Mountains of the Mind Read online

  Having bottled up a wine-and-water mix to fortify themselves at altitude, and leaving the Genevans to guard the camp, Windham and Pococke began to ascend the margin of the glacier, passing ‘several Pieces of Ice, which we took at first for Rocks, being as big as a House’, and hurrying in silence across the ravaged channels of avalanches, where boulders of ice and shattered tree trunks told of the violence which had passed through. It took them five hours of laborious and occasionally dangerous climbing to reach a high promontory. There they stood, pulled the cork from their bottle of watered-down wine, drank a toast and gazed over the cavorting ocean of ice before them.

  Windham’s account of his expedition was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, as well as in several other learned journals in Britain and the continent, and news of his venture spread through the country. Richard Pococke seemed less inclined to make much of his part in it all, not even mentioning the expedition in his second volume of travel reminiscences. He died of apoplexy in Ireland in 1765, but would be remembered for far longer than his life-span, both because of the slow-moving boulder on the Mer de Glace which bore his name (engraved there with hammer and chisel by the enchanted locals in memory of their favourite pasha), and because of the Lebanon cedars which he planted as seeds in Ardbraccan in Ireland, where their progeny still stand today – dark and unexpected verticals in a boggy and treeless territory.

  ‘I am extremely at a loss how to give a right Idea of it,’ wrote Windham of the glacier itself, ‘as I know no one thing which I have ever seen that has the least Resemblance to it.’ Like Burnet thirty years before him, Windham had to ‘give an idea’ of something which was like nothing else at all – a sight which all but confounded metaphor. He managed it by descriptive indirection, by going through another image: ‘The Description which Travellers give of the Seas of Greenland seems to come the nearest to it,’ he wrote. ‘You must imagine your lake put in Agitation by a strong Wind, and frozen all at once.’ It was a brilliant choice of comparison, for it drew upon the travelogues of those few travellers who had sailed west out of Plymouth and then north, towards the unknown upper reaches of the world, and had returned with stories of seas stiff with cold and air so frigid that one’s breath froze and tinkled to the deck.

  Windham’s image of an agitated, frozen body of water would become the standard description for the Mer de Glace, and indeed for glaciers around the world. Windham was the first to contemplate the glacier as a suspended force, and his flamboyantly written account contributed to the growing sense in Europe of the high mountains as a world apart, an environment where the elements transmigrated one into the other: where water became ice and ice became water, and where the snows lay eternally in defiance of the Alpine sun. When Pierre Martel, a French engineer, made a similar trip to the glaciers three years after Windham, he tried to describe what he saw, but could ‘think of nothing more proper’ than Windham’s image. Windham’s metaphor, as metaphors will, controlled Martel’s reading of the world.

  In 1760 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure identified the Alps as a new world – a sort of ‘earthly paradise’ – and began his systematic exploration of them. De Saussure had certainly read Windham’s letter, and had paid a visit to Pococke’s rock on the Mer de Glace, and when he sought to characterize the appearance of the glacier he made use, in a finessed form, of Windham’s image. The glacier looks, wrote de Saussure, like ‘a sea which has become suddenly frozen, not in the moment of a tempest, but at the instant when the wind has subsided, and the waves, although very high, have become blunted and rounded.’ It was this passage which Karl Baedeker quoted in every edition of his guidebook to Switzerland, and that therefore fixed and froze it in the minds of the thousands of Victorians who came to observe the wonders of the glacier: they could conceive of it in no other way. Windham had, from a distance of over a hundred years, whipped up the imaginations of the glacier-goers, and then frozen them with a single metaphor.

  Although ‘glacier’ did not appear as a word in Dr Johnson’s capacious Dictionary of 1755 – it had yet to push its way officially into the English language from the French – the idea of these fashionably disorderly seas of ice was by that year beginning to grip the imaginations of many Britons, for whom the appearance and the actions of glaciers seemed to answer some powerful cultural need. Once Windham and Pococke had blazed the trail, scores and scores of other tourists made their ecstatic pilgrimages to the glaciers and to Mont Blanc, the White Mountain: certainly the highest peak in the Old World and thought to be lower only than the fabulous summits of the Andes.

  In 1765 the curé ’s house was the sole lodging for visitors in Chamonix: by 1785 there were three sizeable inns catering for the 1,500 tourists who came every summer to see the glaciers. Chamonix was a boom-town, and the locals cashed in. The honey they made, a golden, clarified liquid, was carried off by visitors and gained a reputation among gourmands as far away as Paris. The villagers would lay out the other natural wealth of the area on blankets in front of their houses: mostly fossils and crystals – pillars of smoky quartz and clear quartz, mocha stones, chunky onyx necklaces, geodes, tiny blocks of tourmaline – but also chamois horns, and the ribbed ram’s horns of the mountain goat which spiralled up and out of its skull like ammonites.

  Although visitors from across Europe came to behold the glaciers, it was undoubtedly the British who arrived in the largest numbers, and who were the most fervent in their adoration. Touring Switzerland in the winter of 1779, Goethe made his way to Chamonix with the intention of ‘walking on the ice itself, and considering these immense masses close at hand’. He took ‘nearly a hundred steps round about on the wave-like crystal cliffs’ before retreating back to terra firma (‘the more firmer, the less terror’, one late-Victorian tourist would pun nervously in a hotel album a century later, clearly shaken by his trip on the ice) and clambering up to the Montanvert, the rocky outcrop which provided the best view of the Mer de Glace. There he met an Englishman who gave his name simply as Blaire, and who had ‘erected a convenient hut upon the spot, from the window of which he and his guests could survey the sea of ice’. ‘What a devotion to the spectacle of the ice!’ noted Goethe in his journal.

  The Mer de Glace, engraving in G. S. Gruner’s Die Eisegebirge des Schweizerlandes (1760). Note the sightseers in the bottom right-hand corner.

  Perhaps a few hundred people have ever crossed the southern fork of the Inylchek glacier on foot. It is an awkward undertaking. There are no rocky hand-rails or balustrades on the ice-dunes which arise in their hundreds in the middle of the glacier – only smooth, convex surfaces of hard ice. Rivers of green meltwater roar and bluster around the base of the dunes, then disappear abruptly into the wide black sink-holes they have bored into the glacier. The individual dunes are joined by fine ridges of blue ice, rounded like the tiles on the apex of a roof. We crossed these ridges like tight-rope walkers, arms outstretched for balance and placing foot precisely in front of foot. When there was no other choice, we abseiled down into the gullies, leapt the rivers, and with axes and crampons climbed back up and out on to the summit of the next dune. The glacier was only two miles or so in width, but it took us seven hours to traverse it. We pitched a tent in the dark on sharp rocks at the foot of a mountain, beneath a moon as flat as a white plate. I slept fitfully, disturbed by the thin air and thoughts of falling, and woke to find that the frost had scribbled across the inside of our tent.

  The following day the sky was blue, and the cold air was invisibly afire with sunlight. It was dangerous weather – after only half-an-hour exposed skin would redden, and then bubble overnight into blisters. We tugged our gloves on, swathed our heads in yards of fine white muslin gauze, strapped glacier-goggles over our eyes, and walked down the northern flank of the glacier for miles, in silence. In the mid-afternoon we reached a big glacial lake several acres in area, and we pitched camp on its shores, driving our tent pegs into the blue ice which surrounded it, and weighting down the flysheet with slabs of
moraine rock. A fleet of jagged little icebergs navigated slowly about the surface of the lake, mimicking the peaks around them.

  After we had pitched our tents, we lay about on the warm rocks by the brink of the lake, and built little towers out of shale. The others went to sleep. The air was still and hot at that time in the afternoon. I could see heat pulsing off the rocks in thick, gelatinous waves. The icebergs had stopped moving. The surface of the water was the colour of an anvil and as calm as steel. It seemed as though if I tried to dive into the lake, I would bounce and skitter across its surface, like a stone thrown on to ice. Only the ingots of sunlight lying on the clear floor of the lake expressed its depth; allowed the eye to get purchase on its dimensions. I sat up, hugged my knees to my chest, and stared into the water for what felt like hours. As I sat there, time seemed to pause. The sunlight seemed to petrify the landscape and the lake. Only the clouds chimerically forming and reforming miles above me kept up any sort of movement or rhythm by which time could be calibrated. Otherwise, I might have belonged to any aeon. Nothing, it seemed to me then, could be more permanent, nothing more fixed than this tableau of dazzling ice and dark rock – a scene which had lasted for perpetuity and could only continue to do so. The landscape existed above and beyond me; I only happened to be there, a bystander genuinely of no consequence. Nothing more.

  Then, unexpectedly, it began to rain: plump raindrops which splashed upon the pale grey of the rocks we were sitting on. The rain partitioned the air, bruised the stone, and plucked the lake up into a field of fleurs-de-lys.

  There was a set of verses in the Apocrypha which sent a shiver down the spine of every God-fearing Briton who read it. It articulated a vision of divine punishment being visited upon a sinful earth in the form of icy death: a ‘nitre of the north’ which gripped the world and froze it. ‘When the cold north wind bloweth,’ the verses began, implacable and furious:

  and the water is congealed into ice, he poureth the hoar-frost upon the earth. It abideth upon every gathering together of water, and cloatheth the water with a breastplate. It devoureth the mountain, and burneth the wilderness, and consumeth the grass as fire.

  Nothing was impervious to this apocalyptic ice, which obliterated with the same eager and remorseless energy as the unearthly fire of Revelations.

  This Apocryphal vision of a global glacial catastrophe would, over the course of the nineteenth century, come to be realized as true. Geological science would reveal that an Ice Age was something which had happened at least once in the history of the earth, and physical science would suggest that it might happen again in the future. The later nineteenth century had to come to terms with the concept that humanity lived in an epoch bracketed by ages of ice. It was a concept so awful, and so total, that it took the common imagination – especially in green and clement Britain – decades to assimilate it. The horror was mitigated, for Christians at least, only by the knowledge that such an event would be a divine purgative – a purification by cold.

  Visiting the Savoy glaciers in the blighted summer of 1816, Percy Shelley had no such religious insulation to keep himself cosy. ‘Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders!’ Coleridge had asked in the preface to his ‘Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chaumoni’. Reaching Chamonix in mid-July, Shelley had answered Coleridge’s pompously modal question by signing himself into the hotel guest-book as ‘Atheos’ – atheist.

  The evening after his arrival Shelley paid a visit to the Glacier des Bossons. Of all the physical forms which he encountered in the Alps, the glaciers appear to have affected him the most profoundly. He brooded over his experiences among the mountains in two capacious, meditative letters, sent to his novelist friend Thomas Love Peacock, and his thoughts on the glaciers are worth quoting at length, because they were published, and read by many in Britain, and because they startlingly pre-figure the vision of a future ice age which was to haunt the later nineteenth-century imagination:

  [The glaciers] flow perpetually into the valley, ravaging in their slow but irresistible progress the pastures and the forests which surround them, performing a work of desolation in ages, which a river of lava might accomplish in an hour, but far more irretrievably; for where the ice has once descended, the hardiest plant refuses to grow … The glaciers perpetually move onward … they drag with them from the regions whence they derive their origin, all the ruins of the mountain, enormous rocks and immense accumulations of sand and stones … The pines of the forest, which bound it at one extremity, are overthrown and shattered to a wide extent at its base. There is something inexpressibly dreadful in the aspect of the few branchless trunks which, nearest to the ice rifts, still stand in the up-rooted soil …

  If the snow which produces this glacier must augment, and the heat of the valley is no obstacle to the perpetual existence of such masses of ice as have already descended into it, the consequence is obvious; the glaciers must augment and will subsist, at least until they have overflowed this vale.

  I will not pursue Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory – that this globe which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost by the encroachments of the polar ice, and of that produced on the most elevated parts of the earth –

  And so Shelley continued, spinning out his nightmare of an earth turned into a necropolis of ice. He was writing with half a mind to publication, and his language tends occasionally towards the melodramatic, but there is no doubting the disturbance the glaciers caused him. Given time enough, he thinks, there is nothing on earth to stop these perpetually moving glaciers from pouring out of their rightful environment, overflowing the vale, and melding with the ice-caps to encase the world in ice. And time – as we have already seen – was something that geological science had recently been discovering in abundance.

  The future freezing of the earth would have seemed more than usually plausible in that summer of 1816. The previous year Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, had erupted and its pall of dust and cinders had been carried across the world on the trade winds. The particles of debris coalesced into strange aerial shapes over Europe and America and sometimes performed dancing light shows, such as those regularly reported by explorers in the polar regions. Lurid, Turnerian sunsets burnt every evening, though the days were far colder than usual. The global temperature dropped by up to two degrees centigrade, harvests failed, and thousands died of famine or froze to death. There was no summer. Even the sun seemed disrupted – large sunspots were visible to the naked eye and in the streets of London people squinted up at them through shards of smoked glass.

  Little wonder, then, that on that uncommonly cold July day Shelley’s imagination saw in the glaciers the agents of the world’s end. Byron, who was holidaying on the continent with Shelley that year, also sensed something terrifyingly inexorable in the way the ‘glacier’s cold and restless mass / Moves onward day by day’, and the shroud of ash which had been pulled over the skies provoked in him a similar vision of death by freezing: the globe desolated by ice, and home to no man. ‘I had a dream which was not all a dream’, began his famous poem ‘Darkness’, which he wrote that same summer:

  The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

  Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

  Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

  Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

  Shelley and Byron’s visions of a world plunged into deep-freeze were no doubt dismissed by some as the hypotheses of poets with too much time on their hands. Subsequent scientific discoveries, however, were to prove them not winsomely melancholic, but appallingly accurate.

  The idea of the Ice Age did not diffuse into the cultural consciousness, but arrived with very little preparation, docking like an unexpected liner. The man widely held responsible for bringing the Ice Age to public knowledge was Louis Agassiz, a visionary and erratic Swiss scientist who had built a reputation as a palaeontologist before moving into the embryonic discipline of glaciology in th
e late 1830s. The better to pursue his research, he founded a rudimentary laboratory high in the Bernese Oberland: a wooden cabin perched on the shaley moraine of the Unteraar glacier. The cabin itself became part of his experiments on glacial motion, being conveyed downhill on its bed of rocks at – Agassiz calculated – a regal mean rate of 349 feet per annum until, during the spring of 1840, it collapsed in on its unoccupied self. (Agassiz arrived at his laboratory that summer to discover a heap of debris, the separate items of which were beginning to move in interestingly different directions. He was obliged to seek shelter elsewhere.)

  It was high in the Oberland that Agassiz began to form his spectacular conclusions about the one-time extent of the glaciers. ‘Since I saw the glaciers,’ he wrote to an English geologist, ‘I am quite of a snowy humor, and will have the whole surface of the earth quite covered with ice, and the whole prior creation dead by cold.’ It was not an idle boast. In 1840 Agassiz published Études sur les Glaciers – or ‘The Ice Book’ as it was referred to by the British – a work which was rumoured to have been written in a single night of fervid creativity. That same year he toured Britain, lecturing on his radical new theory: that Europe, and quite probably much of the rest of the world, had as recently as 14,000 years ago been thickly sheathed in ice. The Alpine glaciers, in Agassiz’s opinion, had been greatly extended, and the Arctic ice-cap had encroached south across the latitudes; relentlessly excavating, denuding and reorganizing, ironing out the plains of Eastern Europe, filling hills and dales alike with glaciers. Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory was being proved true, at least retroactively.