Going to the mountains – into what one nineteenth-century poet called ‘that weird white realm’ – is like pushing through the fur coats into Narnia. In the mountainous world things behave in odd and unexpected ways. Time, too, bends and alters. In the face of the geological time-scales on display, your mind releases its normal grip on time. Your interest and awareness of the world beyond the mountains falls away and is replaced with a much more immediate hierarchy of needs: warmth, food, direction, shelter, survival. And if something goes wrong in the mountains, then time shivers and reconfigures itself about that moment, that incident. Everything leads up to it, or spirals out of it. Temporarily you have a new centre of existence.
Returning to earth after being in the mountains – stepping back out of the wardrobe – can be a disorienting experience. Like Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy returning from Narnia, you expect everything to have changed. You half-expect the first people you see to grip you by the elbow and ask you if you are all right, to say You’ve been away for years. But usually no one notices you’ve been gone at all. And the experiences you have had are largely incommunicable to those who were not there. Returning to daily life after a trip to the mountains, I have often felt as though I were a stranger re-entering my country after years abroad, not yet adjusted to my return, and bearing experiences beyond speech.
The upper world of the mountains has not always been regarded as a wonderland, however. In the early history of the West, mountains provided an obvious residence for the supernatural. Just as the uncharted Poles became the repositories for myths either of Arcadia (the land of zephyrs and eternal daylight which lay beyond the barriers of ice) or of evil (the northern armies led by Gog and Magog which hung above the innocent southern races), so the upper realm of mountains, abstracted above the normal world by the simple fact of altitude, was regarded as the dwelling-place of both gods and monsters. Giant chamois, trolls, imps, dragons, banshees and other fabulously sinister beings were reputed to patrol the higher slopes of mountains, and divinities to dwell on their summits. John Mandeville described mountains of gold in Ceylon mined by ants as big as dogs. The Franciscan writer Salimbene of Parma recounted how Peter of Aragon climbed to the summit of a mountain to be met with ‘tonitrua horribilia et terribilia valde’ – thunderbolts and lightning – and a ‘draco horribilis’ which flapped away in surprise, its leathern wings blacking out the sun.
Local myths and legends gathered around each hill, and the phenomena of the high mountains – their shape, their storms, their glaciers, their light – were interpreted according to the pattern of these legends. Between 1580 and 1630, for instance, at the height of the European witch crazes, mountains were considered the retreat of witches; storms and blizzards were assumed to be the meteorological spin-offs of their saturnalia. In the early 1600s the Swiss scientist Jacob Scheuchzer drew up a famous compendium of the different species of dragons which he knew to exist in the Alps. To those who have seen how, with the sun above it, a bird can send a silhouette many times its own size slipping across the rocks below, Scheuchzer’s dracopoeia will not seem like quite such a flight of fantasy.
This superstitious attitude towards mountains survived in Europe well into the eighteenth century. When Windham and Pococke arrived in Chamonix in 1741 they were warned off ascending Mont Blanc by the villagers who told them – Windham jotted down scornfully in his diary – ‘many strange Stories of Witches &c. who came to play their Pranks upon the Glaciers and dance to the Sound of Instruments’. In Windham’s scoffing tones can be heard the growing cultural cynicism of the Enlightenment towards such credulousness. It was the spread of rationalism in Europe which routed the imaginary dragons from the mountains.
There is also the belief in the upper world as the home of gods. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it has habitually been up mountains that prophets and seers have gone to receive divine counsel. Moses, for example, saw into the promised land from the summit of Mount Pisgah, and ascended Sinai to receive the ten commandments. Holy men and anchorites have long found in the upper world of the mountains an environment more conducive to contemplation than the secular bustle of the lowlands. My favourite mountain eremite is the eighteenth-century Disentian monk Placidus a Spescha, who would regularly climb to the summit of one of the mountains near his monastery in the Swiss Alps, and sleep there, wrapped in cowl and habit, to spend the night closer to his God.
Spescha has had many recent counterparts, who have been drawn like him to the mountain tops by a faith in the simple geometry of enlightenment, according to which ‘up’ means towards heaven. One such was Maurice Wilson. Wilson was a Yorkshireman by birth, a salesman by trade, and insane by the age of thirty. As a young man, he became obsessed with the idea that he could ascend mountains through a combination of fasting and prayer, thus coming closer to God. In the early 1930s Wilson decided that Mount Everest would be his ultimate target. In 1934, after flying an open biplane called Ever Wrest 5,000 miles from London to Purnea (quite against the wishes of the English, Nepali and Indian authorities), Wilson began his illegal ascent of the mountain, which had not at the time been climbed. Despite being under surveillance by the Indian police, he managed to slip out of Darjeeling in the early hours of a cold April morning disguised as a pilgrim – draped in a thick woollen mantle of royal blue, billowed about with a twelve-foot red silk sash, the whole outfit constellated with brocade and golden buttons – and started his approach of the mountain on foot and mule across the wind-scoured Tibetan plateau.
Given his emaciation, and lack of climbing experience, Wilson got remarkably high on the mountain. The Sherpas he had hired abandoned him – wisely, though not without reluctance – at 21,000 feet, in the upper basin of the Rongbuk glacier. Wilson climbed on up into the teeth of desperate weather and impassable obstacles (bergschrunds, yawning crevasses) and died of malnutrition and exposure. A British reconnaissance party ascending by the same route a year later discovered his corpse lying on a small beach of shale. They interred him in a crevasse, and sat down under a rock overhang to read his diary: a small book bound in green leather, with coarse pages. Wilson’s firm handwriting became more spidery towards the end, his syntax less assured. But the final entry, for 31 May, was written clearly: ‘Off again, gorgeous day.’
What deflected the imaginative perception of the upper world away from gods and monsters, and towards the feast of natural phenomena which Gesner found so delighting, was natural theology – an influential doctrine which spread across Europe between the 1690s and the 1730s.
The founding premise of natural theology was that the world in all its aspects was an image given by God to man. It was, in the words of Thomas Browne, a ‘universal and public manuscript’ in which could be read God’s grandeur. To scrutinize nature, to discern its patterns and its idiosyncrasies, was thus a form of worship. The mountains were among the finest of God’s texts; the best seats in what Gesner had called ‘the great theatre of the world’. ‘Providence,’ declared the Abbé Pluche, one of the principal theorists of natural theology, ‘has made the air invisible in order to allow us to witness the spectacle of nature.’
Therefore, to visit the upper world and contemplate its marvels was to be elevated spiritually as well as physically. If you looked hard enough, and if you bore God firmly enough in mind, it was possible to overmaster the automatic sensations of fear and horror which the mountainous environment was still felt by many to inspire. The natural theology movement was crucial in revoking the reputation of mountains as aesthetically displeasing, for it forced intellectual Europeans into a more specific experiencing of the physical world. A new way of looking at wild landscape established itself, which combined sweeping experiences with a close attention to the micro-phenomena – the tiny special effects – of the mountains.
It was under the pressure of natural theology, as well as science’s new inquisitiveness concerning the physical matter of the universe, that towards the end of the eighteenth century the idea of the ‘upper
world’ of the mountains became common imaginative currency. Wherever we look in landscape writing of that period, the same image is being used. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure called the mountains ‘a sort of terrestrial paradise’. The French explorer Jean de Luc, who in September 1777 discovered the Glacier du Buet, described how he felt himself levitated into ‘the pure upper atmosphere’. Marc Bourrit wrote in his Journey to the Glaciers of the Duchy of Savoy (1774) of how in the ‘other world’ of the mountains the traveller finds his ‘mind voluptuously employed in the contemplation of so many wonders’. The most influential of these accounts of the upper world was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), the book which is now widely credited with having created secular mountain-worship. ‘It seems as if, being lifted above all human society,’ Rousseau wrote of the Alps:
we had left every low terrestrial sentiment behind: and that as we approach the aethereal regions, the soul imbibes something of their eternal purity. Imagine to yourself all these united impressions; the amazing variety, grandeur and beauty, of a thousand astonishing sights; the pleasure of seeing only totally new things, strange birds, odd and unknown plants, to observe what is in some sense another nature, and finding yourself in a new world … one isolated in the higher spheres of the earth. In short, there is a kind of supernatural beauty in these mountainous prospects which charms both the senses and the minds into a forgetfulness of oneself and of everything in the world.
Here was a manifesto – couched in Rousseau’s winningly ebullient prose – for the ‘aethereal regions’ of the mountains as a new and enchanting world which teemed with astonishing sights.
As the cult of the upper world spread, and more people were attracted to the mountains, so too the casualties began to occur. In 1800 a young Frenchman fell into a crevasse on the Glacier du Buet. When his maimed body was retrieved – ‘the unfortunate young man’, wrote a witness, ‘had experienced the most sudden and violent compression’ – his rescuers turned out his pockets in an effort to identify him. They found seventy-eight livres in money, a notebook, and a well-thumbed edition of the third volume of de Saussure’s Vo yages dans les Alpes. Tucked between the pages of his notebook for safe-keeping, they also found an uncompleted letter written to his father. It began, heartbreakingly: ‘You see, my dear father, that I have undertaken a journey: you see also that this journey is one of the most interesting and beautiful that can be wished …’ The death of the young man was a stern reminder as the nineteenth century chimed in that the mountains and their environs could be fatally punitive, as well as wondrous.
During the 1800s John Ruskin in England, and the intellectual dynasty of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir in North America, penned rapturous essays in praise of the mountains, which paid especial attention to the exquisite minutiae of the high hills – the glaciers ‘like moving pavements of marble’, or the miraculously unique architecture of each snowflake. Ruskin wrote of how he had watched inky storm clouds breaking like ‘troublous seas against the crags’, and concluded that of such spectacles ‘there can be as little imagination or understanding in an inhabitant of the plains as of the scenery of another planet than his own’. When the first volume of Peaks, Passes and Glaciers was published in London in 1859, it was littered with impassioned references to ‘the upper ice-world’. From the middle of the century, too, the new-born medium of photography enhanced the status of the mountains. ‘It must be set down to the credit of photography,’ wrote one Himalayan photographer modestly of his own plates, ‘that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these, and renders it more susceptible of their sweet and elevating impressions.’
A community of wilderness connoisseurs specializing in the precise observation of nature and the controlled play of the imagination emerged during the nineteenth century. Ways of calibrating the attractiveness of different mountains were proposed and argued over: this one had a ridge whose curve imitated the contours of the sail of an Egyptian felucca, that one evolved a delicate lattice-work of ice in the winter months. The appreciation of mountain beauty no longer took the form of generalized awe, but was a much more specific responsiveness to the phenomena of the hills. Accounts of mountain-goers from the 1800s tend to be exuberant with detail, written by travellers whose eyes have become newly sensitive to the particular beauties of the mountains. Particularly striking is a love of stone and rock. Again and again in travel journals, attention is drawn to curious geological outcrops: arches, caves, stalactites and pinnacles, or rocks that resembled lions, bishops, ‘Moors’ Heads’, cannon, camels … Explorers returned from the Atlas mountains in Morocco, the Mountains of the Moon, the Rik range of South Africa, and the Mei-Ling Ridge in China, bringing back with them stories of the gigantic beauties of these mountains – the ‘rugged precipices’, the ‘innumerable rocks’, the ‘immensely high cliffs’ – but also of their minute lithic splendours: mica chasms a few inches wide, or boulders plugged with crystals of smoky quartz or clothed with emerald moss.
A complementary fascination emerged for the transient beauties of the mountains: those fugitive effects – winds, blizzards, storms, snow-devils, technicoloured parahelia, Brocken Spectres, coronae, fog-bows – which hovered on the verge of the intangible and the invisible. This fascination was fostered in part by the Sublime, and in part by the fondness for the Rococo style which characterized art and architecture of the later 1700s. The Rococo aesthetic cherished immateriality, evanescence and fragility, qualities supplied in abundance by the filmy effects of light or cloud, by the fleeting blue and green tints of ice, by mist, clouds, snow, spume, spindrift, and by all the other phantasmagoria on display in the high mountains. Painters squared up to the challenge of how to paint sunsets, cloud formations, fog and the other miasmic aerial effects of mountains. Writers lavished long descriptions on how clouds formed around the summit of peaks like white Elizabethan ruffs, or on top of them like floury wigs. Goethe, during his winter trip to the Savoy Alps, wrote a detailed analysis of the behaviour of freezing fog, and also tried to puzzle out how altitude affected the blueness of the sky. A few years later Shelley lounged on sun-warmed boulders on the lower slopes of the Alps and let his imagination model the passing clouds into animals and scenes from the Bible. There was an exciting sense of volatility to the upper world, which contrasted so pleasingly with the solidity of its rocky substructure.
Reading about these natural historical miracles away from the cold, thousands of people were drawn to seek out the splendours of the upper world. A tyro mountaineer writing in 1859 spoke for many when he declared that he had been lured to the Alps by the rumours of its beauties and its solitude. ‘The praises I had always heard bestowed upon the great beauty and grandeur of the scenery,’ he said, ‘had long excited my curiosity and given me a strong desire to explore this wild and unfrequented region … these trackless wastes of ice and snow.’ Climbing upwards came to represent – as it still does – the search for an entirely new way of being. Experience was unpredictable, more immediate and more authentic in the mountains. The upper world was an environment which affected both the mind and the body in ways the cities or the plains never did – in the mountains, you were a different you.
It is the light of the mountains which has always attracted more comment than any other aspect of their beauty. Early travellers wrote, amazed, of the billion tiny ‘flashes of fire’ which a sunlit slope of snow radiates, or how when the sun shines upon icy rocks ‘there are a thousand suns reflected instead of one’. Many were staggered by the magnificent effects of alpenglow. Alpenglow – which is caused by the reflection of the rising or setting sun off snowfields – makes the sky appear underlit by powerful pink or red lights of massive wattage, and steeps the mountains in mauve, carmine, cochineal. For a long time it wasn’t known what caused alpenglow. In the Eastern Alps it was rumoured to be the reflection of sunlight off a trove of bright treasure buried beneath the ice. Some of those who saw the alpenglow at its fiercest
and most lurid thought that a conflagration must have taken place beyond the rim of the horizon; a colossal inferno.
Nowhere but in the mountains do you become so aware of the incorrigible plurality of light, of its ability to alter its texture rapidly and completely. Even the light of the desert doesn’t rival mountain light for velocity of change. Light in the mountains can be harsh and volatile: the dazzle and flicker of a snowstorm in sunshine, for instance, like a flutter of blades; or the ostentatious splendour – the extravagant son et lumière show – of a thunderstorm. On a bright day snow and ice-fields glow with a magnesium intensity, a white light so concentrated that you cannot look directly at it for long without the risk of searing your cornea. At dusk, light can take on a matt, atomized quality, as though it were composed of vast and visible photons.
Mountain light can also be architectural: the spires and pillars of luminescence which certain cloud configurations build, or the fan-vaulting effect created when the sun shines from below and behind a jagged rock ridge. It can be visionary, as when you climb above the clouds and the light strikes off the fields of ice beneath you, and it seems as though there are brilliant white kingdoms stretching as far as the eye can see. There is the Midas light, the rich yellow light which spills lengthways across the mountains, turning everything it touches to gold. And there is the light which falls at the end of a mountain day, and unifies the landscape with a single texture. This light possesses a gentle clarity, and brings with it implications of tranquillity, integrity, immanence.
Mountains of the Mind Page 20