Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  is recognized by all Englishmen and most Europeans as the mainspring of moral life … Already it is more difficult to find sustenance for our imaginations than in the days when Herodotus or Ulysses roamed in worlds all romantic and unknown, more difficult even than in the spacious times of great Elizabeth.

  By the end of the First World War, the two polar blanks on the map had been filled in, or at least the two poles had been ‘touched’. The geographical mysteries which had so attracted the young Joseph Conrad to Africa had all been solved. The only region which apparently remained pristine was the Tibetan plateau, on the southern edge of which was Mount Everest: the so-called ‘Third Pole’, the last fastness of the unknown. It wasn’t unknown to the Tibetans and the Nepalis, of course, who had worshipped the mountain for centuries without feeling the slightest inclination to climb it.* But as so often in the history of exploration, the existence of indigenous people did not in any way diminish the Western explorers’ sense that they were the first into the area.

  In 1920, when it was first made public that an expedition would be launched to climb Everest, there was an outcry at the prospect that the entire surface of the globe was to be filled in. ‘It will be a proud moment for the man who first stands on the top of the earth,’ lamented an editorial in the Daily News, ‘but he will have the painful thought that he had queered the pitch for posterity. For my part, I should like to think that some corner of the globe would be preserved for ever inviolate. Men will never lose the sense of wonder, but they will always try to do so, and such a sanctuary would have a world wide effect.’ The Evening News took a much stronger line, declaring that ‘Some of the last mystery of the world will pass when the last secret place in it, the naked peak of Everest, shall be trodden by those trespassers.’

  Precisely the same worry at the dwindling of the unknown has dogged our own era. ‘The surface of the globe,’ wrote the explorer Wilfred Thesiger in his autobiography, The Life of My Choice, ‘having now, thanks to the internal combustion engine, been thoroughly explored, no longer affords scope for the adventurous individual in search of the unknown.’ It is not only the movement of individuals which destroys the unknown, of course, but the movement of information. The global information networks which have been established during the past century – the internet foremost among them – mean that almost nothing remains unrepresented in some medium or other. At the click of a mouse we can summon up images, verbal or visual, of almost anything we wish for. There seems barely any room left for the unknown or the original. So we, like the Victorians before us, have taken steps to relocate the unknown. We have displaced our concept of it upwards and outwards, on to space – that notoriously final frontier – and inwards and downwards, to the innermost chambers of atom and gene, or the recesses of the human psyche: what George Eliot called ‘the unmapped country within us’.

  In a way, though, there is no such thing as the unknown. Because wherever we go, we carry our worlds with us. Consider, for instance, the gentleman mountaineer Douglas Freshfield, who in 1868 explored the then little-known Caucasus range, navigating only by the vague indications and blue smears of an old Russian map. In his journal, Freshfield comforted himself over and over again by seeing the alien landscape in terms of Victorian Britain. A pair of unclimbed peaks is ‘of steep writing desk form’, a glaciated cirque is ‘as flat as a cricket ground’. A ‘day of rainstorms and gleams’ is ‘like English Lake weather’, a rich Caucasian dessert he finds ‘rather like Devonshire cream’. So many of the nineteenth-century exploration accounts do the same: the jungle pool carpeted with iridescent algae appears ‘as smooth as billiard baize’, the lustrous water of a distant ocean glitters ‘like the Serpentine on a bright day’.

  We don’t come fresh to even the most inaccessible of landscapes. ‘History,’ as the American writer Susan Solnit has observed, ‘which is itself an act of imagination, is carried in the mind to the remotest places to determine what one’s acts mean even there.’ So traversing even the most uncharted landscape, we are also traversing the terrain of the known. We carry expectations within us and to an extent we make what we meet conform to those expectations, as Freshfield did. A raft of largely undetectable assumptions and preconceptions affects the way we perceive and behave in a place. Our cultural baggage – our memory – is weightless, but impossible to leave behind.

  So perhaps the unknown exists most perfectly in anticipation, in the imagination. The journey, the climb, the expedition, the discovery, are most purely experienced in the future tense, before the feet are set, before the comparisons are made. Had I gone into that unexplored valley in the Tian Shan, I would almost certainly have found it very like other snowy valleys I have visited. I would have been disappointed by its familiarity.

  Yet we are still capable of being surprised by strangeness, of being shocked by the new. In the right frame of mind, to walk from one room in a house to another can be exploration of the highest order. To a child a back garden can be an unknown country. The best writers of children’s books have understood this. Richard Jefferies’s overlooked Bevis, the Story of a Boy (1882) follows the adventures of two boys, Mark and Bevis. They first ‘discover’ a lake near their home, which they imagine to be an uncharted inland sea surrounded on all sides by impenetrable jungle. They then build a boat, and set out to explore the reaches of the sea. On their journey they discover and name a New Formosa, a New Nile, Central Africa, the Antarctic, the Unknown Island and many more territories besides.

  Jefferies described the book as a celebration of the wondrousness of childhood, a time ‘where there was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground’. Arthur Ransome would use the same idea to more acclaim several decades later in his Swallows and Amazons, where Roger, Titty, John and Susan set sail across Windermere – which they know just as ‘the lake’ – on a voyage of exploration. The northern and southern tips of the lake are to the children the terrae incognitae of the Arctic and Antarctic, and it is surrounded to the east and west by the unexplored High Hills, and to the north-east by the Great Mountains. What Jefferies and Ransome both realized, and explored, was how the alchemy of the imagination can turn a lake into an entire world; can turn the thoroughly known into the thoroughly unknown. No matter that Windermere – the lake on which Roger, Titty and the others sailed – was thick with yachts and houseboats; to the children they were its explorers, its pioneers, the first to sail across it.

  The map, drawn by Steven Spurrier, which accompanied the first edition of Swallows and Amazons (1930). Note the High Hills, the Great Mountains, and the unexplored antipodes of the Arctic and Antarctic. Reproduced by permission of the Spurrier family.

  Snow is the ideal surface for would-be explorers. It has the appealing quality of refreshing itself, of obliterating the traces of those who have been before. To walk across a fresh snow-field is to be in a very real sense the first person to have trod that path. J. B. Priestley caught some of the quality of novelty and of exploration that snow brings in a brilliant passage from his Apes and Angels: ‘The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?’

  One New Year’s Day I got up at dawn, and walked out to Parker’s Piece, the grassy common in the centre of Cambridge. There was no one else around. Snow had fallen early that morning, and then stopped. The sun was emerging from behind the rooftops. Only two chalky plane trails, slashed over each other like a gigantic teacher’s cross, blemished the blueness of the sky. I stood for a few minutes and watched as the plane trails disappeared, depleting themselves from the ends inwards. Then I started walking across the open ground. The surface of the snow had frozen into a crust. It was not solid enough to hold my weight, and with each pace I crunched through into its downy, stuffed interior. When I reached the far side, I looked back. My line of footprints bisected the field o
f snow like the perforations on the white backs of postage stamps. I could have been the first person ever to cross the land, and that morning I was.

  * On his first expedition to Greenland, Parry brought with him a flag on which was painted an olive branch. With this he hoped to convince the ‘Esquimaux’ of his peaceful intentions. It appears not to have occurred to Parry that the symbolic associations of an olive branch might fail to be recognized by people who lived in an ice world almost entirely devoid of vegetation, let alone of trees. It is an earlier version of the mixture of idiocy and cultural arrogance which leads some turn-of-the-millennium Englishmen abroad to believe that, if spoken very slowly, English functions as a form of intuitive Esperanto – miraculously comprehensible to all from Novosibirsk to Timbuktu.

  * To the Tibetans and Nepalis it was (and still is) unfathomable why a mountain as magnificent as Chomolungma (the Tibetan name for Everest, meaning Mother Goddess of the World) or Sagarmatha (the Nepali name for Everest, meaning Forehead of the Ocean, or Goddess of the Sky) should be named after a human being.

  * Tellingly, the Sherpa people – who inhabit the Khumbu region of Nepal, near Everest, and whose name is now synonymous with excellence in high-altitude mountaineering – do not have a word in their language for the ‘top’ of a mountain: only for ‘pass’ and ‘flank’. Both the Nepali and Tibetan cultures practise a pantheistic religion, in which gods are thought to inhabit landscape features. Prior to the growth of Himalayan mountaineering in the twentieth century, a very Western import, to the Nepalis and the Tibetans the notion of climbing the summit of a high snow mountain existed somewhere between downright lunacy and outright blasphemy.

  7

  A New Heaven and

  a New Earth

  Suppose a Man was carried asleep out of a plain Country amongst the Alps and left there upon the Top of one of the highest Mountains, when he wak’d and look’d about him, he wou’d think himself in an inchanted Country, or carried into another world; every Thing wou’d appear to him so different to what he had ever seen or imagin’d before.

  THOMAS BURNET, 1684

  It was a winter afternoon and I had walked up into a high valley in the Canadian Rockies, following a river whose banks were formed of round boulders. The water of the lake at the head of the valley, on whose shoreline I stood, was frozen – the red reed beds at its periphery locked into place by the ice. A big storm was on its way, according to the radio weather report I had listened to back at the road. Away to the east, I could see thunderheads congregating, and the valley was flooded with storm-light. It was a fixing light, which cast the scene – stilled it, held it. But it was also a light which made the most ordinary objects seem marvellous: the individual rocks around the shore, the slopes of snow lying between the firs, the pine-needles, like pairs of dividers, which had blown on to the lake ice.

  A strong wind was blowing, and increasing in strength by the minute as the storm neared, herding the turbulent air before it. I had walked up here – a good three hours’ graft – because I wanted to catch the wildlife, but there was nothing to be seen. Prints in the snow showed that considerable natural traffic had passed through since the last snowfall: rabbits and hares, certainly – their black droppings punctuated the whiteness like a scatter of full stops – and deer, which had left their prints crisply, like pastry cut-outs. Birds, too, pressing their cuneiforms into the snow.

  Across the valley, to the west, where the mountains which formed the headwall of the valley shelved into the lake, scores of middle-sized waterfalls should have been pummelling down into the water. That day, though, most of them were frozen into stiff shining curtains of ice. Although some of the bigger waterfalls remained unfrozen, the lake water near the shore was undisturbed.

  But there was something even more strange about the waterfalls, and it took a few seconds before I realized what it was, and began to smile. All the waterfalls which were unfrozen were falling up the cliff-face. It felt briefly as if I had been turned on my head, or the whole cliff face flipped upside-down. But no; it was the wind. The storm-wind which was blowing against the rock face was so strong that it was bullying the waterfalls back up the cliff. Where the water spilled over a lip of granite, it was plummeting upwards into the sky. These weren’t waterfalls, they were waterrises.

  I looked along the mountains on the far side of the lake, and I could see dozens of silver waterfalls doing the same. They looked like a row of chimneys, bellowing silver smoke into the air. I stayed and watched them for an hour or so as the storm approached.

  During the sixteenth century a group of ground-breaking naturalists which became known as the Zurich School was formed. It is remembered nowadays for its attentiveness to the diversity and detail of nature. The most important member of the Zurich School was Conrad Gesner (1516–65), a man with little tolerance for the superstitions of his age.

  Gesner’s most famous act of rationalism took place on Mount Pilatus, the peak which rises above Lucerne. The citizens of that city lived in fear of the malignant ghost of Pontius Pilate which was reputed to inhabit Lake Pilatus. On 21 August 1555, Gesner and a friend climbed Mount Pilatus and cast stones down into the grey waters of the lake, in deliberate provocation of any supernatural entities which might have been lurking there. The waters didn’t erupt, the ghost of Pilate was not seen abroad, and no cataclysm immediately overtook Lucerne. Gesner’s symbolic exorcism of the citizens’ fears is now often taken to mark the beginning of the banishment of superstition from Western imagining of the mountains.

  Gesner was a lover of the mountain world in a century when such a love was considered lunatic. In 1541 he wrote a letter to his friend James Vogel on the subject of mountain-going. It began stridently: ‘Men dull in mind find no cause for wonder anywhere; they idly sit at home instead of going to see what is on view in the great theatre of the world.’ And it continued in a similarly uncompromising tone:

  Therefore I declare that man to be an enemy of nature who does not esteem high mountains worthy of long study. Of a truth the highest parts of the loftiest peaks seem to be above the laws that rule our world below, as if they belonged to another sphere. Up there the action of the all-powerful sun is not the same, nor is that of the air or winds. There the snow is everlasting and this softest of substances that melts between our fingers cares nothing for the fierceness of the sun and its burning rays. So far is it from disappearing with the lapse of time that it passes into hardest ice and crystals that nothing can dissolve.

  Gesner was one of the first thinkers to propose the idea that the world of mountains was a world entirely apart: an upper realm in which physical laws operated differently and where conventional, lowland ideas of time and space were turned topsy-turvy. ‘Up there’, Nature was not like herself at all. The elements metamorphosed into one another, disregarding their natural states and interactions, and complicating the human relationship with matter. The hierarchy of the elements was reordered – the hot sun had no purchase on the ice, which remained defiantly solid before it. ‘Up there’, the transparent wind became visible: once filled with ice crystals or snow flakes, its billows and contours were given dramatic visual expression. The air, too, was clearer, and thinner; and the blue of the sky an entirely different hue and texture, more like tinted porcelain, from the overcast serge of a lowland sky. And ‘up there’ waterfalls could flow upwards, in disobedience of gravity.

  As I gazed across the valley at the light flattening the scene, and at the rows of waterfalls, I thought of Gesner’s letter. Of a truth the highest parts of the loftiest peaks seem to be above the laws that rule our world below, as if they belonged to another sphere. He was right. The mountains are another world. In the mountains, I have felt my body tingle from toes to skull with the aerial charge of imminent lightning. I have struck grape-green phosphorescent sparks from the snow with my boots while tacking up a slope in the pre-dawn light. I have seen exquisite flowers of snow fall from the sky, and watched the collapse of rock towers which have
stood for millennia. I have sat on a tightrope-ridge of rock with one leg in one country, the other in another. I have dropped into a crevasse, and been bathed in turquoise ice light.

  Literature and religion are littered with stories of other worlds – uncharted oceans, secret realms, imaginary deserts, unclimbable peaks, unvisited islands and lost cities. The curiosity and attraction we instinctively feel towards the locked room, the garden over the wall, the landscape just beyond the horizon, the imagined country on the other side of the world; these are all expressions of the same desire in us to know somewhere apart, somewhere hidden. When Gesner called the mountains another sphere, he was locking into or launching an idea of huge imaginative power. Those early travellers who did penetrate what Thomas Burnet in 1684 called ‘the inchanted country’ came back with astonishing reports of eternal snows, dizzying geological structures and awesome catastrophes of rock and ice – scarcely believable, let alone conceivable, to those who had never seen such an environment.

  To my mind, the finest of all other-world stories occurs in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, those four very ordinary English children, are evacuated to a house in the countryside to escape the Blitz. While they are exploring the house, Lucy pushes through some fur coats at the back of a big wardrobe – the sort that has a looking-glass in the door – and steps out into a world of eternal winter, where fauns carry umbrellas and the White Witch drives her sleigh across the snows. What makes Lewis’s story so potent is how close that other world is to real life. The extraordinary is there, hidden behind a rack of old coats, tucked away in a nook of the everyday. You just need to know where to look, and have the curiosity to do so.