Trekking through Tibet en route to Everest in 1921, George Mallory experienced this light. By day he found Tibet to be an unsightly country of rough gravel plains and abrupt, jagged hillsides. For Mallory, the angles and textures of the landscape were all wrong; its appearance grated on his eye. But, ‘in the evening light’, he wrote back to his wife, Ruth, ‘this country can be beautiful, snow mountains and all: the harshness becomes subdued, shadows soften the hillsides; there is a blending of lines and folds until the last light, so that one comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony’.
Moonlight, as well as sunlight, can impart the oddest qualities to the mountains. Travelling into Chamonix for the first time on a night coach, Goethe saw the moonlight reflected off the silver roof of Mont Blanc and briefly mistook it for another planet: ‘A broad radiant body,’ he wrote amazedly, ‘belonging to a higher sphere; it was difficult to believe that it had its roots in earth.’ On a clear night, moonlight can perform a more mundane electrolysis, turning the mountains silver. I remember early one summer, camped high in the Alps and unable to sleep out of nervousness for the next day’s climb, creeping outside in the small hours and watching these silent shapes about me, all silvered by the moon. They looked strangely temporary – like a great caravanserai of tents, pitched by happenstance and ready to be bundled up and rolled away the next day in preparation for the march.
Mountain light is spectacular. It can also, in conspiracy with the other elements at play in the mountains, be deceptive: producing mirages, tricks of the light. On snowfields or glaciers your normal spatial perspectives are warped by the whiteness and the uniformity of the landscape’s texture. Distances become hard to judge. Wandering the snow plains of the Alps in the 1830s and 1840s, the Scottish scientist and mountaineer James Forbes found himself unable to focus on anything at all, astonished by the ‘effect of interminable vastness with which icy plains outspread for miles, terminated by a perspective of almost shadowless snowy slopes’. On the Glacier du Buet, the combination of sunshine and high snow produced a mirage of smoothness so persuasive that Jean de Luc became convinced he was ‘suspended in the air on one of these clouds’.
Some travellers had more bizarre and more specific hallucinations – an English climber on Everest in the 1930s reported giant teapots pulsating in the sky above the summit – and others more macabre ones. When Edward Whymper was lowering himself gingerly down the Matterhorn in 1865, only a few hours after three of his companions had plummeted to their deaths, he saw three crosses floating in the foggy air, one higher than the other two: a misty Golgotha marking the death of his three friends. The explanation for Whymper’s vision is now thought to be either embroidery on his part – he was known to have an elastic sense of truth – or to have been a peculiarly complex form of the so-called Brocken Spectre. The Brocken Spectre, which was first seen and described by Bouguer in Peru in 1737, is a trick of the light which occurs on bright days, when the observer is standing between the sun and a bank of mist or cloud. The observer’s shadow is cast on to the mist, and the sun is refracted by the water suspended in the air to produce halos of colour around the shadow. I have seen a Brocken Spectre only once, on the Isle of Skye. I was walking up the spine of a long, elegant ridge running north–south. The morning sun was shining on me from the east, and I suddenly noticed my shadow projected on to the damp mist below me, with a colourful nimbus. It looked like an attentive genie, scudding along on his magic carpet of mist, always preserving the same distance from me.
In the mountains, the early travellers discovered, nature was given another medium with which to sculpt: the snow. To read through the journals and letters of mountain-goers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is to watch the evolution of a new aesthetic towards snow and ice – a new responsiveness towards the precise beauties of winter. At first glance snow seems to simplify a landscape, to smooth out its complexities. Stones are turned to spheres, trees to spires, mountain-tops to cones. The landscape gains a simple Euclidean beauty, and a unity.
Cold also brings intricacy and variety with it. ‘Who would have thought that snow could meld itself so many ways?’ asked one astonished traveller in the 1820s. Snow is the disguise artist of the mountains. It can rock benignly down through the air in flakes as big and soft as duck down, or be fired from the clouds in shotgun-pellets of hail. It can lie in neat windrows, or in irregular waves. Spindrift is one of the most charismatic features of snowy mountains. Climbing a lee-slope in a big wind, you can look up to see sheets of spindrift flaring out over the ridge, or it can undulate over the surface of hard snow like a supple second skin. As ice, it can coat objects in glistening shellac, or form a tracery of icicles which stretches out across a rock face. Once, ascending a glacier 15,000 feet up in the Himalaya, I glanced up from my plodding feet to see acres of frozen ice slopes stretching away from me on either side, as smooth, hard and bright as china.
Snow is not always white, either. Old snow looks thick and creamy, like sallow butter. A fresh fall of snow, frozen overnight, glitters a hard blue. Lumps of ice reflect light like a glitter-ball, shooting different coloured squares of light in every direction. Then there are the odd algal blooms which tinge snowfields the colour of watermelon, or mint, or lemon. In certain areas of the Himalaya, northerly winds sweep up tons of mustard-coloured sand from the Punjab and dump them on snowfields, turning them gritty and yellow.
One of the most fragile and beautiful effects of cold is rime ice. Rime ice is formed when super-cooled air (air whose temperature is below 0°C) carrying liquid water-droplets is blown on to a surface suitable for the droplets to freeze on: a rock, for example, or more dangerously, the leading edge of an aircraft’s wing. Rime ice tends to form into delicate feather-like structures. What is curious about it is that it grows into the wind. As each new layer of rime ice is formed, it becomes the surface on which the next layer will crystallize. So by the alignment of rime ice on a rock you can tell which way the prevailing wind has been blowing: an example of how the land keeps its own meteorological archives. One winter I came across a pair of the granite tors which protrude from the summits of the Cairngorm mountains. It had been cold for several days, and the dark stone of the tors was invisible beneath a thick layer of rime ice. Reaching out with a gloved hand, I touched a feather of ice and was shocked when it crumbled away into powder, like a structure of ash left behind by a fire.
Many mountain travellers recorded their wonder at the variety of shapes and structures into which ice forms itself. Take, for instance, the testimony of Marc Bourrit from 1774, marvelling at the ‘ice-buildings’ he stumbled upon among the Savoy glaciers:
we saw before us an enormous mass of ice, twenty times as large as the front of our cathedral of St. Peter, and so constructed, that we have only to change our situation, to make it resemble whatever we please. It is a magnificent palace, cased over with the purest crystal; a majestic temple, ornamented with a portico and columns of several shapes and colours: it has the appearance of a fortress, flanked with towers and bastions to the right and left, and at bottom is a grotto, terminating in a dome of bold construction. This fairy dwelling, this enchanted residence, or cave of Fancy … is so theatrically splendid, so compleatly picturesque, so beyond imagination great and beautiful, that I can easily believe the art of man has never yet produced nor ever will produce, a building so grand in its construction, or so varied in its ornaments.
Bourrit’s unstable analogies – now it’s a temple, now a fortress, now a fairy dwelling – were a function of the ice’s own slipperiness; its resistance to firm description. Ice and snow have always been substances off which language slides and slithers, unable to get a good grip. But Bourrit, like many after him, found something attractive in this visual fickleness, because it meant that the ice’s beauties were bespoke. Each traveller saw what he chose to see in this visually biddable world: ‘We only have to change our situation to make it resemble what
ever we please,’ he wrote. Ice could be sculpted by the sun and by the perceiving mind into almost any conceivable shape: a pagoda, an elephant, a fortress. The process could work in reverse as well – other things could resemble the ice. When Wordsworth was in the Chamonix valley one Sabbath in 1820, he watched a procession of white-robed votaries winding in slow motion between the dark and spiry pine trees, and they looked to him like a cortège of pale glacier columns, marching slowly down the valley towards the church. It is the unpredictability and inconsistency of the play of light off ice which has made it such a difficult subject for artists. The Victorian artist Silvanus Thomson declared that he was ‘never happier than when painting ice’, but spent his life being disappointed with his inability to render properly its subtle luminosities. Ice is a substance more lustrous than water and, for all its solidity, more capricious. Only photography – literally light-writing – comes close to recreating the contingent brilliancies of ice, its millions of scintillas.
The ice edifices which so astonished Bourrit can be seen more often in miniature. If, on the afternoon of a hot day, you kneel and put your face close to the surface of a glacier or a frozen lake, you will enter a new architectural world of tiny palaces, town halls and cathedrals. They are formed by the uneven melting power of the sun on the ice’s surface and are fruitlessly exquisite creations: destined to be erased overnight and then recreated in further baroque variations with each sunrise. I once spent a quarter of an hour on my knees in the snow, examining a huddle of these tiny ice buildings, and then looked up to find the mountains there. I was shocked for several seconds by how startlingly large they were in the winter sky.
Travellers found that the coldness of the high mountains possessed another remarkable property beyond the beautiful visual effects it produced – the property of arresting time. Cold kills, but it also preserves; it slows down the organic processes of disintegration. I have come across butterflies laid out on the ice, each tessera of colour on their wings still in place, as though they had just been puffed with ether. Leading a train of cargo mules through a labyrinth of glacier columns on the Portillo snowfields in 1833, Charles Darwin looked up to see ‘on one of these columns of ice a frozen horse was exposed, sticking as on a pedestal, but with its hind legs straight up in the air’. The horse had slipped into a crevasse and then, by dint of the glacier’s strange machinations, had been lifted up and out of the body of the glacier. Its corpse was perfectly intact, as though it were still alive. The glacier had embalmed it expertly. On its icy pole it must have looked like a skewed merry-go-round pony.
Human bodies, too, are preserved by the cold, and the literature of the mountains contains many accounts of the discovery of corpses which look eerily alive. Unlike the ocean, from which bodies turned up bloated and nibbled, or the jungle, in which the best an explorer might hope to find would be a mouldering pith helmet on top of a pile of bones, in the mountains – as at the Poles – time was often halted by the cold. Charles Dickens was both horrified and fascinated by the cryogenics of altitude. There is a scene in Little Dorrit where a group of travellers cross the Great St Bernard Pass. Approaching the hostel, they are caught in a swirling snowstorm. As they make themselves thankfully warm in the hostel, they are unaware that:
silently assembled in a grated house half-a-dozen paces removed, with the same cloud enfolding them and the same snow flakes drifting in upon them, were the dead travellers found upon the mountain. The mother, storm-belated many winters ago, still standing in the corner with her baby at her breast; the man who had frozen with his arm raised to his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it with his dry lips after years and years. An awful company, mysteriously come together! A wild destiny for that mother to have foreseen!
Dickens’s ‘grated house’, with its grim company of corpses, reminds me of the garden of the White Witch in Narnia, queen of the winter, who freezes those who disobey her in mid-gesture and arranges them as garden ornaments.
The sky and the air, too, were found to be magnificently different in the mountains. At altitude, on a clear day, the sky was no longer the flat ceiling of the lowlands, but an opulent cobalt ocean, so sensuously deep that some travellers felt themselves falling up into it. Looking at it, you could be bowled over by what one traveller – lost, like so many, for words – described as ‘an inexpressible sensation of immensity’. On reaching an Alpine pass in 1782 the German Leonard Meister was overwhelmed by the new sense of space. ‘Inspired, I raised my face to the sun; my eyes drank in the infinite space; I was shaken by a divine shudder; and in deep reverence I sank down.’
Night skies were also extraordinary in the mountains. Away from the smog and the light pollution of the cities the stars multiplied, and the universe seemed deeper, more limpid. Sleeping outside at 6,000 feet in the Alps in 1827, John Murray enjoyed ‘a night gemmed with stars innumerable, sparkling with a light so vivid as to defy comparison with the scene witnessed on the level of the sea, or amid the dense and vapoury atmosphere of Britain’. It was indeed, wrote an ecstatic Murray, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.
8
Everest
Up where no overshadowing mountain stands,
To wards the great and the loftiest peak
A fiery longing draws me.
PETRARCH, c. 1345
If I try to imagine Everest in my mind’s eye, it appears not as a single image but as three contrasting pictures.
There is the mountain itself, the physical structure of black rock which I first saw from the slopes of a peak forty miles distant. Streaming out from its summit is its kata or blessing-scarf – the white trail of ice crystals flung out by the jet-winds that scour the mountain for eight months of the year.
There is an image of the South Col of Everest now – the empty oxygen bottles stacked like bright bombs, the tent poles collapsed skeletally on top of each other, and the gaudy fabric of the tents shredded and flapping in the wind like prayer flags. It resembles a battlefield.
And thirdly there is George Mallory, who died on the summit slopes of Everest in June 1924. Mallory’s memory is inextricable from the mountain on which he perished. The image of him I have in mind is from a photograph taken in Tibet during the approach march to Everest in 1922. Having undressed for a river crossing, Mallory is naked except for a dark felt hat and a rucksack. He is side-on to the camera, and his left leg is pushed chastely forward so that his thigh is concealing his groin. His skin is luminously pale and his body surprisingly curvaceous: there is a roundness to his buttocks and the bow of his stomach. His face is shadowed from the pure white Tibetan sunlight by the brim of his hat, and he is looking directly at the camera and giving a saucy, seaside smirk. He emanates warmth and good humour. Two years after the photograph was taken, the geologist and climber Noel Odell would watch two dark specks – one was Mallory, the other Andrew Irvine – making their way slowly up the final slopes of Everest, until the cloud swirled in and hid them for ever.
Everest is the greatest of all mountains of the mind. No mountain has exerted a stronger pull over more imaginations. And no one has been more attracted to Everest than George Mallory. It was an attraction which ripened quickly into obsession and then climaxed, three years later, in tragedy. Three times Mallory tried to climb the mountain – in 1921, 1922 and 1924 – and the third time he did not return. Mallory sensed the power the mountain had over him. ‘I can’t tell you how it possesses me,’ he wrote to his wife, Ruth, in 1921. ‘Geoffrey,’ he wrote to his old climbing partner and mentor, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, ‘at what point am I going to stop?’
Mallory was an exceptional individual, who climbed from the heart: of this there is no doubt. But he also climbed under the influence of 300 years of changing attitudes towards mountains. I have sat in archives and read his letters home to Ruth, I have read his correspondence with friends and family, and I have read his journals. All of these documents brim with Mallory’s love for height, for views, for ice, for glaciers, for remoteness, for the u
nknown, for summits, and for risk and fear. In Mallory, the ways of feeling about mountains which earlier chapters of this book have tried to trace coincided forcefully and lethally.
In a sense, almost everyone we have met in this book – Windham and Pococke swigging wine from the bottle in celebration of that first trip to the Savoy glaciers in 1741, Dr Johnson striding along the Buller of Buchan in 1773, Caspar David Friedrich painting his Traveller above a Sea of Clouds in 1818, Albert Smith booming out his tales of valour on Mont Blanc to a rapt audience in 1853, and the hundreds of other people who each made tiny adjustments to the way mountains were imagined – is involved in Mallory’s death. He was the inheritor of a complex of emotions and attitudes towards mountainous landscape, devised long before his birth, which largely predetermined his responses to it – its dangers, its beauties, its meanings.
Mallory had been introduced to mountains while he was a pupil at Winchester College, and had developed a profoundly Romantic love of them. The company he kept while at university and afterwards amplified his passion for mountains; made him even more susceptible to the mesmerism of high places. He eddied about on the periphery of the Bloomsbury set – he was friends with Rupert Brooke and Duncan Grant, among others – a milieu which celebrated idealism, adventure and the exceptional individual. With Rupert Brooke, Mallory shared a love of the mountains. Brooke once sent a postcard to Mallory declining regretfully the invitation to come climbing in North Wales. The postcard was of Rodin’s Penseur. ‘My soul yearns for mountains, which I adore from the bottom,’ wrote Brooke. ‘But the pale gods have forbidden it.’ Mallory’s mountain gods were less wan, more Thor-like, than Brooke’s pallid divinities, but his sense of legend and myth was not different.
Mountains of the Mind Page 21