL, 1884

  I looked upwards. A tall, steep face of rock, striped vertically with snow gullies, angled up into the lightening sky. That was our route. My eye followed the face down. Without relenting in angle, it dropped some 600 feet to a small glacier which arced off the bottom of the face. The convex surface of the glacier looked hard, silvered and pitted like old metal, and it was pocked with stones which had fallen from the cliffs above. Further down, the glacier tumbled over a hundred-foot drop. There its surface turned a curdled grey, and the smoothness of the upper ice became ruptured into crevasses and blocks. I could see glimmers of blue ice far down inside the body of the glacier. That was where we would end up if we fell.

  We had left the hut too late that morning. When we stepped outside, the sky beyond the mountains to our east was already livid with colour. It meant the day would be a hot one; another good reason to have avoided a late start, for the warmth would loosen rocks that were gripped by ice, and cause crevasses to yawn in the glaciers. Pushing for time and unroped, we half-jogged up over two steepening miles of glacier, trusting the lingering cold to keep the snow-bridges rigid. A final toil up a long snow ramp – tacking back and forth to make the slope less severe – brought us to the shoulder of our mountain, and the beginning of the route.

  The main problem was scree, the debris of small stones and rock chips which collects on mountain sides. Scree is despised by mountaineers for two reasons. First, because it can easily
be pushed off on to you by people climbing above. And second, because it makes every step you take insecure. Put a foot down on a shoal of scree, and it’ll skid off as the scree scrapes over the rock beneath.

  For about thirty minutes we moved steadily up the face. The rock was in poor condition, shattered horizontally and mazed with cracks. When I tried to haul myself up on a block of it, it would pull out towards me, like a drawer opening. Some of the rock ledges were covered with a moist sill of snow. My hands became progressively wetter and colder. The climbing hardware we had festooned about us clanked and tinkled on the rock. This, our breathing and the rasp of rock on rock were the only noises.

  Then came a shout. ‘Cailloux! Cailloux! ’ I heard yelled from above, in a female voice. The words echoed down towards us. I looked up to see where they had come from.

  Time doesn’t stop or slow down when you are in danger. Everything happens as fast. It’s just that – providing we survive them – we subject these periods of time to such intense retrospective scrutiny that we come to know them more fully, more exactly. We see them in freeze-frame. From this moment I remember a rivulet of water running darkly down the rock-rib in front of my eyes, the minute cross-hatchings on the fabric of my waterproof jacket and a little yellow Alpine flower tucked into a pocket of rock. And a sound – the crunching of the scree beneath my feet as I braced myself for impact.

  There were just two rocks at first, leaping and bounding down the face towards us, once cannoning off each other in mid-air. And then the air above suddenly seemed alive with falling rocks, humming through the air and filling it with noise. Crack, went each one as it leapt off the rock face, then hum-hum-hum as it moved through the air, then crack again. The pause between the cracks lengthened each time, as the rocks gained momentum and jumped further and further.

  Up above us, two French climbers glanced beneath their legs. They watched as the single rock which they had nudged off a ledge dislodged several other rocks, and those some others, and suddenly a gang of rocks of different sizes was leaping noisily off down the face. They couldn’t see properly whether there was anyone below them: a protruding hood of rock prevented them getting a full view of the face. But it seemed unlikely that anyone would be coming up beneath them. They were the first down the mountain, having been turned back by a difficult pitch at the top. There had been no one coming across the glacier from where they had reached their high point. And no one would have been stupid enough to come any later than that. But they shouted anyway, out of decorum; like calling ‘fore’ on an empty golf course.

  I continued to gaze up at the rocks as they fell and skipped towards me. A boy who had been a few years above me at school had taught me never to look up during a rockfall. ‘Why? Because a rock in your face is far less pleasant than a rock on your helmet,’ he told us. ‘Face in, always face in.’ He had led us all day on a horseshoe walk in Wales, and then when we returned, exhausted, to the car park and the minibus, he had marched back off into the hills in the sludgy dusk light with a rope over his shoulder, to climb until he could no longer see. A year later he and a friend were killed by rockfall in the Alps.

  I heard Toby, my partner on the mountain that day, shouting at me. I looked across. He was safe beneath an overhanging canopy of rock. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then I felt a thump, and was tugged backwards and round, as though somebody had clamped a heavy hand on my shoulder and turned me to face them. No pain, but the blow had almost jerked me off my stance. The rock, which had hit the lid of my rucksack, bounced off towards the blue crevasses far below.

  Rocks were spinning past now, maybe a dozen of them. I looked up again. A rock was heading down straight towards me. Instinctively, I leant backwards and arched my back out from the rock to try to protect my chest. What about my fingers, though, I thought: they’ll be crushed flat if it hits them, and I’ll never get down. Then I heard a crack directly in front of me, and a tug at my trousers, and a yell from Toby.

  ‘Are you all right? That went straight through you.’

  The rock had pitched in front of me, and passed through the hoop of my body, between my legs, missing me but snatching at my clothing as it went.

  I looked up again, and watched as the last, and biggest, of the boulders fell towards me. I was directly in its line again. About forty feet above me it took a big hop off a rock, and spun out into the air. As I watched it come it grew larger, and darker, until it was the size of my head. With a sharp report it struck the rock face once more, then took a lateral leap to my left, and whirred away past me.

  I realized I was gripping the rock in front of me so hard that my fingers were white at their tips. My limbs were shivering and seemed barely able to support my weight. My heart pistoned. But it was over. I promised myself yet again that I would never come back to the high mountains. ‘Let’s get off this hill,’ I shouted across to Toby.

  Trekking cautiously back across the glacier, unnerved, my body still trembling from the adrenaline, testing the soft snow for crevasses, we heard the characteristic whop-whop-whop of a helicopter give the valley a rhythm. I began to sing aloud the chopper song from Full Metal Jacket: ‘Surfin’ Bird’ – the Trashmen cover. Then I stopped. Get a grip, I told myself. You’re not in Vietnam, you’re in the Alps, just a guy who’s gone up into the mountains to scare himself, and succeeded. The helicopter’s not for you.

  It wasn’t, either. It beat a path of sound over the glacier and thumped its way off east, towards the pinnacle of the Zinalrothorn, where somebody else had died.

  Late that night, back in the valley and unable to sleep, I got out of our tent and walked about the campsite, stepping carefully over the guy-ropes. Torches were on inside some of the other tents and they looked like little orange igloos against the blackness of the cold meadow. The sky was clear, and the tilted snowfields on the upper slopes of the mountains flashed the moonlight down into the valley like signalling mirrors.

  As I walked, I thought back over the day. Toby and I had spent the evening in a bar, drinking pints of lager in celebration of our near-miss. The room was full of smoke and other climbers, clunking from table to bar and back again in heavy plastic boots, shouting out their tales over the music. We had sat and talked through the events of the morning: what if the big final stone hadn’t leapt sideways, what if I’d been knocked off, would you have held me, would I have pulled you off? A more experienced mountaineer would probably have thought nothing of it, filed it away in the bulging folder of near-misses, and carried on regardless. I knew I would not forget it. We had talked, too, about how much pleasure the fear had brought afterwards. And we had talked, as mountaineers always do, about how strange it is to risk yourself for a mountain, but how central to the experience is that risk and the fear it brings with it.

  In his Voyages dans les Alpes, de Saussure wrote briefly about the chamois hunters of the Alps, men who pursued a notoriously perilous profession. The hunters were menaced by crevasses on the glaciers over which they chased their quarry, they faced death by falling from the steep slopes the chamois preferred, and death by exposure from the Alpine storms which could gather so quickly. And yet, de Saussure had written:

  it is these very dangers, this alternation of hope and fear, the continual agitation kept alive by these sensations in his heart, which excite the huntsman, just as they animate the gambler, the warrior, the sailor and, even to a certain point, the naturalist among the Alps whose life resembles closely, in some respects, that of the chamois hunter.

  When I read this passage, it made absolute sense to me, despite the intervening centuries. As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a ‘continual agitation alive’ in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear – this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.

  Of course the significant difference between de Saussure’s chamois hun
ter and me was that for the hunter, risk wasn’t optional – it came with the job. I sought risk out, however. I courted it. In fact, I paid for it. This is the great shift which has taken place in the history of risk. Risk has always been taken, but for a long time it was taken with some ulterior purpose in mind: scientific advancement, personal glory, financial gain. About two and a half centuries ago, however, fear started to become fashionable for its own sake. Risk, it was realized, brought its own reward: the sense of physical exhilaration and elation which we would now attribute to the effects of adrenaline. And so risk-taking – the deliberate inducement of fear – became desirable: became a commodity.

  It is the summer of 1688, a momentous season in Europe. In Rotterdam, William of Orange is assembling a formidable invasion fleet to sail to England and prosecute what will become known as the Glorious Revolution. John Locke, too, is in Holland that summer, in exile, considering what to do with his anti-tyrannical tract, Two Treatises of Government. The Venetians are fighting the Ottomans up and down the Adriatic coast. And in North Italy, a young Englishman named John Dennis – who will find future fame as a playwright and aesthetician, and as the butt of Alexander Pope’s jokes – is sitting before a snapping fire in a hostelry in Italy, having just crossed the Alps, and scribbling a letter to a friend in England who has never been near any mountains.

  For a man who will make his living and his name from his pen, Dennis is finding it remarkably difficult to put words to what has happened to him. ‘’Tis an easy thing to describe Rome or Naples to you,’ he writes, ‘because you have seen something yourself that holds at least some resemblance with them; but impossible to set a Mountain before your Eyes, that is inaccessible almost to the sight, and wearies the very Eye to climb it.’ Dennis faces the enduring problem of the travel-writer: how to say what something is like, when it is like nothing that your reader has ever seen? He concentrates at first on producing a physical description of the mountains, and runs through the conventional complaints of his age against their hostility, drawing his friend’s attention to the ‘impending Rocks’, the ‘dreadful Depth of the Precipices’, and the ‘roaring Torrents’.