Mountains of the Mind Read online

  From the train station we thumbed a lift up to the Cairngorm car park, and began the walk-in to the jagged black-and-white ramparts of the Northern Corries. It felt good to be out in the wind, which pushed at us in big soft buffets. High above the summits of the corries a crow surfed the turbulence, stiff-winged and silhouetted. When we reached the foot of the corries, we picked a narrow, near-vertical 300-foot gully which would take us up on to the plateau. From there we could, depending on the mood of the weather, head deeper into the hinterland or just turn back for home.

  It was slow, hard going up the gully, even with axes and crampons to help us. The big southerly wind had scoured the plateau of snow and flung it all into the north-facing gullies, hundreds of tons of it, and it rushed incessantly down upon us like a thick white river, surging about our knees. It was, I reflected briefly as I stopped to gasp for breath, wonderful snow. Plumes of it whipped up and danced in mid-air, choreographed by the strange swirls and vortices of wind that filled the corries. The rock-ribs to the right and left of the gully were densely varnished with ice, and from every overhang was suspended a rigid chandelier of blue icicles.

  By the time we reached the plateau, an hour later, the weather had severely deteriorated. It was snowing hard. Visibility had decreased to a hundred feet and the temperature had suddenly dropped. My eyebrows felt heavy, as though something were pulling them away from my forehead, and when I put a gloved hand up I found they were dense with ice. We knelt a few feet from the head of the gully, trying to coil the rope. In the cold it was as inflexible as a steel hawser. Its two ends lashed stiffly about in the wind which, having seemed so exhilaratingly playful a few hours before, had become a hurricane. I remembered the warning I had read in a guidebook to the area: The highest recorded wind speed on the Cairngorm plateau is a gust of 176 mph: more than sufficient to flip over a car.

  There was no question of trying to make it back. It was impossible even to stand up – the wind would have bludgeoned us over the edge. And we couldn’t go back down the gully. On hands and knees we crawled for a few hundred yards to where a bank of snow had drifted up and frozen, and spent an hour hacking out a rough snow-cave. For the next twelve hours we huddled together shivering in the cave, hands lodged in each other’s armpits for warmth, waiting for the wind to drop. All that night I longed for the temperate and horizontal fens.

  In Cambridge I had forgotten how hostile the Cairngorms could be. In my mind’s eye I had seen them in their most benevolently beautiful state: graceful whale-backs of snow and ice, cast in a bronze winter sunlight. The actuality had been a very different matter. With mountains, the gap – the irony – that exists between the imagined and the actual can be wide enough to kill.

  As the traffic in the Alps and other mountains became heavier over the course of the nineteenth century, so the mortality rate rose. From the start there had been dissenting voices: John Murray’s Handbook to Switzerland, for example, pronounced those who went up Mont Blanc to be ‘of unsound mind’. Such warnings went largely unheeded, though, and more and more people fell foul of what Edward Bulwer-Lytton called ‘the sudden dangers none foreknow’: the collapsing cornice, the unexpected rockfall, the avalanche.

  The dangers of mountaineering were shockingly emphasized in 1865, two years after Ruskin wrote his letter to his father on the morally improving effect of danger, by the infamous Matterhorn disaster. While descending after the first ascent of the mountain, three Englishmen – a lord, a vicar and a young man from Cambridge – and a Swiss guide crashed 4,000 feet off a sheer face of the mountain to the glacier below. The three other climbers were saved only because the rope attaching them to the fallers snapped. When a rescue team reached the glacier, they found a trio of naked and mutilated corpses. The men’s clothes had been ripped from them during the fall. Croz, the Swiss guide, had lost half his skull, and the rosary he wore was embedded so deeply into the flesh of his jaw that it had to be cut out using a penknife. Of Douglas, the lord, nothing was to be found except a boot, a belt, a pair of gloves and a coat sleeve.

  The Matterhorn disaster, as it became known, took the shine off the Golden Age of mountaineering. Britain in particular reacted with a mixture of horror and fascination at this apparent waste of life. Blue British blood had been spilt in the pursuit of altitude, and many rightly sensed that there was considerably more spillage to come. Charles Dickens, an armchair aficionado of that sanest of endeavours, polar exploration, thought mountain-climbing ludicrous and trumpeted his opinion about town. ‘BRAG!’ he bellowed unsympathetically. ‘The scaling of such heights … contributes as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weathercocks of all the cathedral spires of the United Kingdom.’ The weathercock newspapers, which only a few months previously had been praising the intrepidity of mountaineers, turned with the wind of the hour and inquired dolefully why Britons were so bent on ‘reaching the unfathomable abyss never to return’, or denounced mountaineering as ‘a depraved taste’.

  The public, however, was more fascinated than horrified by the deaths, and displayed a predictable grim interest in the details of the disaster. To many, moreover, the act of dying in the mountain had conferred a majesty upon the men. A. G. Butler wrote an elegy for the fallers which elevated them to the status of demi-gods and likened mountaineering to a cosmic battle: ‘They warred with Nature, as of old with gods, / The Titans; like the Titans too they fell, / Hurled from the summit of their hopes …’ Never mind the messy details of death – the horrifying seconds of frictionless plummet, the bones and organs turned into a mass of jelly by the impact – in Butler’s verses the fallers’ fate was transformed into something atavistic and magnificent. Mountain-climbing wasn’t the sublimation of student japery, as Dickens had denounced it, but an epic endeavour: an encounter with the utmost of all foes, Nature. For that, any risk was worth it.

  The Matterhorn disaster was a crucial moment in the history of risk-taking in the mountains. Had disapproval spread to become the orthodoxy, mountaineering might not have flourished as it subsequently did. In the end, though, it was Butler’s hyperbolic adulation and not Dickens’s contempt which carried the day. Mountain-climbing thrived, the fascination which mountains and risk-taking held for the non-mountaineering public was fortified, and the graveyards in the small Alpine villages filled up with a steady stream of climbing dead. Edward Whymper, one of the climbers who survived, later provided an epitaph for the Matterhorn disaster and for mountaineering itself. ‘Climb if you will,’ he wrote, ‘but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.’ Whymper followed his own prescription and lived a long and enthusiastically cantankerous life – many others have not been so prudent or so fortunate.

  There are many ways to die in the mountains: there is death by freezing, death by falling, death by avalanche, death by starvation, death by exhaustion, death by rockfall, death by ice-fall and death by the invisible aggression of altitude sickness, which can cause cerebral or pulmonary oedema. Falling is, of course, the ever-present option. Gravity doesn’t ever forget itself or go temporarily off duty. The French writer Paul Claudel put it nicely – we lack wings to fly, but we always have strength enough to fall.

  Every year now, hundreds of people die in the world’s mountains, and many more thousands are injured. Mont Blanc alone has killed over 1,000 people; the Matterhorn 500; Everest around 170; K2 a hundred; the North Face of the Eiger sixty. In 1985 nearly 200 people died in the Swiss Alps alone.

  I have seen the climbing dead all over the world. They congregate in graveyards in mountain towns, or in ad hoc cemeteries in base camps. It’s often impossible to retrieve or even find the bodies of those killed in the mountains, so many of the dead are present only as objects or tokens: rock faces with plaques neatly screwed on to them; names scra
tched into boulders; rude crosses made out of stone or wood; flowers huddled together under a poncho of cellophane. They are accompanied by the formulae of grief, which have done their duty so often, and which do it again without losing their power or their poignancy: Here lies … Here fell … In memoriam … All those uncompleted lives.

  It’s easy to sentimentalize or glorify the climbing dead. But what should be remembered – what’s often forgotten – are the people left behind. All those parents, children, husbands, wives and partners who have lost their loved ones to the mountains. All those ruined lives which have to be completed. People who regularly take big risks in the mountains must be considered either profoundly selfish, or incapable of sympathy for those who love them. I recently met a woman at a party whose cousin had been killed in a fall the previous year. She was angry and baffled by what had happened. Why had he felt the need to mountaineer, she asked me, not wanting an answer. Why couldn’t he have played tennis, or gone fishing? What made her even more angry was that his brother was still climbing. Her aunt and uncle were desolated by the loss of one son, she said, and the other one was still pursuing the pastime which had killed his brother. Or at least he had been until the week before, when he had broken both legs in a fall. She had been glad when she heard this news, she said, because she guessed it would stop him ever climbing again: it would save his life, would stop him – she hissed with quiet fury as she said this – being so selfish. Later, I heard that he had recovered the use of both legs, and was climbing again within a month of having had the plaster-casts removed.

  In a situation like this there is an inescapable sense that some bad magic or mesmerism has been worked: that a love of the mountains has become something akin to brainwashing. It is an example of the dark side of mountaineering, a reminder of its potentially huge costs. There is no undeniable need to put one’s life at risk on a mountainside or a cliff-face. Mountaineering isn’t destiny – it doesn’t have to happen to a person.

  I now almost fully acknowledge that there is nothing inherently noble about dying in the mountains: indeed that there is something atrociously wasteful about it. I have largely stopped taking risks. I rarely undertake climbs which require the security of ropes. I have discovered that it is eminently possible to spend time in the mountains and to be at far less risk than one would be, say, crossing city streets. I’m scared more easily, too: my fear threshold has been sharply lowered. That fizzing, nauseous, faintly erotic feeling of real terror grips me more quickly these days. Edges that five years ago I would happily have walked along, I now keep my distance from.* For me now, as for the vast majority of mountain-goers, the attraction of mountains is far more about beauty than about risk, far more about joy than fear, far more about wonder than pain, and far more about life than death.

  The fact remains, though, that many people are still lured to take risks in the mountains, and do still die among them. Chamonix, in France, is probably the world’s greatest mecca for mountain-lovers, and the only place I know where the flagpoles have ruffs of steel spikes on them to stop people climbing them. It is a dense small town; a clot of apartment buildings, churches and bars stuck in a gap in the Alps. It always surprises me to see it there. You come across it unexpectedly, winding up the steep-sided road from Geneva, not thinking there’s enough flat ground on which to build a house, let alone a town. And then suddenly there it is, lodged in the valley. Rising on every side of it are slopes of rock, smeared with glaciers, leading the eye upwards to the gleaming silver summit of Mont Blanc and to the ferrous-red pinnacles of rock which stand on every skyline.

  On average, one person dies each day during each summer climbing season in Chamonix. You don’t know they’ve gone, these people. There are no empty seats in the bars being protectively watched by red-eyed friends, no parents wandering stunned about the hot streets, wheezing with grief. The only clue is the whop-whop of rotor-blades as the rescue helicopters criss-cross the air above the town. Everyone in the bars looks up when a helicopter comes over; speculates briefly on where it’s headed.

  One spring I was trekking across the Glacier du Géant, the high-altitude glacial bowl which spreads between France and Italy in the mountains to the south-east of Chamonix. You can walk from one country to the other across this glacier bowl: it’s about five miles wide. En route, you pass crevasses which are capacious enough to take a row of houses. Looking into them, you can see the cross-section of the glacier: the multi-coloured strata of ice – white near the surface, passing through shades of cobalt, ultramarine and sometimes sea-green. The ice layers at the bottom of these big crevasses consist of snow which fell several centuries ago.

  All around you, out of the shining field of the glacier, jut the famous aiguilles of the Mont Blanc range – the needles and towers of russet rock which thrust thousands of feet into the air. On a clear day the colour scheme of the glacier bowl – red rock, blue sky, white ice – is as bright and defined as the tricolore itself. Most of the aiguilles have names. There is Le Grand Capucin – The Great Monk – who keeps a silent ministry beneath his habit of brown rock, and La Dent du Géant – The Giant’s Tooth – which angles upwards like a caffeine-stained fang, or a 600-foot version of the accent that tops its name. People climb the aiguilles. Walking along the glacier, you can often see a tiny speck of red or white stuck into a seam on one of the rock faces, thousands of feet up.

  That day we were traversing the glacier bowl from Italy to France. We had only just begun the crossing when I spotted, a hundred yards or so from the beaten track, what looked to be a clump of hardy flowers growing from the glacier. It seemed improbable; there was no earth for the flowers to grow in, only ice. I paced over to have a look.

  It was a little green ball of clay, or plasticine, about the size of a fist, half-buried in the ice. Into it had been poked a dozen silk flowers, with short wire stalks. The silk of the petals must once have been colourful, but the weather had reduced all the flowers to a sepia brown. Slung round the stalk of one of them was a tiny card inside a plastic wallet: like one of the identity-tags that babies wear in maternity clinics. I nudged it over with the tip of my ice-axe. Moisture had got inside the wallet and made the ink run, but I could still make out a few blurred words: Chérie … morte … montagnes … au revoir.

  I wondered what had happened to her. How she had died, and where. Who was grieving for her. Whether her whole family had come up here to plant this little garden for her. Then I walked back to the path and carried on towards France.

  We crossed the glacier without incident. I returned home two days later. Waiting on my answer-phone was the news that somebody else I knew had died in the mountains. He had just completed a climb on Ben Nevis, and was unroping on the gentler ground at the top of the climb when a tiny, freakish avalanche pushed him back over the edge of the 1,000-foot gully he had just ascended. He was twenty-three. One of the burnt-yellow helicopters that the Scottish Mountain Rescue use had flown his body out from the Allt a’ Mhuilinn, the glen that runs up into the granite horseshoe of Ben Nevis and Carn Mor Dearg.

  I stood there with the phone in my hand after the message had ended, and pressed my forehead against the cool wall. I hadn’t seen him since we had climbed together on the cliffs on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh one New Year’s Eve. Drunk and laughing, we had walked through the snowing streets of Edinburgh, seeing the flakes falling in each orange cone of street-light. We had marched up to the craggy side of Arthur’s Seat, and there we had spent an hour or so climbing, clambering straight up the icy rock face or trying traverses. I remembered us both side by side, ten feet off the ground, leaning outwards from the cold rock to look for the next hold, hair combed straight back off our heads by gravity.

  * Hitler believed strongly in the mystical power of mountains, and the image of the striving, suffering, physically remarkable mountain-climber lent itself well to fascism, with its twinned aesthetics of muscularity and maleness. During the 1930s the Reich sponsored teams of young German climbers – �
�Nazi Tigers’, as they became known – to attempt increasingly dangerous routes, the most notorious of which was the Mordwand (literally Death Wall) of the Eiger. They perished by the score. The mountaineer was also a favourite trope of Nietzsche’s. ‘The discipline of suffering – of great suffering,’ he wrote, ‘know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto … This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.’

  * My new-found cowardice is not yet equal to that of Marcel Proust, who declared himself suffering a mixture of vertigo and altitude sickness after travelling from Versailles to Paris, the former being eighty-three metres higher than the latter.

  4

  Glaciers and Ice: the Streams of Time

  In the hot summer of 1860 the glaciers of Chamonix were alive with the rustle of crinoline. Up on the Mer de Glace, beneath an Alpine sky undisturbed save by the elegant minarets of the nearby aiguilles, little guilds of men and women clambered about on the acres of ice. The men were dressed in dark tweed, the women in voluminous black dresses, with thin gauzes of muslin dropping down from the brims of their hats to protect their complexions from the Alpine sun, which glanced up off the ice to scorch the insides of nostrils and the undersides of eyelids. Both sexes wore cleated boots and everybody clutched a four- or five-foot alpenstock, fanged with metal at its bottom end.

  A guide – a Chamoniard – attended each group, pointing out the sights of the glacier and ensuring that no one was lost to fatigue, or to the yawning crevasses (though every so often someone was). At the lower part of the Mer de Glace, where the ice was most violently ruptured, adventurous parties picked their way upward along precipitous banks of ice, flanked on either side by blue abysses into which they shouted and heard their voice returned from the depths in a basso profundo. Further up the glacier, towards the Col du Géant, the sun had sculpted the ice into a menagerie of legendary beasts and other strange likenesses. ‘Like the mutilated statuary of an ancient temple,’ wrote one visitor, ‘like the crescent moon, like huge birds with outstretched wings, like the claws of lobsters and like antlered deer.’ Boulders, bigger than houses, which the locals claimed had been struck off the surrounding mountains by the electric bolts of heaven, lay about on the surface of the glacier, and it pleased those who came back to Chamonix every summer to note how far downstream their favourite rocks had perambulated in a year. When the good weather held for days on end, the surface of the glacier would be melted by the radiance of the sun, except for the ice beneath the rocks, which would be left clasped aloft on thick gelid pedestals. The daring ate their lunch in the shade of these rocks – glacier-tables, as they were known – while the even more daring scrambled up on to their flat tops to do the same.