Mountains of the Mind (33 page)

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:

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’.

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 unknown, 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.

Eventually, and terribly, Mallory’s yearning for mountains would prove stronger than his love for his wife and family. Three centuries earlier he would have been cast into Bedlam for his obsession with Everest. In 1924 his death on the mountain cast a nation into mourning, and Mallory into myth.

The world’s tallest mountain was once a sea-floor. One hundred and eighty million years ago, the outline of the earth’s landmasses looked very different. Imagine, to begin with, the triangle of what is now India, separated from the main body of Asia by an ocean which no longer exists: the Tethys Sea. This India was moving northwards on its plate towards Asia at high speed (six inches a year or so), propelled by the same geological action – the convection currents of liquid rock pulsing away in the mantle – which had cut it so neatly out of the supercontinent of Pangaea 20 million years previously.

Where the leading edge of the Indian Plate met the immovable Tibetan Plate, a subduction zone formed. The landmass of India was still at this point separated from Eurasia and Tibet by the Tethys Sea. Thick layers of marine sediment accumulated on the floor of the Tethys Sea, formed from sand, coral debris and the innumerable corpses of aquatic creatures. Much of this sediment was laid down in the deep trench of the subduction zone.

Over the course of millions of years, the northern edge of the Indian landmass moved towards the southern edge of the Tibetan landmass. As the two edges closed together, the mass of sediment
which had been laid down was squeezed together. Heat and pressure combined to petrify it. Some of this rock was forced downwards between the plates, and pushed into the mantle of the earth where it was melted to magma. But most of it – billions and billions of tons of it – was forced upwards.

In this way the Himalaya were created. India hurtled into Tibet, and the marine sedimentary material packed between the landmasses was coerced upwards to form the four curvilinear ridges of the Himalaya, the high point of which was Mount Everest. The shapes of these original mountains were far more smoothed and curved than the complex forms which we now see: their latter-day complexity has been brought about by the subsequent erosive power of earthquakes, monsoons and glaciers.