Mountains of the Mind (25 page)

A battalion of guides could not have saved Auldjo from the afflictions he suffered on the mountain, however. Altitude sickness, hypothermia, snow-blindness and narcolepsy were visited upon him on the way up; heat-stroke, dyspepsia, loss of motor control and eventually total collapse were added to those ailments on the way back down. He made the summit, but it was due only
to the concerted efforts of his six guides that Auldjo survived. When Auldjo was at his hypothermic worst, and utterly incapable of movement, his guides huddled round him and heated him up using their own body warmth. Thus thawed, he was able to descend the final few hours of the mountain. He staggered back to a hero’s welcome in Chamonix, spent two days recuperating, then bid a tearful farewell to his guides and set off for London.

On his return to England, Auldjo wrote up an account of his ascent which divided its time between describing his extreme suffering and describing the extreme beauty of the mountain. On the debit side, Auldjo noted manfully, the climb had been exceptionally arduous, and ‘the cold excessive’. However, he declared, all in all his suffering had been worth it for the view from the summit of Mont Blanc had revealed to him scenes ‘of dazzling brilliancy, too much almost for the eye to encounter and such as no powers of language could adequately portray’.

Concluding his story, Auldjo observed that ‘perhaps will it not be decreed presumptuous in me to say that this brief narrative may be consulted with advantage by all those, who influenced by a congenial spirit of adventure, may be disposed to engage in a similar undertaking.’ Presumptuous it certainly was not: Auldjo’s mixture of derring-do and sublime sensibility proved popular, and his book sold very well. Not only did his account help to enhance the fascination of Mont Blanc in the public imagination, it also familiarized the idea that a view – that ‘dazzling brilliancy’ he had seen from the summit – might be worth risking one’s life for. The number of summit attempts from Englishmen described a steep upwards curve in the years following 1828 – Auldjo’s book had caught the imagination of the country.

Among those who read it was a young Londoner called Albert Smith, whose imagination was so inflamed by Auldjo’s description that he was moved to travel to Chamonix himself and attempt the
mountain. In 1851 he climbed it successfully, and with considerably less discomfort than his hero, Auldjo. Smith’s ascent, as we know, became the subject of his best-selling show, which opened in London in March 1853. News of the mountain also spread to America, and among those who read the account of Smith’s ascent, and his theatrical descriptions of the incomparable view from the summit, was Henry Bean, who, on 5 September 1870, accompanied by his American friend Mr Randall, a Scots Reverend named George MacCorkendale, three porters and five guides, started his ascent of Mont Blanc.

It all began so well. After an easy climb in pristine weather, the group overnighted at the Cabin des Grands Mulets. Having set off again in warm sunlight the following morning, the group were observed from the telescopes of Chamonix to have reached the summit of the mountain at 2.30 p.m. and they turned immediately to begin their descent. Then, with a terrible swiftness, a thundercloud closed around them and they were lost from view.

Were we able, twenty-four hours later, to start off up the mountain and follow the path taken by Mr Bean and Mr Randall, we would leave the town of Chamonix and ascend steeply through the dense pine forests that texture the piedmont, over the ruptured ice of the Glacier des Pèlerins. Here we would enter the lower cloud of the storm which still wrapped the mountain, pass quickly and nervously beneath the echoey couloir of the Aiguille du Midi, which is sending down irregular fusillades of rockfall, and finally we would enter the blizzard which has enfolded the top of Mont Blanc, and which is so severe that once within it there is only whiteness in every direction.

And here, somewhere on the expressionless snowscapes of the Col du Dôme, we would find Mr Bean. He is hunched in a snow-hole that he and one of the porters have dug using their alpenstocks and their stiffened hands as shovels. Mr Bean is on the outside facing
inwards, barely grasping the stub of a pencil. His fingers are white and violet with frostbite, and rigid. His clothing is frozen into a herringbone-tweed carapace, which makes movement of any sort difficult. Leaning on the back of the porter, who is hunkered in the snow-hole with him, Mr Bean is writing a few words to his wife in a notebook that he has carried up the mountain. His pencil moves slowly and stiffly across the page. The
scratch scratch
of coarse lead on coarse paper is inaudible against the raving of the wind. He adds to the words he has already written:

At this point Mr Bean’s handwriting becomes larger, loopier, less steady:

What is both fascinating and macabre about this sequence of events is how clearly it allows us to see certain seductive, dangerous ideas about altitude being passed on from person to person – like the Black Spot in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
– until at last they result in tragedy. It illustrates how emotional attitudes about concepts as indeterminate as height, views and summits are transmitted. John Auldjo is stirred by the accounts he has read by others who have seen or scaled the Alps, and decides to climb Mont Blanc. His own narrative inspires Albert Smith to emulate the feat, and Smith by means of his celebrated Piccadilly Show inspires tens of thousands of people to see Mont Blanc first-hand. Among those influenced by Smith is Henry Bean, who is moved to leave his wife and embark on his awfully big adventure. Auldjo and Smith survive; Bean, MacCorkendale, Randall and their eight nameless helpers die. All of these men were attracted to the mountains by two intertwined ideas: first, the abstract notion that reaching the summit of a mountain was a worthwhile end in itself; and second, the belief that the view from a great height – the ‘scenes of dazzling brilliancy’ which Auldjo described – could be sufficiently beautiful to merit risking one’s life to see it.

Like everybody else who has perished in the mountains – the Russian Buddhas frozen on the top of Pik Pobeda; the father and son whose memorial my grandfather walked past on his way to school – Bean was sent to his death by ways of feeling set in motion many years before his birth. Because in the ways we perceive and react to
forms of landscape we are prompted, primed and reminded by those who have gone before, no death in the mountains is isolated from historical circumstance. Although we might like to believe that our experience of altitude is utterly individual, each of us is in fact heir to a complex and largely invisible dynasty of feelings: we see through the eyes of innumerable and anonymous predecessors. The unexpected pleasures which Evelyn discovered at height; Friedrich’s iconic image of the traveller on his rocky promontory; Shelley’s aerial poetry; Auldjo’s ecstatic vision from the top of Mont Blanc – all of these played a part in transforming the way altitude has been imagined. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the imagination of millions is susceptible to what the mountaineer and writer Joe Simpson calls the ‘beckoning silence of great height’: the inverted gravity of mountain-going – the attractive force that pulls you ever upwards.

The most exciting map I have ever held was a photocopied sheet which supposedly represented the far east of the Tian Shan mountains, near where Kyrgyzstan borders China and Kazakhstan. It was exciting because it was so rudimentary – there was a cross to signify a peak, a circle for a lake and a line for a ridge. No contour lines curling around the mountains. No shading to represent dangerous cliffs. And definitely none of those reassuring Ordnance Survey acronyms: FB for footbridge, PO for post office and PH for pub.

In the centre of the map was outlined the Y-shaped valley carved out of the mountains by the Inylchek glacier. This central highway of the Tian Shan was well enough known. It had first been penetrated by the Russian explorer P. P. Semenov in 1856 and 1857 (he became known afterwards, in the literal way of nineteenth-century Russian nomenclature, as Semenov-Tian-Shanskii). Undeterred by the bands of Kyrgyz brigands which roved the territories around
Lake Issyk-Kul, Semenov had pushed as far east as the Santash pass. This area had long been a contested march between China and the different potentates of the Central Asian plains; it was allegedly on the Santash pass that Tamburlaine had instructed each man of his army to add a stone to a pile on their way to war with China. When his depleted army crossed back over the pass after the campaign, each man picked up a stone. Tamburlaine counted the stones which were left, and thereby knew exactly how many soldiers he had lost in China.

It was Semenov’s reports which enticed subsequent Russian explorers and cartographers to the region, including the malevolent but brilliant Nikolai Przhevalsky. A proudly European Polish-Russian of Cossack descent, Przhevalsky detested the Asian peoples among whom he spent so much of his life. In his last book he suggested exterminating all Mongolians and replacing them with Cossacks, a policy which Stalin – rumoured to be Przhevalsky’s son – would go some distance towards enforcing. Przhevalsky overcame his abhorrence of non-Europeans sufficiently to lead four expeditions across Central Asia, including one to the far east of Kyrgyzstan. He died among Asians too, in 1888, in Karakol, the town at the eastern tip of Lake Issyk-Kul which in Russian is now named after him. His shining black statue surveys one of that town’s dusty squares, and there is a little-visited museum devoted to his memory, filled with the bric-à-brac of his trade: saddle-bags, maps, weapons and – oddly – troupes of stuffed animals.