Mountains of the Mind (8 page)

‘The Rocks and Antediluvian Animals’, frontispiece to Ebenezer Brewer’s
Theology in Science
(1860).

Cuvier became a celebrity in his day, in part for his capacious brain (he was reputed to have memorized the 19,000 books in his library) but above all for his skill as an anatomist. Where James Hutton had been possessed of a remarkable ability to deconstruct rocks, Cuvier was able to reconstruct the megafauna of Europe from their petrified bones: to reimagine what the beasts that once roamed the earth might have looked like. He strung outsize skeletons together with wire, embedded archipelagos of bone in cement frames, and with the help of illustrators developed the first drawings of dinosaurs. To many, Cuvier’s work appeared more like thaumaturgy than taxidermy, for it conjured not only creatures but whole ages to life. ‘Is Cuvier not the greatest poet of our century?’ Balzac would later write ecstatically of him. ‘Our immortal naturalist has reconstructed worlds from blanched bones. He picks
up a piece of gypsum and says to us “See!” Suddenly stone turns into animals, the dead come to life, and another world unrolls before our eyes.’

Stimulated by the new fervour for what had popularly become known as the Ancient Earth, fossil-hunting and palaeontology quickly became the European craze of the early nineteenth century. Every day, it seemed, a new dead species was discovered. An energetic sub-tribe of geologists, the fossil-hunters, sprang up. The fossil-hunters went with their knapsacks, hammers and soft brushes to where the rock was exposed: to the sea-side – like the rich Jurassic shale beds at Lyme Regis from which the renowned fossil-hunter Mary Anning prised ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs – to creeks, quarries and river-cuts, and, of course, to the mountains. Athletically inclined fossil-hunters clambered up cliff-faces, past the different folds and pleats of rock, and wrote of how they felt themselves to be moving at speed through time, ascending an epoch with a single movement.

Many fossil-beds were pillaged by the collectors – the Victorian predilection for rendering species extinct extended even to already extinct species. Moneyed amateurs filled rooms with their finds, and for their smaller specimens invested in ‘fossil chests’: waist-height cabinets with rows of slide-out, glass-topped drawers, divided beneath the glass by matchwood partitions into dozens of little square holding-pens. In each pen, carefully labelled, was placed a fossil: a shark’s tooth, say, or a fern impressed delicately on to a shard of shale. Fashionable little cemeteries of this sort stood in many affluent households, and people would come to gaze through the glass at these relics from former worlds, to ponder their own mortality and to contemplate the ineffable age of the earth.

The fossil craze is significant to our inquiry for two reasons. First, because it intensified the nineteenth-century fascination with the past ages of the earth. Fossils, Charles Lyell had adroitly observed in
his
Principles
, are ‘ancient memorials of nature … written in a living language’, and palaeontology, like geology, taught people how to read a landscape as a history book: for what it told of the past. Indeed geology was
the
popular science of the first half of the 1800s. By 1861, even the Queen had a mineralogist by appointment. Geological tourism became a growth industry: those about to embark on a geological tour in the 1860s could pick from a range of lecture courses which would tutor them in the ways of rocks. For those who preferred the personal touch, Professor William Turl of Green Street in London offered (so his advert ran) ‘individual instruction for tourists so that they can acquire sufficient knowledge to identify all the ordinary components of the crystalline and volcanic rocks to be encountered in the European mountains’.

The second and connected significance of the fossil craze was that it encouraged thousands of people outdoors, and fostered a more hands-on approach to rocks and cliffs. Indeed, the foundations of Western geology were laid down in the mountains, and mountaineering has always walked hand-in-glove with geology. Many of the pioneering early geologists – Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, and the Scotsman James David Forbes, for instance – were also pioneering mountaineers.
*
Saussure’s four-volume
Vo yages dans les Alpes
(1779–96) was both a founding work of geology and one of the first wilderness travel books. When the Geological Society of London formed in 1807, its members, aware that the implications of their science ran against the religious grain of the time, were keen to be perceived neither as fuddy-duddies nor as iconoclasts. They ended up styling themselves ‘knights of the hammer’: chivalric men of science
who sallied forth into the wilds in quest of knowledge. Robert Bakewell, in his
Introduction to Geology
(1813) observed that ‘an additional recommendation to the study of geology, [is] that it leads its votaries to explore alpine districts …’ As if to prove his point, the frontispiece to the first edition of his
Introduction
showed Bakewell sitting happily among the rock columns on the top of Cadair Idris.

Geology, therefore, for the early nineteenth-century public, came to suggest both a healthy outdoorsiness and a romantic sensibility: not just tinkering with old bones and stones. More than this, geology was perceived by many as a form of necromancy, which made possible a magical voyage into a past where one would encounter – as one knight of the hammer put it – ‘prodigies more wonderful than fiction’. After the 1820s, when the rudiments of classical geology diffused in Europe and America, it was realized by increasing numbers of people that the mountains provided a venue where it was possible to browse the archives of the earth – the ‘great stone book’, as it became called.

I had two stone books as a boy. One was slim paperback called
A Guide to Rocks and Crystals
, and it provided descriptions and photographs of hundreds of different stones, whose resonant names I would roll round my mouth –
red and green serpentine, malachite, basalt, fluorspar, obsidian, smoky quartz, amethyst –
until I had learned them. I spent hours beachcombing on the Scottish coast, not for the serendipitous discoveries of the tide-line – the single flip-flop which had leapt off a passing liner, the neon globe of a fishing-float or the vulcanized corpse of a jellyfish – though these were certainly wonderful, but for the rocks which cobbled the beaches. Crunching across that geological pot-pourri with my guide in hand, I swooped
upon stone after stone, gathering them up and stashing them in a canvas shoulder-bag I carried, where they clunked and squeaked against each other. It felt like being given free range in the world’s finest sweet-shop: I could never quite believe I was allowed to take the stones away. I lugged them home, arranged them in troughs on the window-sill and kept them glossy and sleek with water.

I loved the colours of the stones, and their feel – the big flat ones which fitted warmly into the palm of the hand like a discus, and had rings of blue or red cutting through the background smoky grey; or the heavy granitic eggs, smoothed by epochs of oceanic massage; or flints, more jewel than stone, translucent as dark beeswax, and as deep to look into as a hologram. But what began truly to fascinate me, as I read more widely in geology, was the realization that each stone had a story attached to it: a biography which stretched backwards in time for epochs. I felt obscurely proud that my life had intersected with each of these inconceivably ancient objects; that because of me they were on a window-sill and no longer on a beach. Occasionally, I would take two stones and, cupping one in my hand, use it to shatter the other. There would be a crack, an orange sprig of fire and a smudge of rock-smoke. I would briefly be pleased that I had achieved what billennia of geophysical forces had not.

I paced over the Scottish hills and through the long glens of the Cairngorms looking for mineral treasures. My most sought-after specimens from the hillsides were lumps of rose quartz, tumbled into roundness by the rivers: beautiful with their chalky pink-and-white complexion, and their soft, pulsing luminosity. I also prized the Scottish granite, which with its fleshy pink feldspar and fatty flecks of quartz resembled a geological pâté. I read more widely about geology, and I began to understand the grammar of the Scottish landscape – how its constituent parts related to one another – and its etymology; how it had come to be. And I appreciated its calligraphy; the majuscule of the valleys and peaks, the intricate engravings of
streams and rivulets, and the splendid serifs of ridge top and valley bottom.

From the summit or the slopes of every mountain I climbed with my family, my father would select a rock and carry it down in his orange canvas rucksack. He grouped them together, dozens of them, to make a rock garden. I remember a nubbed lump of gneiss, a black basalt pillow, a yard-long slab of silver mica as bright as salmon skin, and a hunk of dark igneous rock in which dozens of tiny quartz nodules were embedded. The finest of all, to my mind, was a rounded boulder of yellow-white quartz, as smooth and soft to touch as thick cream.

The other geological book I owned as a child was the chauvinistic
Boy’s Guide to Fossils
. During one summer I spent in a cottage near the Scottish coast, it became my constant companion. Up among the cliff-top outcrops where the sediments lay with their rounded edges, my brother (seven) and I (nine) gathered belemnites. They were pointed and hard as bullet casings. We searched the seashore strata – hopelessly, I now realize – for trilobites. We levered rock nodes from the sea-cliffs with knives and smashed them open with hammers. We walked up to the hill lochs in the mountains above the sea, carrying little rods and minuscule black flies, and twitched trout from their water: dark little fish no more than a hand’s-span in length which seemed, to my newly elongated imagination, at least a billion years old – more coelacanth than trout. But beyond the belemnites, there were no real fossil finds that year. No ammonites or ichthyosaurs. Certainly no archaeopteryx or giant prehistoric sharks. Our lack of success didn’t stop me dreaming, of course: of pulling a plesiosaur skull from a soft chalk bank, or of striding over the Siberian permafrost, stubbing my toe on the tip of a tusk, and looking down into the ice to see a mammoth staring tremulously back out at me.

Two summers after the Scottish holiday, our family set off to tour the National Parks of the American desert states. In Utah we saw the
rock faces of Zion, the arches of Arches and the fretted pink obelisks of Bryce Canyon, which were arrayed up and down the valley like baroque missiles. I think it was near Zion that we pulled up at a roadside pump to feed our big American car with petrol. At one edge of the gravel forecourt was a man wearing a baseball cap. He was sitting on a dining-room chair, with an electric circular saw mounted on a frame in front of him, and a pyramid of rough rock spheres stacked like oranges to his left. We walked over to the man, and there was a conversation between him and my father. ‘Pick a rock,’ my father said, turning to me. The man stood up and watched me as I examined the rock pile. I wondered if they were dragon’s eggs. I weighed one in my hand. It felt lighter than I expected. I whispered to my mother that it was light.

‘That’s a good sign,’ said the man, taking the rock from me, sitting back down on the chair and placing his legs either side of the saw blade. ‘Light means there’s space inside. Have that one.’

He gunned the saw. Its silver-grey fangs seemed to spin first one way, then the other, and then blurred into a single immobile edge. The saw’s engine began rhythmically to puff blue smoke into the air of the forecourt. ‘Watch this,’ my father mouthed to me over the noise of the saw. I wondered what would happen if the saw fell forwards into the man’s lap. Using a handle, the man lowered the saw’s edge slowly on to my rock egg, which he had vised into position. It took a minute or so for the saw to move, squealing, through the rock. When it was done the man cut the engine and raised the saw upwards, out of the rock. The rock dropped from the vise on to a blanket he had placed beneath it and fell apart like a halved apple. He dried off the halves with a yellow towel, and held them out to me. ‘You’ve been lucky,’ he said slowly. ‘You chose well. You chose a geode. Most people aren’t as lucky as you.’ I held a half in each hand, and looked at them. Each half was hollow inside, like a cavern, and the walls of each cavern were lined with numberless tiny blue crystal
teeth. As we drove out of the forecourt, gravel bits clattering up against the chassis of the car, I held the two halves together to remake the rough rock sphere, and then pulled them apart, astonished again and again by what I saw.