Mountains of the Mind
Page 18
In many ways, too, the mountains offered a more authentic experience of the unknown than other more apparently daring exploits. ‘Gentlemen now walk across Siberia with as little discomposure as ladies ride on horseback to Florence,’ wrote James Forbes in 1843:
Even the Atlantic is but a highway for loungers on the American continent, and the overland route to India is chronicled like that from London to Bath. The Desert has its post-houses, and Athens has its omnibuses. But in the very heart of Europe is an unknown region … Whilst Parry, and Franklin, and Foster, and Sabine, and Ross, and Darwin brave the severities of arctic and antarctic climates, to reap the knowledge of the various phenomena of earth and atmosphere, climate and animals … are we perfectly informed of all these particulars even in our own quarter of the globe? Undoubtedly not.
In Forbes’s words can be heard an ennui at the civilization of the wider world (the Atlantic has become a highway, Siberia a pavement, Italy a manège, Athens a traffic-jam), a sentiment which would gain in power as the century wore on. But there is also an audible excitement at the discovery of the terra incognita of the Alps which was buried in the heart of civilized Europe, previously hidden from view by the camouflage of altitude.
In the Alps were innumerable virgin peaks, and beyond the Alps lay the unmapped, unexplored, unclimbed expanses of the Greater Ranges – the Andes, the Caucasus, the Himalaya … An editorial in the first edition of Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (1859), a popular anthology of writing by members of the Alpine Club, drew attention to the ‘unlimited field for adventure’ offered by mountaineering in the Alps, ‘not to mention the numerous ranges which the Englishman’s foot is someday destined to scale’. Plus, presumably, the rest of the Englishman’s body.
Drawn by this abundance of terra incognita, from the 1850s until the 1890s Italian, French, German, Swiss, American and British mountaineers swarmed over the Alps; bagging, climbing, naming and, most significantly of all, mapping.
On early European maps, mountains were represented figuratively as molehills, or little brown blossoms of rock. The Cottonian World Map (circa 1025–50), for example, depicts several crude caramel-coloured hummocks, about which strolls a winged and humpbacked monster loosely resembling a lion. Where knowledge faded out, legend began: the fantastical creatures which populated these early maps were embodiments of the unknown: little cartoons of ignorance. By the fifteenth century, however, these magical portmanteau beasts – body of a lion, head of a snake – would be more or less extinct from maps, chased off their edges by the spread of knowledge, though they would survive for far longer in the imaginations of mariners, explorers and travellers.
Even after the beasts had disappeared, mountains continued to be represented figuratively, as were forests (as miniature groves of stylized fir trees) and seas (as rows of blue wavelets frozen in mid-lap). The mountains of these early maps were drawn as they might appear if one were looking at them from the level of a valley: the ‘plan view’ – the view from on top – had not yet been conceived of. A Portuguese map of Europe from the late fifteenth century used rows of tiny brown mounds, arranged in neatly geometric patterns, to represent mountainous areas: it looks as though a well-drilled and industrious team of moles has been at work on the continent. Odder still is the representation of the Alps on the Canepa Portolan map of 1489, where the mountains are slung upside down and luridly coloured. They resemble bunches of red and green grapes.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cartographic techniques became more nuanced and more standardized, and greater attention began to be paid to differentiating between landscape features. In 1681 Thomas Burnet observed critically that ‘The Geographers are not very careful to describe or note in their Charts, the multitude or situation of Mountains.’ He proposed that all ‘Princes’ should have ‘draughts of their own Country and Dominions’ which properly depicted ‘how the Mountains stand’, and ‘how the Heaths, and how the Marches are plac’d’. Burnet justified his suggestion on the mildly erotic grounds that ‘’tis very useful to imagine the Earth in this manner, and to look often upon such bare draughts as shew us Nature undrest; for then we are best able to judge what her true shapes and proportions are.’
Under the pressure of expectation of the Renaissance, cartographers devised ways of suggesting three-dimensionality. The ubiquitous molehill was adapted to create cone-shaped, flattened or craggy mountains. Shadowing was introduced to suggest relief from the ground around, and hachures – short lines of shading – began to be used to provide information about slope and steepness: the steeper the slope, the denser and darker the hachures. Frederick the Great instructed his Prussian military topographers that ‘Wherever I can’t go, let there be a blot.’ Contour lines were an invention of the sixteenth century, but they could not properly be used until advances in survey techniques provided the detail required for them.
The charm and the pleasure of a map lie in its reticence, its incompleteness, in the gap it leaves for the imagination to fill. As the traveller Rosita Forbes noted, a map holds ‘the magic of anticipation without the toil and sweat of realisation’. In my family, the maps would always be bought well in advance of the next trip to the mountains. New maps are noisy and ill-behaved. When you open them, they put up resistance, try to spring back into their folded form. They clack and crack as folds are reversed, and stiff panels of paper pop in and out of shape. We would wrestle our maps flat on to a floor, weight their four corners with books and then kneel down to plot possible routes across them. Early on, my father taught me to read contour lines, so that the whole map rose magically out of itself.
Maps give you seven-league boots – allow you to cover miles in seconds. Using the point of a pencil to trace the line of an intended walk or climb, you can soar over crevasses, leap tall cliff-faces at a single bound and effortlessly ford rivers. On a map the weather is always good, the visibility always perfect. A map offers you the power of perspective over a landscape: reading one is like flying over a country in an aeroplane – a deodorized, pressurized, temperature-controlled survey.
But a map can never replicate the ground itself. Often our mapping sessions would induce us to bite off more than we could chew. At home we would plot a route over terrain that would, in reality, turn out to be sucking bog, or knee-high heather, or a wide boulder-field thick with snow. Sometimes a landscape would caution us of the limits of our map’s power. I have had a map snatched from my hand by the wind and whirled over a cliff edge. I have had a map pulped into illegibility by rain. And I have stood in a white-out on a mountain-top and been able to put my finger on a map and say ‘I am here’, but still have had to take shelter in a snow-hole until the storm passed.
Maps do not take account of time, only of space. They do not acknowledge how a landscape is constantly on the move – is constantly revising itself. Watercourses are always transporting earth and stone. Gravity tugs rocks off hillsides and rolls them lower down. Grouse swallow quartz chips to use in their craw, and excrete them elsewhere. There is a continual trafficking of objects, of stones. Other changes occur. A sudden rain-shower can transform a tiny tributary stream into an uncrossable torrent. The meltwater outflow from the mouth of a glacier will sculpt silt into ceaselessly changing patterns of abstract beauty. These are the dimensions of a landscape which go unindicated by a map.
Patterns formed in glacial silt.
Francis Galton (1822–1911) is now best known as the man who fathered and christened eugenics, but like many Victorians he was many things. Explorer, climber, mystic, meteorologist, criminologist and advocate of fingerprinting, Galton was also an innovative cartographer. One of his most enduring coups was to combine symbols for weather systems with maps, thereby creating the prototype of the TV weather map. Galton believed that maps should convey more than just spatial information about terrain. He wanted to give travellers a phenomenal impression of the lands they visited. Maps, he felt, should somehow duplicate the smells, scents and sounds of a place:
Galton’s multi-media map was ill-conceived, for what he was proposing was nothing less than a facsimile of the world itself. But a map is an abbreviation: this is its definition, its strength and its limitation. To know a landscape properly, you must go into it in person. You need to see how in winter a tree gathers warmth to itself, and melts the snow it stands in. You need to hear the rifle-crack of a crow’s call snapping over icy ground. You need to feel the remoteness of a huge grey pre-dawn Alpine sky, with the lights of the nearest town blinking thousands of feet beneath you.
Most of the world’s mountainous areas were mapped in the nineteenth century, the imperial century. Mapping has always marched in the vanguard of the imperial project, for to map a country is to know it strategically as well as geographically, and therefore to gain logistical power over it. In the case of Britain, the intuitive desire of the British to purge the globe of its unknown spaces fitted the political ambitions of the imperium.
When, from the early 1800s onwards, the expanding British and Russian empires began to chafe against one another in Central Asia, detailed cartographic knowledge of the trans-Himalayan region became vital. In 1800 Robert Colebrooke, then Surveyor-General of Bengal, extended a mandate to all British infantry officers to enter and map any country they chose. At this point, the Andes were still thought to be the highest range in the world, and when these illicit surveyors began returning even greater heights for the Himalayan peaks – Lieutenant W. S. Webb, for example, observed Dhaulagiri from four survey stations in the plains, and calculated its height to be 26,862 feet – they were ridiculed by professional cartographers and accused of fumbling their figures (the currently accepted height for Dhaulagiri is circa 26,800 feet).
The information these maverick map-makers gleaned often came at a price. Beyond the objective dangers of the terrain they moved through, the surveyors risked being attacked by bandits or punished as spies. The Emirs of Afghanistan, in particular, did not take kindly to the officers of a nearby foreign power wandering round their country. After losing too many of their own men to accidents and assassination, the British – characteristically – decided to train up native Indian cartographers, disguise them as pilgrims, and send them in to reconnoitre and map the parts British officers couldn’t safely reach. The pandits, as they became known – giving us our word ‘pundit’ – taught themselves to count their own paces, to walk at 2,000 paces to the mile, and to mark off each one hundred paces by moving a bead on their rosaries. They carried their notes hidden in their prayer wheels, and in their staffs were stashed thermometers, so that they could measure altitude by boiling-point. The most famous of these early pandits were the Singh cousins, Nain and Kishen. So committed was Kishen to his job that he not only worked out his own pacings, but also those of a galloping horse; when a bandit attack forced him to escape on horseback, he was therefore able to continue mapping the terrain through which he fled.
Tree trunk in old snow.
Rock citadels at dawn.
In 1817 the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India had got under way on the baking plains of Southern India, under the superintendence of the soldier-surveyor William Lambdon. The aim of the GTS was to create a so-called ‘grid-iron system’ for the whole of British India: a pattern of interlocking cartographic triangles which would permit the estimation of the relative distances and heights of any two points on the subcontinent. The GTS caravan moved northwards up the country from Cape Comorin, creating their triangles and gathering demographic and topographic information as it went. By the early 1830s the vanguard of the GTS was within sight of the Himalaya. Twenty-yard-high towers of stone were built from which the survey’s theodolites could be trained on the pale distant summits of the Himalaya, peering deep even into forbidden Nepal and Tibet. Allowances were made for the illusory clarity of the air and for the lateral pull exerted on plumb lines by the gravity of the Himalayan range, and seventy-nine of the Himalaya’s highest peaks were ‘fixed’. These were the key to the whole Himalayan puzzle: ‘The peaks,’ wrote one superintendent of the survey, ‘can be made the basis of subsequent surveys; the courses of the rivers and the positions of lakes can be laid down with regard to them; the trends and forms and magnitudes of the ranges can be inferred from the distribution of the peaks.’ Overseeing it all until his death in 1866 was George Everest, the surveyor who would – rather unwillingly – leave his name attached to the world’s most famous geological feature.*
For with mapping came naming. The nineteenth century, more than any other, saw the wild places of the world being franked and hallmarked. As each blank on the map – down in the Antarctic, up in the Arctic and throughout the mountainous areas of the world – was first penetrated and then accounted for, it had imprinted on it the tiny, cursive names of its discoverers. Many mountains, of course, had been named long before – the Jungfrau and the Eiger were christened in the eleventh and twelfth centuries respectively, for instance – but it was during the 1800s that the micro-naming properly began. Niches, notches, shoulders, cols, ridges, glaciers, routes: all began to bear the names of climbers and explorers. Look at a large-scale map of the Alps now, and you will see the names still jostling for space, radiating out of geological features like small black spokes.
This obsessive naming was a form of commemoration. It was also, unmistakably, one of colonization: a thwarted expression of the Victorian drive to bring the Empire home. That acquisitive instinct – which reached its fullest expression in Britain with the Great Exhibition of 1851 – didn’t work as well with mountains as it did with, say, flora and fauna. The Victorians transported their mountains symbolically, of course, in the form of rock samples. But properly to prove where they had been, they left their names behind. It was a form of imperial graffiti.
The Nojli Surveying Tower, North India. Photograph probably taken in the 1890s.
The Victorian explorers’ habit of place-naming was not only a function of their imperial instinct, however. It was also a more fundamental mechanism for making sense of landscapes that, by virtue of their extreme difference from home, might otherwise have been unknowable. The urge to mark places in a landscape with names – to attempt to fix a presence or an event within time and space – is a way of allowing stories to be told about that landscape. Here, at this place which I shall name x, we ate food, or we fell ill, or we saw an astonishing sight, and then we moved onwards to the place I have named y. For the explorers, names gave meaning and structure to a landscape which might otherwise have been repetitively meaningless. They shaped space, allowed points to be held in relation to one another. They provided a stability – the stability of language, of narrative, of plot – to the perpetually changing upper world of ice and storm and rock through which they moved. Naming was and remains a way to place space within a wider matrix of significance: a way, essentially, to make the unknown known.
Once in the desert in Egypt I climbed a little hillock, only a few hundred feet high, of golden rock and sand. It was noon, and the desert rang with a metallic white light. Near the top of the hill, but low down on an exposed pillar of sandstone, I caught sight of some lettering. I squatted down to look at it, and put a hand up to my forehead to shield my eyes from the glare: Lt Carter 1828. The sandstone around the letters was dark brown, deeply sun-tanned by hundreds of thousands of desert days. But the lettering was still pale and bright: only nearly 180 years old, it had not had time enough to darken.
I tried to imagine Lieutenant Carter there, crouched down, scratching away with his bayonet tip, etching himself in time. I could understand his behaviour: a person far from home, wanting to write himself in some way into this frighteningly indifferent landscape. I left Carter’s graffito behind an
d walked on up for the ten minutes it took me to reach the top of the hill. I looked out at the dunes for a while, then heaped together three or four loose lumps of sandstone to form a makeshift cairn, and turned to head back down the path.
The Victorians were in many ways the unknown’s most implacable foes. Yet even as they worked so energetically to eradicate it, they began also to feel the need for the continued existence of inaccessible places – places of great imaginative potency. There emerged an impulse to preserve the unknown for its power of resonance, for its quality of nullity.
George Eliot, always so attuned to the national mood, sensed this feeling early on in its development. There is a moment in Middlemarch when the young Will Ladislaw declares that ‘he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination’. To many in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Ladislaw’s sentiment seemed an increasingly just one. The century had been spent trying to enlarge the frontiers of knowledge, and that effort had now evoked a claustrophobia at the diminishing limits of the unfamiliar. The age of realism had discovered that it yearned for mysteries.
This claustrophobia was in no small part a consequence of technological modernity – telegraph lines tying the world up in a cat’s cradle of communication, train tracks and steamships criss-crossing it faster and more frequently – which was exercising its distinctive trick of compressing time and space, of bringing the distant nearer faster. In 1900, on the cusp of full-blown modernity, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim had to go as far as Borneo to find somewhere ‘beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines’. Towards the end of the 1800s in both Britain and North America, calls were made (as one writer put it) ‘rigidly to economize the regions of dream’ – to conserve the world’s remaining wildernesses from the intrusions of industrial modernity. ‘The case for the safeguarding of natural beauty,’ wrote the mountaineer F. W. Bourdillon,