Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  The crevasses in the glacier were of considerable interest to the visitors. The braver of the women would edge towards their lips, held either by a rope around the waist, or more usually by the strong arm of their guide. Once on the brink they could peer into the crevasse, could see how further down the dirty white snow changed its complexion and its colour to a translucent blue, or, if the light were entering from a different angle, an intense green. The better equipped among them pulled out a cyanometer to gauge the tint of the icy walls, which they had already used to measure the remarkable cerulean of the sky, or the pale blue light that leaked into the holes their alpenstocks made in the snow.

  Later that evening, sitting by the fire at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, the visitors swapped stories of the people who had perished on the ice; of how a French Protestant minister had slipped into a narrow crevasse on the Grindelwald glacier, just wide enough to admit a man, and a guide had descended after him on the end of a rope to find the minister’s body lying awkwardly in the far corner of ‘a grand and spacious hall of ice, of immense size, with a finely vaulted roof ’; or of the young woman who just the year before had been crushed to death by a block of ice which had dropped from the arch of frozen water that marked the end of the Glacier du Bois, and which drew so many visitors.

  For those who were disinclined to make the substantial climb up to the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons spilt itself over the brim of the valley and pushed down through the dark pines which forested its slopes and kept the avalanches pent up during winter, until it almost reached the Chamonix–Servoz road. From the base of the glacier, muscular rills of silty water escaped down the runnels they had carved on the northward side of the road: eventually they would mingle with the blue headwaters of the Rhône.

  Here, right by the roadside, there were marvels aplenty: no need to exhaust oneself unnecessarily, agreed the parties that came to witness them. Chamoniards in breeches pointed them out – how the glacier toppled the ancient pine trees as though they were saplings and splintered them as though they were kindling; how, when the sun was high and hot, the ice could be heard creaking and groaning like ship’s mahogany in a storm; how near its snout the glacier was disrupted into a thousand obelisks of ice.

  There was, observed many of the visitors to the Glacier des Bossons, something frighteningly improper about its location, the way it made its slow and violent way down into the valley, leagues below its rightful altitude. Life had to go about its business in the shadow of this truculent, almost obscene, mass of ice; peasants had to gauge its likely career and build their huts and houses out of its way. The glacier got many of them anyway, for they drank its meltwater on a daily basis, thus silting up their kidneys and causing goitres to flourish beneath their chins.

  None of this was a problem for the visitors, of course, who rather enjoyed fossicking through the Alpine maquis in search of the tiny, acidic strawberries that glowed like embers right in the shadow of the ice, or finding the troupes of deep blue gentians that grew only a few paces from the glacier side. And after all, these feelings of pleasurable horror at the spectacle of the moving ice – the deliberate inducement of which was a motive for visiting Chamonix in the first place – were soon forgotten when the coachman cracked his whip and the visitors’ carriage rumbled off towards Geneva, the railway station and iceless England.

  Not everyone was enchanted by the glaciers. Back in the 1830s, a disgruntled visitor had composed a quatrain for the album in the Hôtel Imperial: ‘Give me the glace Tartoni makes, / And take your Mer de Glace for me, / I’d rather eat his ice and cakes / Than cross again that frozen sea.’ That page of the album was now well thumbed, for the ditty had become something of a sight in itself – rumour had it that the man had been lost to an avalanche up near the Jardin the following day, and that this rhyme was his last word.

  Were it not for the supposed death of the man, that page might have drawn attention to itself anyway, for it was an unusual sentiment in an album filled to the margins with expressions of awe. The Imperial’s guest-book, like that of every other hotel in Chamonix, was a Festschrift for the glaciers and the peaks, echoing with ‘magnificents’ and ‘sublimes’, just as the amphitheatres of the mountains echoed with them in the daytime. For the majority of visitors – whether climbers, strollers or just spectators – these mighty ice rivers left deep and abiding grooves of wonder in the mind. ‘The Glacier,’ wrote Karl Baedeker decisively in the preface to his Handbook for Travellers to Switzerland, the vade mecum of every tripper to Switzerland from 1863 onwards, ‘is the most striking feature of the Alpine world, a stupendous mass of the purest azure ice. No aspect of Switzerland is so strikingly and at the same time so strangely beautiful.’ What a peculiar obsession it was, though – how curious that people should feel the urge to admire and to disport themselves upon these masses of ice.

  But then the glaciers were superb enigmas in an age which, beset by mechanization and materialism, was hungry for mysteries. Their history and their motion were imperfectly understood. No one really knew how they moved their bulks over the land, or even whether glacial ice was a liquid, a solid or some category-defying hybrid substance which both flowed (like a liquid) and fissured (like a solid). It had also since the 1840s become apparent that at some point in the spans of geological time glaciers had been far more extensive than they presently were. The existence all over Europe of polished and furrowed beds of rock, which looked as though they had been ploughed flat by an inconceivably powerful force, suggested this to be the case, as did the distribution of large angular blocks of rock upon the surface of the land, often dozens of miles from their nearest possible site of origin.

  When I was twenty-two, I was part of a mountaineering expedition to the Tian Shan, the high and remote range which sweeps westwards out of China and into the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. We were flown into the mountains by helicopter, a rusting, clattery old bird that touched down briefly to drop us, before pulling up and away into the mist.

  China lay to our east behind an elegant ridge of mountains, Kazakhstan to the north, hidden by a bulkier, more monstrous range. Slowly we made our way towards base camp – a herd of tents and lean-tos huddled on the black moraine of the Inylchek glacier.

  The Inylchek is the world’s third most voluminous glacier – a deep river of ice which pushes through the Tian Shan for some fifty miles. It is Y-shaped, and its two upper arms are fed by dozens of tributary glaciers that flow in slow-motion into it, and by minor ice-falls down which blocks of ice as big as cars descend at a stately rate. I lived on the Inylchek moraine for a few weeks, and at night, from inside the tent, I could hear the glacier running through its repertoire of sound effects: the slither as blades of slate slipped over one another, dislodged by an adjustment of the glacier’s massive machinery; the groan, from deep inside the glacier, of ice separating from ice. It reminded me of James Forbes’s lovely description of the Mont Blanc glacier in 1843: ‘All is on the eve of motion.’

  In comparison with the glacier’s rhythms our movements around the camp – a pair of quick hands dealing out a pack of cards on an upturned rock, feet being stamped to keep them warm when the sun had dropped behind the mountains – seemed almost frivolously fast. Occasionally, though, would come a cataclysm, the mountains showing their own sleight of hand: the high scream of a block tearing away from an ice-fall, or the crack and rush of an avalanche.

  Once, during the daytime, there was a soft crump and a big bass roar from far away to the east. We looked up. At that distance everything happened at a languorous, decelerated velocity. For what felt like minutes, the avalanche descended the face of Pik Pobeda. It was a big one, the biggest I had ever seen. Tens of thousands of tons of snow and rock falling in silence. It struck the glacier at the bottom of the face and, like a white carpet unrolling, the powder and debris from the avalanche billowed out horizontally for almost half a mile. Twenty minutes later the pall of white was still hanging in the air over the
glacier. We muttered a few words of hope for the Spanish team that we knew were on the north face of Pobeda, and turned back to our game of cards.

  At first glance glaciers appear destitute of life or interest; attractive only for their qualities of desolation and emptiness. They seem static, frozen like a photograph by the cold and the thin, transparent air. Eighteenth-century travellers regularly compared them to deserts. But like deserts, glaciers open themselves up to you when you look closely at them. You can never step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus. Had he travelled a few latitudes further north, he would have said the same for glaciers. The ice is in that old paradox – a permanent state of flux.

  On the Inylchek glacier, every time I stepped off the moraine and on to the ice, something would have changed. The glacier had a different character for each part of the day. In the cold mornings it was crisply white. At noon the sun carved the surface of the ice into groves of tiny, perishable ice trees, each one only a few inches high: a miniature silver and blue forest which stretched away for miles up and down the glacier. The late afternoon light – a rich, liquid light – turned the big dun rocks on the ice into tawny beasts, and made the pools of meltwater which gathered in the glacier’s hollows glint like black lacquer. One night I was out on the glacier when it began to snow in big, heavy, wind-blown flakes. In the beam of my head-torch it looked as though I was moving at warp-speed through deep space.

  Dusk was my favourite time on the glacier. The sun always fell fast, dropping suddenly behind a row of peaks, so it was a brief affair – forty minutes or so when shadows quickly densened beneath rocks, and the air temperature plunged. Down at the glacier’s side, you could sense it battening down for the night. If you put a hand an inch or two above the ice, you could feel the cold pulsing off it, like marble. Out on the wide meltwater pools, the ice formed in zigzags just beneath the surface of the water, then thickened into heavy boiler-plates, locking in the deeper water. I once bent down to examine a shallow pool of water which had gathered in a dip, and watched for a few minutes as ice crept jaggedly inwards from its edges and knitted in the middle, like a fontanel closing, or a tiny ice age.

  Glacier-going was not just a nineteenth-century fad. It was back in the 1660s that reports first began to filter back to London of an outlandish phenomenon to be found in the very heart of Europe: the ‘Icy and Chrystallin Mountains of Helvetia’. One of the first of these reports was a letter by a Mr Muraltus, published on 9 February 1673 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London’s foremost intellectual institution. It was accompanied by a rough illustrative plate of the Lower Grindelwald glacier which showed an army of icy pinnacles marching down a steep-sided valley. ‘The Icy Mountain,’ began Muraltus confidently, ‘deserves to be view’d.’ He continued:

  The Mountain it self … is very high, and extends it self every year more and more over the neighbouring meadows, by increments that make a great noise of cracking. There are great holes and caverns, which are made when the Ice bursts; which happens at all times, but especially in the Dog-days. Hunters do there hang up their game they take during the great heat, to make it keep sweet by that means … When the Sun shineth, there is seen such a variety of colors as in a Prism.

  What must they have made of it in London, this moving mountain which by fits and starts overwhelmed the terrain about it and advertised its intent with ‘great noise’, which split the sunlight into its constituent colours and itself burst into shards without warning? The Londoners knew of ice, to be sure – the Thames froze most winters, often so thickly that carriages could be driven from Lambeth to Blackfriars. But that was manageable ice, convenient ice. Tents were pitched on its margins; out in the centre skaters could cut figures of eight on it, the ice crystals fizzing from their boots. London ice was a very different beast from this frozen, belligerent mountain that ‘expands itself into … great Chinks, and that with a terrible Noise … frightens the whole Neighbourhood’.

  By the start of the eighteenth century, glaciers had gained a reputation in Britain, and on 12 October 1708 William Burnet, son of the Bishop of Salisbury (and no relation to Thomas), took matters in hand. ‘I resolved to go my self and see the Mountains of Ice in Switzerland,’ he wrote to Dr Hans Sloane, eminent natural historian and then Secretary of the Royal Society, who published his letter in the Society’s Proceedings that same year. ‘Accordingly I went to the Grindelwald, a Mountain two Days Journey from Bern. There I saw, between two Mountains, like a River of Ice, which divides it self in two Branches, and in its way from the top of the Mountains to the bottom swells in vast Heaps, some bigger than St Paul’s Church.’

  Burnet, like John Dennis before him, was confronted with the difficulty of describing something that his readers – the scientific cognoscenti of London – had never seen. He picked his metaphors according to his audience, and could not have chosen a more suggestive, accessible image of size for the metropolitans of the Royal Society than ‘St Paul’s Church’. Wren’s cathedral was only two years away from completion in 1708, having already been thirty-three years in the building – every Londoner had seen its grey, graceful cupola lending curves and altitude to the city’s low-slung skyline; every Londoner had marvelled at its proportions. Burnet’s audience were thus furnished with a vivid vision of what the Grindelwald glacier resembled – ‘a River of Ice’ – and its size – bigger even than Wren’s cathedral. This image of the glacier as frozen river would become for a few decades the staple simile for the ice mountains: apposite as it was, it passed straight into the common imagination.

  For all his suggestiveness, however, Burnet had done nothing more than look. It did not occur to him to go near the ice, to touch it. It was not until thirty years later, in an act of swaggering braggadocio and self-promotion, that an Englishman would actually set foot upon the glacial ice, and write home about it.

  One evening in the summer of 1741, out on the meadows of Sallanches – a small town between Geneva and Chamonix – a little laager of white tents was pitched near to the fields of wheat and rye which the June sun was just beginning to burnish. A pair of sumpter horses was tethered to a stake outside, their panniers bulbous with provisions, and three men with guns stood guard by them, peering into the accumulating gloom in an effort to keep sight of the locals, who were increasing in number with every half-hour. Occasionally, the young man whom the locals had come to see would push back the heavy canvas flap of one of the tents and take a turn about the campsite. He was swathed in the tight turban and voluminous robes of a Levantine potentate, and at his waist hung a dagger whose curve rhymed with that of his exorbitant slippers. His friend walked with him and they laughed together to see the astonished faces of their witnesses. The guards, who were already used to their employers’ quirks, said nothing, and concentrated on making sure that no prying hands slipped inside the saddle-bags of the horses.

  The pseudo-sultan was Richard Pococke, a compulsive traveller and an aspirant churchman. His companion was William Windham, the eldest and most fractious son of William Windham, the present paterfamilias of a Norfolk dynasty of William Windhams which stretched back to the fifteenth century. Windham the younger had been dispatched to Geneva by his exasperated father, where it was hoped he would pick up the manners and mores befitting a young gentleman from a politically inclined family, but where instead he did nothing but pick up whores, get into fights and keep an ear out for possible entertainments.

  It had been Windham who had been keen to see the glaciers of Chamonix – according to the second-hand rumours in London they were simply astonishing. Despite their proximity, only a few Genevans had visited the glaciers; most of the staunch Calvinists of that city believed that God had seen fit to punish the rustically godless inhabitants of Chamonix by visiting the ice-rivers upon them in a torpid and enduring plague. No one was prepared to accompany Windham to the glaciers, until he met Richard Pococke: a gentleman, as Windham described him in his published account of their excursion, ‘recently
arrived at Geneva from his voyages into the Levant and Egypt, which countries he had visited with great Exactness’.

  Well armed, well laden and backed up by a trio of Genevan henchmen, the two set off for Chamonix in a little cavalcade of horses on 7 June 1741. From Geneva they rode the four leagues to Bonneville, and thence proceeded along the River Arve, where they were ‘entertained with an agreeable Variety of fine Landskips’. That first night, they camped on the fields at Sallanches, and it was there, to the wonder of the locals, that Pococke dressed himself up as a panjandrum (he had brought the clothes with him from Egypt, along with a wooden coffin containing a mummy from Saqqara and a stone statue of Isis).

  Word had got about in the valley of their intentions to set foot upon the glaciers, and as they approached Chamonix, riding into the long afternoon shadow of Mont Blanc, a prior came to meet them and to convince them of their folly. But although their first sighting of the glaciers had hardly inspired them – the ends of them ‘appear’d only like white Rocks’, noted Windham disappointedly, ‘or rather like Immense Icicles, made by Water running down the Mountain’ – the two men were not to be deflected from their course. As Windham told it afterwards, ‘relying on our Strength and Resolution, we determined to attempt the Mountain’.