Mountains of the Mind (4 page)

What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans – a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountain has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves. Mountains are only contingencies of geology. They do not kill deliberately, nor do they deliberately please: any emotional properties which they possess are vested in them by human imaginations. Mountains – like deserts, polar tundra, deep oceans, jungles and all the other wild landscapes that we have romanticized into being – are simply there, and there they remain, their physical structures rearranged gradually over time by the forces of geology and weather, but continuing to exist over and beyond human perceptions of them. But they are also the products of human perception; they have been
imagined
into existence down the centuries. This book tries to plot how those ways of imagining mountains have altered over time.

A disjunction between the imagined and the real is a characteristic of all human activities, but it finds one of its sharpest expressions in the mountains. Stone, rock and ice are significantly less amenable to the hand’s touch than to the mind’s eye, and the mountains of the earth have often turned out to be more resistant, more fatally real, than the mountains of the mind. As Herzog discovered on Annapurna, and I discovered on the Lagginhorn, the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountains one climbs. These are matters of hard, steep, sharp rock and freezing snow; of extreme cold; of a vertigo so physical it can cramp your stomach and loosen your bowels; of hypertension, nausea and frostbite; and of unspeakable beauty.

There is a letter which George Mallory wrote to his wife Ruth during the 1921 reconnaissance expedition to Everest. The advance guard of the expedition was camped fifteen miles from the mountain, between a Tibetan monastery and the tongue of the glacier which swept down from the base of Everest, where ice broke, as Mallory described it, ‘like the huge waves of a brown angry sea’. It was an arduous place to be; cold, high and wind-blasted, the wind given body by particles of snow and dust so that it snaked between the rocks in grubby currents. Mallory had spent that day – 28 June – making the first approaches to the mountain on which he would die three years later. It had been an exhausting day: up at 3.15 a.m., and not back until after 8 p.m., covering many miles over glacial ice, moraine and rock. Twice he had fallen into pools of freezing water.

After the day’s end Mallory lay, exhausted, in his cramped and sagging little tent, and wrote a letter home to Ruth by the granular light of a Tilley lamp. He knew that by the time his letter reached her in England a month later, his work on the mountain would probably have been completed for that year, one way or another. Much of the letter was taken up with an account of the day’s efforts, but in his concluding paragraphs Mallory tried to describe to Ruth how he felt about being in such a place, attempting such a feat. ‘Everest has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen,’ he wrote to her. ‘My darling … I can’t tell you how it possesses me.’

This book tries to explain how this is possible; how a mountain can come to ‘possess’ a human being so utterly; how such an extraordinary force of attachment to what is, after all, just a mass of rock and ice, can be generated. For this reason, it is a history which scrutinizes not the ways that people have gone into the mountains, but the ways that they have imagined they were going into them, how they have felt about them and how they have perceived them. For this reason it doesn’t deal in names, dates, peaks and heights, like the
standard histories of the mountains, but instead in sensations, emotions and ideas. It isn’t really a history of mountaineering at all, in fact, but a history of the imagination.

‘ To me / High mountains are a feeling’, declared Byron’s Childe Harold, as he stared reflectively into the still waters of Lac Leman. Each of the following chapters tries to trace a genealogy for a different way of feeling about mountains, to show how that feeling was formed, inherited, reshaped and passed on until it became accepted by an individual or an age. The final chapter discusses how Mount Everest came to possess George Mallory, to cause him to leave his wife and family, and eventually to kill him. Mallory exemplifies the themes of the book, for in him all of these ways of feeling about mountains converged with unusual and lethal force. In this chapter, I have blended Mallory’s letters and journals together with my own suppositions to write a speculative recreation of the three Everest expeditions of the 1920s in which Mallory took part.

To begin to trace these genealogies of feeling about mountains, we need to move backwards in time – back past me edging nervously along the sheet of snow in the Alps; back past Herzog standing on the top of Annapurna, the names of his illustrious predecessors chasing through his brain; back past Mallory at the base of Everest, scribbling his letter to Ruth on his camp-bed with the Tilley lamp roaring quietly away in the corner; back past four men falling down the cliffs of the Matterhorn in 1865; back towards the time when this modern repertoire of feelings about mountains was just beginning to form. Back, in fact, to the unseasonable cold of an Alpine pass in the summer of 1672, where the philosopher and churchman Thomas Burnet is guiding his young aristocratic charge, the Earl of Wiltshire, over the Alps and down to Lombardy. Because before mountains could become loved, a past had to be defined for them, and for that Burnet was to prove essential.

August 1672 – the high noon of a continental summer. In Milan and Geneva the citizens are sweltering beneath a strong European sun. Many thousands of feet above them, among the snows of the Simplon Pass – one of the major crossing points of the European Alps – shivers Thomas Burnet. Shivering with him is the young Earl of Wiltshire, great-great-grandson of Thomas Boleyn, the father of the ill-starred Anne. The boy, his family have decided, needs educating and Burnet, an Anglican churchman possessed of a prodigious and restive imagination, has taken what will be a decade-long sabbatical from his fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, to act as chaperone and cicerone to a succession of teenage aristocrats – of whom the young earl is the first.

For Burnet it is an excuse to see the Catholic continent. They will cross the Simplon Pass with their sullen guide and his train of
braying mules, and then travel southwards, past the long gleam of Lake Maggiore, through the orchards and villages of the foothills, across the green baize of the Lombardy Plains, and down finally to the pale and edifying cities of Northern Italy – Milan first among them – which the boy must see.

Before that, though, the crossing. There is little to recommend the Simplon Pass. A rudimentary hostelry exists at its highest point, but it isn’t a pleasant place for a night’s sleep. The cold is intrusive, and there are bears and wolves in the area. And the hostelry itself is really a shack, staffed by Savoyards who grudgingly double as shepherds and hoteliers.

Yet, despite these multiple discomforts, Burnet is happy. For here, among the mountains, he has discovered somewhere utterly unlike anywhere else: a place that has for the instant stalled his powers of comparison. This landscape is literally, to Burnet, like nothing else on earth. Despite the summer month, snow lies about in deep drifts, sculpted and frozen by the wind and apparently impervious to the sunshine. In the light it has a gold dazzle to it, while in the shadow it looks the creamy grey-white of cartilage. Rocks as big as buildings are scattered about, and throw complexities of blue shadow around themselves. The sound of distant thunder rolls in from the south, but the only thunderheads to be seen are thousands of feet beneath Burnet, massing over the Piedmont. He is, he realizes with delight,
above
the storm.

Down in Italy are the celebrated ruins of Rome, which Burnet knows the young earl must tour as part of his education in antiquity. Burnet himself is not immune to the magnificence of Rome’s broken temples, and the gilded, weeping saints who fill the niches in the churches. But there is something up here, in what he will later describe as ‘these sonic mountainous parts’, amid the gargantuan rubble of the Alps, which to Burnet is infinitely more suggestive and overwhelming than Rome’s ruins. Even though his age demands that
he find them hostile and repulsive, Burnet is unaccountably affected by the mountains. ‘There is something august and stately in the Air of these things,’ he wrote after the Simplon crossing, ‘that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions … as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination.’

During his ten years on the continent Thomas Burnet and his various young wards would cross the Alps and the Apennines on several occasions. Gradually, the repeated sight of these ‘wild, vast, and indigested heaps of Stones and Earth’ fostered in Burnet a desire to understand the origin of this alien landscape. How had the rocks come to be so dispersed? And why did the mountains have such a powerful psychic effect on him? So deeply did the mountains strike Burnet’s imagination and his investigative instincts that he decided he could not ‘feel easie, till I could give my self some tolerable account how that confusion came in Nature’.

Thus it was that Burnet began work on his stylish, apocalyptic masterpiece, the first book to envisage a past for mountains, those most apparently timeless of objects. Burnet was writing at an ominous period in Europe. In 1680 and 1682 unusually lurid comets were seen in the skies. Edmond Halley, having taken celestial sightings from the top of a volcano, had tracked and named his own fiery messenger, and had (correctly) forecast its return in 1759. Thousands of pamphlets were printed across Europe predicting the catastrophes which would imminently blight the civilized lands – the deaths of monarchs, storm winds stripping the fields, drought, shipwrecks, pestilence and earthquakes.

It was into this saturated atmosphere of signs and portents that Thomas Burnet’s
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
dropped in 1681, published at first in Latin in a discreet print-run of twenty-five copies, and carrying a pert little dedication to the King (which insinuated His Majesty’s stupidity). Burnet’s book looked not forward to possible future catastrophes, but backward to the biggest disaster of them all – the Flood. It was
The Sacred Theory
which began the erosion of the biblical orthodoxy that the earth had always looked the same, and it was
The Sacred Theory
which would crucially shape the ways in which mountains were perceived and imagined. That we are now able to imagine a past – a deep history – for landscapes is in part the result of Burnet’s decade-long rumination on ruination.