Mountains of the Mind Read online

  Agassiz’s purpose was scientific, but his style, like his personality, was dramatic, as can be seen in an article he wrote for the Edinburgh New Philological Journal in 1841. The earth, he claimed, had been plunged into:

  a climate such as the poles of our earth can scarcely produce – a cold, in which everything that had life was benumbed, suddenly appeared. Nowhere did the earth offer creatures protection against the omnipotence of the cold. Whithersoever they fled, into the dens of the mountains, which formerly had served to many of them as a lurking-place, or into the thickets of the forest, everywhere, they succumbed to the might of the annihilating element … A crust of ice soon covered the superficies of the earth, and enveloped in its rigid mantle the remains of organisms, which but a moment before had been enjoying existence upon its surface … everything organic upon the earth was put an end to.

  To the early Victorian mind, still very much in thrall to the Sublime, Agassiz’s was a thrilling vision, excitingly awful in its totality. The ice had hunted life to its last lurking-place, had obliterated ‘everything organic’, and had rewritten the land. Agassiz’s proposals were at first dismissed as ridiculous. But he possessed persuasive ocular proof – the striated rocks, the angular erratics, the inexplicable Till – and his campaign gradually began to gain support. ‘You have made all the geologists glacier-mad here,’ a Scottish scientist wrote to Agassiz after he delivered a lecture in Glasgow, ‘and they are turning Great Britain into an ice-house.’

  It is difficult for us to understand how drastically the idea of the Ice Age rewrote the nineteenth-century world-view. It affected almost every scientific discipline – natural history, chemistry, physics – and obliged the rethinking of much of anthropology, natural history and theology. More immediately, familiar landscapes had suddenly to be looked at with very different eyes. In Llanberis in Wales, in Windermere in the Lake District, in the Cairngorms or in Switzerland, the evidence of the passage of the Ice Age could now be seen: scooped corries, U-shaped valleys, gigantic boulders, and the blade-like ridges which had been sharpened by glacial action. John Ruskin, in the fourth volume of Modern Painters, described how in the Alpine valleys ‘there are yet visible the tracks of ancient glaciers … the footmark, so to speak, of a glacier is just as easily recognisable as the tracks of a horse that had passed along a soft road which yet retained the prints of its shoes’. Ruskin’s image – the glacier as a horse, the hard mountain as a soft road – made the ancient superbly immediate; collapsed the deep past into the familiar present.

  A three-layer panorama from 1860 showing the modern ‘Adamitic’ world (top layer) separated by the ‘sharp sword’ of the Ice Age (second layer) from the reptiles and mammals of the Tertiary and Secondary periods. Lithograph by W. R. Woods, from Isabella Duncan’s Pre-Adamite Man (1860).

  Glaciers became big news. Major cultural critics of the day – Ruskin, John Tyndall – discussed their import. Words were exchanged in the pages of the quarterlies over the cause of motion of glaciers and over the precise physical nature of glacial ice. Ruskin, with characteristic aplomb and perhaps with a desire to put an end to the pettifogging, declared them to be ‘one great accumulation of icecream, poured upon the tops, and flowing to the bottoms, of the mountains.’

  The considerable column inches devoted to glaciers between the 1840s and the 1870s, and the revelation of the Ice Age, increased the number of glacier-goers, who were eager to see at first-hand these masses of ice which had shaped the surface of the world. The ‘little glaciers of the present day’ were, as Tyndall put it, ‘mere pigmies as compared to the giants of the glacial epoch’, but that was just fine, for it pleased the imagination to attempt that enlargement of pigmy to giant. Visitors to the glens of Scotland imagined them being sculpted by glaciers that had long since deliquesced, and visitors to the extant Alpine glaciers imagined them for what they had once been: mighty rivers of ice encasing the earth.

  What profoundly horrified the later Victorians – as it had horrified Shelley – was the possibility that the Ice Age might come again; this time as tragedy. In 1862 the physicist William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, had made public his belief that the sun was cooling without renewal of its energy. Not only was there nothing new under the sun, but the sun itself was nothing new, and was ageing day by day. Owing to the slow and irreversible seep of entropy, the solar system was condemned to what had been christened ‘Heat Death’. It was Buffon’s nebular hypothesis all over again, except that this time it was not the globe which was cooling down, but its lantern and radiator, the sun. The universe was pulsing away on a limited wattage, science had proved, and the icy earth would at some point in the future swing blind and blackening through space.

  Solar physics was a hot topic among articulate Victorians from the 1850s onwards. Kelvin’s discovery (which would not be discredited until the discovery of radioactive salts by Rutherford in the early years of the twentieth century) made a universal winter – another Ice Age – historically foreseeable. The Poles themselves, ‘the crystalline continents’, were inaccessible, but out on the glaciers of the Alps, or the Caucasus, or the Karakorum, it was possible for the Victorians to confront their fears of obliteration; to acquaint themselves with the means of their future destruction. They felt the same horrified awe that we might feel in visiting the gleaming, ranked warheads of a nuclear arsenal. The return of the Ice Age, indeed, was their nuclear winter.

  I first saw John Ruskin’s drawing of the Glacier du Bois while leafing through the second volume of his thirty-nine-volume Works, appalled at the industry of the man. It is a startling sketch. Ruskin decided that it would be impossible to replicate the formal qualities of the ice itself: conventional realism would be thwarted by its appearance. So he sought instead to depict the relationship between the observer and the observed; to present not the ice as it was, but the ice as he saw it – to paint the act of perception.

  In 1842, J. M. W. Turner, whom Ruskin venerated, had completed one of his finest canvases, Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. There is, at first glance, no steamboat in this picture, only snow storm. The canvas is aswirl with dark colours, a viscous whirlpool of cloud canted up to the vertical. Only after a few seconds, and with the help of the title, does the ship become visible, its round dark mill-wheel barely discernible through the spume, the fire from its furnaces gilding only a tiny area of heaving sea. Once the ship has been seen, then the long black-brown limb of storm reaching down from the thunderheads is understood to be nothing of the sort, but the billowing smoke-stack reaching upwards. Finally, at the very centre of the whirlpool, one spots deliverance – a hint of blue, the tinted iris of the storm, an eye-shaped glimpse of good weather. Not enough to make a Dutchman a pair of trousers, but blue sky nevertheless.

  Ruskin’s drawing of the glacier is clearly modelled on Turner’s painting of the snowstorm. There is the same forceful sense of vortex, of centripetal energy. Spindrift – the loose particles of snow and ice blown by wind – lisps over every surface. A chough or raven flies just on the event horizon of the picture, as does a bristly old tree bole – both apparently about to be swirled inescapably down into the pale plug-hole of the sun. Even Ruskin’s signature, in the bottom left-hand corner, is bending under the strain, its ends being tugged inwards by the pull of the drawing. In the background the mountains stand in profile, like white knives, echoed by the pinnacled surface of the glacier. Ruskin comes nearer in this drawing than any other artist I have ever seen to catching the experience of being on a glacier. He brilliantly compounds its paradox of stasis and dramatic force. On a glacier, one is always aware of motion in the midst of stillness: there is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins observed of an Alpine ice-river, ‘an air of interrupted activity’.

  I fell into a crevasse once, walking over the snowed-up surface of a Swiss glacier and whistling, as I tend to do on glaciers, the Doors’ song ‘Break on through to the Other Side’. I did. There was
a creak, and then an awareness of collapse beneath my feet, like a trap-door opening.

  The Glacier du Bois, etching from a drawing by John Ruskin (1843).

  I dropped vertically, and jammed at belly-level in the ice, the air punched from my lungs by the fall. My lower half had entered another element. It felt colder, much colder down there. My feet, heavy with boots and crampons, kicked in emptiness, until I realized this might dislodge me and I let them hang, toe-downwards, and spread my arms out across the snow, in the upper world. There was a sensation of unknowable depth beneath me and I was gripped by a terrible vertigo. It was the same feeling as when, aged thirteen, I stepped from the brink of a yacht into sea several miles off the coast of Corsica, where the charts showed a submarine trench of 4,000 feet. The water was clear, tinged with blue. My brother and I dropped two silver centimes and with scuba masks watched their slow bright tumble, head over tail, for what seemed like hours through the water. Suddenly I was seized with panic, with the fear of losing my buoyancy and tumbling helplessly downwards after the coins. I had to be pulled from the water by my father, who cupped me under my armpits and lifted me out in one fluid movement, trailing a tail of sea water.

  My climbing partner hauled me gracelessly from the glacier, like a body from a swimming-pool, and I lay on the snow gasping, almost asthmatic with fear. That night, safe in an Alpine hut but sleepless on a thin mattress with other climbers turning all about me, my mind got to work on what had happened, luxuriating in the conditional tense. Had I dropped into the crevasse, the glacier would have gone about its business as surely as if I had not been there. Its internal machinery would have annihilated my body. Had I fallen, like the French Protestant minister, into a crevasse the size of a ‘grand and spacious hall’, the sides would have closed in over the months, and the space would have diminished from ballroom, to bedroom, to broom cupboard, to coffin.

  Glaciers compounded two concepts that were especially exciting to the nineteenth-century imagination: great force and great time. In Travels through the Alps of Savoy, the Scottish glaciologist James Forbes drew attention to this last aspect of them. ‘A glacier is an endless scroll,’ he wrote, ‘a stream of time upon whose stainless ground is engraven the succession of events, whose dates far transcend the memory of living man. Assuming the length of a glacier to be roughly twenty miles, and its annual progression 500 feet, the block which is now discharged from its surface on the terminal moraine may have started from its rocky origin in the reign of Charles I!’ To walk down the ‘wide gleaming causeway’ of a glacier, therefore, was to walk backwards in time. To descend into a crevasse was to encounter ice that had been compacted when the Civil War was in progress. To behold a gargantuan avalanche or an ice-fall, as did Robert Ker Porter, an English aristocrat and soldier travelling in the Caucasus in the late 1810s, was to witness the collapse of ages – ‘the snows and ice of centuries, pouring down in immense shattered forms and rending heaps!’ Glaciers and the mountains around them forced the human mind to think in different ways, and at different speeds.

  There is a lovely anecdote about Mark Twain, who visited Switzerland with his family in 1878. Having climbed high up the eastern side of Zermatt valley, they pondered the easiest way back down. ‘I resolved,’ Twain remembered in A Tramp Abroad, ‘to take passage for Zermatt on the great Gorner glacier.’

  I marched the Expedition down the steep and tedious mule-path and took up as good a position as I could upon the middle of the glacier – because Baedeker said the middle part travels the fastest. As a measure of economy, however, I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts, to go as slow freight. I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move. Night was coming on, the darkness began to gather – still we did not budge. It occurred to me then, that there might be a time-table in Baedeker; it would be well to find out the hours of starting. I soon found a sentence which threw a dazzling light upon the matter. It said, ‘The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little less than an inch a day.’ I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom had my confidence so wantonly betrayed. I made a small calculation: One inch a day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three and one-eighteenth miles. Time required to go by glacier, a little over five hundred years! The passenger part of this glacier – the central part – the lightning-express part, so to speak – was not due in Zermatt till the summer of 2378, and that the baggage, coming along the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later … As a means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure …

  Twain, with a characteristically charming lack of gravity, was satirizing an attitude towards nature which has since come to predominate: we expect nature to do our bidding, to fall into step with us. Or we override it with technology, and render its rhythms superfluous. Our need for speed has led us to esteem the streamlined, the dynamic in all things, and that estimation has accelerated us out of sync with the natural world.

  But slowness and stasis have their own virtues too, their own aesthetic, and it is well to be reminded of that from time to time. Early one spring I caught a minibus out of Beijing. It drove north past the frozen Mi yun reservoir – acre after acre of silver ice – which provides Beijing with much of its water, and up into the pleated landscape along whose narrow ridges the Great Wall marches. After three hours the bus turned off the main asphalt road and hairpinned laboriously up a rubbled track.

  We stopped, finally, in the shadowed floor of a gorge. High above us on its north wall was a squat watchtower, supervising the land around as it had done for 800 years. Spilling off the rim of the gorge was a frozen waterfall: thick pipes of dirty yellow ice three or four hundred feet in length, and between them vertical stripes of clean blue ice. The whole frozen fall looked like a Gothic pipe-organ, with its tubes and wind-tunnels radiating extravagantly up and out. The air was warm, and from the tips of the lowest icicles meltwater ran in continuous streams.

  We strapped on crampons, picked up a pair of axes each, and spent the day climbing the fall. During a break I took off my climbing gear, and scrambled down to explore the frozen river into which the waterfall plunged. Seen from an oblique angle, the ice appeared blue ridged with silver. I dropped down on to it.

  Where the ice filled the gaps between the shoreline stones it was the milky white colour of cataracts. The big resident boulders out in the middle of the river, which would in summer have generated whirlpools and rapids, were surrounded by smooth planes of transparent ice. Looking down into the ice I could see its deepness, marked by the birch leaves suspended in it and by plump white air bubbles which ascended like strings of pearls. There was a clatter, and I glanced up. A mink poured itself out of the shadows on one side of the river, skittered across the damp ice and galloped off over the flat stones on the other side. It printed them with wet pawmarks, black decals which in the dry air faded quickly back into the colour of stone.

  My sense of wonder at the frozen waterfall and the halted river derived from the absolute stasis of something that would normally be absolutely turbulent. Perhaps our quickening obsession with speed has to do with our end-of-the-worldliness: the latent sense, unique to our modern age, that apocalypse might come either by ice (the death of the sun) or by fire (nuclear holocaust). I had wondered about this, though I had not found anyone else who did until, reading through Théophile Gautier’s journalism, I came across a passage from 1884:

  How strange is this wild urge for rapid locomotion seizing people of all nations at the same instant. ‘The dead go swiftly’, says the ballad. Are we dead then? Or could this be some presentiment of the approaching doom of our planet, possessing us to multiply the means of communication so we may travel over its entire surface in the little time left to us?

  Terrifying in their slow implacability, ripe with history and, at least to the properly primed imagination, thrillingly beset with hazards – it was unsurprising that glaciers attracted such a quantity of avid guests to them in the nineteenth century.
Above all, glaciers offered somewhere that was utterly different. As Ruskin wrote admiringly of the Zmutt glacier, ‘the whole scene [is] so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely from the presence of men, but even of their thoughts’. When in 1828 John Murray and his wife trekked into the middle of the glacier of Talèfre, they sat down among the seventy-foot ice pyramids to slug from a flask of brandy, and reflected on the splendour of their situation:

  Amid these awful and icy solitudes, no voice was heard but our own. The stillness of death reigned around, save only that it was, at distant intervals, broken by the thundering crash, announcing the fall of a distant avalanche, or the rending of the mighty glacier. In this vast amphitheatre, walled in by mountains of snow, here and there penetrated by the peaked summits of their aiguilles, reigns an eternal winter, the accumulated snows of many ages, the wreck and run of rocks, and all the magnificent personification of dread desolation …

  Solitude, deathliness, sterility, barrenness, inhumanity – these were the qualities of a landscape which Romanticism had made so appealing. The polar wastes exemplified this landscape ideal, but in the nineteenth century, as now, the poles were unapproachable to all save the most determined and well-financed explorers. It was the glaciers of Europe, South America and Asia which provided the nearest and finest approximation to the poles. People came – as they still come, as I have come – to enjoy them in their tens of thousands, and to die by the dozen: drawn to the ice by feelings that had, like the glaciers themselves, accumulated over the centuries.