Mountains of the Mind Read online

  5

  Altitude: the Summit and the View

  Now away we go towards the top. Many still, small voices are calling ‘Come Higher’.

  JOHN MUIR, 1911

  ‘They sit there like Buddhas in the snow,’ Sasha told us. ‘I have myself seen more than a dozen of them.’ He meant bodies, the bodies of climbers, most of them Russian, who have died on the summit ridge of Pik Pobeda: Victory Peak, the highest point in the Tian Shan mountains. Sasha wasn’t trying to impress us. He knew he had no need of that. For three-quarters of the year he was a lecturer in mathematics at a Moscow institute, and every summer for three months – the weather window – he came to the Tian Shan to climb harder and harder routes. He spoke almost irreproachable English, had outsize, bottle-thick glasses, and always wore a scrawny down jacket and a pair of patched salopettes.

  We looked up at the ridge, some five miles away. At high altitude the depressurized air acts as a lens, bringing distant objects closer. From where we were on the glacier we could see the hunched, bulky outline of Pobeda immaculately, each serac and snow-field on its seven-mile-long summit ridge picked out. The evening light had sluiced the snow pink, so that it looked curiously benign, like strawberry ice-cream. We stood there, five of us, our breath pluming in the cold air, thinking about the bodies. I imagined them leaning casually against snow-banks, as though they were just sleeping, as though you might shake them awake. I imagined them sitting there along the summit ridge like cairns, marking the way to the top.

  It was more likely, though, that their bodies had been contorted by the cold, their clothes had been pulverized by storms and sunlight and lay in tatters around them, and their skin had been bleached and beaten off their bones.

  ‘I remember hearing of one man,’ Sasha said, gesturing up at the ridge. ‘He reached the summit in bad conditions, thick snow, with two others. They could see another big storm coming from the east, so they turned round straight away and followed their own tracks back along the ridge. After five minutes’ walking, he went blind in one eye. Click! Just like that – blackness. Like turning off a light. His retina had gone. A couple more paces and click! – the other one went too. Both retinas ripped off by the pressure. They led him for a while, but he would never get down with no eyes. Finally he just sat down in the snow to die.’

  Sasha shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s still up there. That is how it is at height.’

  Sight is often all you have at high altitudes. The other senses are abolished. It is too cold to feel anything, too high to smell anything, your taste-buds are dulled, and there is no sound except for your own breathing. Sight is essential: you need your eyes to spot the few scarves of cirrus which might be the outriders of a storm, or to place your feet methodically one in front of the other during a blizzard, or to look at the view – which is likely to be one of the reasons why you are up in such a dangerous, aerial world in the first place.

  Like altitude, memory can lend a peculiar sharpness to certain images. When I was seven I clearly remember my grandfather showing me a black-and-white photograph, perhaps ten inches by five, of a snow ridge in the Alps which he had climbed – the Biancograt of the Piz Bernina. The ridge was so sharp that it appeared to cut the sunlight in two: one side of the ridge blazed whitely, the other was cast in shadow. In the background was only the sky, and at its summit the ridge tapered to a snow cone. From the tip of this cone unfurled a white flag of cloud. With his little finger, my grandfather pointed out the flag. He told me it was a stream of ice crystals being blown off the mountain by the wind. To me this peak, dipping its point up into the empty air and flying its flag of ice, seemed extraterrestrial. I could not believe my grandfather had climbed it.

  Most summers when I was young we would drive up to visit my grandparents in the Scottish Highlands, and use their house as a base for days in the hills. My grandfather kept his climbing equipment in a garage that was always cold and smelt of engine oil. There were his skis, for a long time taller than me, and the seal-skins which he slipped over their bases. He explained to me how the nap of the skin meant the skins would slide over the snow only in one direction: when he wanted to ascend, they stopped him slipping backwards. His ski-poles were straight and wooden, with metal tips and wide, circular buckets of rattan. Two crampons always sat together near the skis, the grey metal oiled, articulated and fanged. They were like two little monsters. And there was his ice-axe, three feet long and heavy as an oar, its wooden shaft coated in varnish and the steel adze scarred with use.

  My grandfather grew up in Montreux on the eastern shore of Lake Geneva, and on his way to and from school he passed a monument to an Englishman and his son who had fallen to their deaths while descending the grassy lower slopes of a peak near Arolla. Each summer he would go up into the mountains in the company of Big Labby, a Dutch friend of the family whose nickname did little justice to his size. At the age of nine my grandfather climbed his first 3,000-metre peak in the Alps, the Haute Cime of the Dents du Midi. On its summit he met General Charles Bruce, the man who led the Everest expeditions in 1922 and 1924. The grand old general, shot about and scarred after sustained active service in the British army, had a few quiet words with Labby and my grandfather, and then romped off down the steep side of the mountain. My grandfather descended tentatively by the easy way, nursing the encounter to himself. He has always held that unexpected meeting to mark the start of his climbing life.

  Over the years I discovered more about the scars in that ice-axe. My grandfather had climbed in the Himalaya, North America and all over Europe. There was a gully route named after him in the Ala Dag range in Turkey, which he explored during his wartime leave. Shortly after marrying my grandmother, who had herself climbed extensively in the British Isles, the Venezuelan Andes and the volcanoes of the West Indies, he took her on a climbing holiday to the Valais region of Switzerland. Early in the week a storm hustled in and kept them confined to the remote Turtmanntal hut for three days, with only a single large onion to eat between them. He advised me against planning ‘this sort of jaunt’ for my own honeymoon. For his seventieth birthday, he and my grandmother joined an expedition to the mountains of Bhutan. Unseasonally heavy snowfall blocked them into a valley at over 4,000 metres; finally the Indian army had to be persuaded to airlift them out using helicopters. I recall anxious afternoons back in England – us sipping tea aimlessly, not really speaking, waiting for the phone to ring.

  My grandfather’s veneration of high places has never wavered. It is not something he has seen fit to question, although friends of his have died and been appallingly injured in the mountains. One friend, who had been avalanched at 24,000 feet on the Himalayan peak of Masherbrum, and had been forced to spend a night in an ice-cave, lost sixteen fingers and toes to frostbite. He was twenty-two at the time. I met him once, fifty years after the event. Instinctively I put out my hand to shake his, and was shocked to feel the bulbous palm, the shiny nubs where the fingers had been.

  I tried to talk to my grandfather about it once: about why he loved being at height, about why he had spent – and risked – his life struggling to reach so many summits. He didn’t really understand the question, or even that it was a question. To my grandfather the attraction of altitude was beyond explanation, or had none. How is it, though, that summits and views have gained such an attractive force over the imagination of so many? Or as Tennyson put it in a tone of mild incomprehension – for although mountains obtrude now and again into his poetry, he was not constitutionally a man for the heights, preferring to pass his holidays on the Isle of Wight – ‘What pleasure lies in height … in height and cold?’

  We might answer Tennyson’s question simply by saying that the urge to explore space – to go higher – is innate to the human mind. The French philosopher of space and matter, Gaston Bachelard, considers the desire for altitude to be a universal instinct. ‘A human being,’ he writes, ‘in his youth, in his taking off, in his fecundity, wants to rise up from the earth. The leap is a
basic form of joy.’ Certainly, the equation of height with goodness is embedded in our language and consequently in the way we think. Our verb ‘to excel’ comes from the Latin excelsus, meaning elevated or high. Our noun ‘superiority’ is from the Latin comparative superior, meaning higher in situation, place or station. ‘Sublime’ originally meant lofty, distinguished or raised above. And so on. Conversely, a clutch of pejorative words are associated with depth: ‘lowliness’, ‘inferiority’, ‘base’, dozens more. We construct our models of progress on a gradient. We move on up, or we sink back down. It is harder to do the former than the latter, but that makes it only more admirable. One does not, under any linguistic circumstances, progress down. Most religions operate on a vertical axis in which heaven or their analogue of that state is up, and its opposite is down. To ascend, therefore, is in some fundamental way to approach divinity.

  More recently, the mountain summit has become a secular symbol of effort and reward. ‘ To peak’ is to reach the high point of an endeavour. To be ‘on top of the world’ is to feel incomparably well. Undoubtedly, the sense of accomplishment which comes from reaching a mountain-top has historically been a key element of the desire for height. This is unsurprising – what simpler allegory of success could there be than the ascent of a mountain? The summit provides the visible goal, the slopes leading up to it the challenge. When we walk or climb up a mountain we traverse not only the actual terrain of the hillside but also the metaphysical territories of struggle and achievement. To reach a summit is very palpably to have triumphed over adversity: to have conquered something, albeit something utterly useless. It is the imagined significance of the summit – which is, after all, nothing but a patch of rock or snow raised higher than any other by the contingencies of geology; a set of co-ordinates in space; a figment of geometry; a point without a point – which has largely given rise to the industry of ascent.*

  A sense of success is not the only pleasure which lies in height, however. There is also a joy to be found in the sensory experience of altitude: a bliss which isn’t competitive, but contemplative. Height makes strange even the most familiar of scenes. To look over a city you have lived in all your life from the top of a tower is to see it afresh. The poet George Keates, a friend of Voltaire, put it well when he wrote that at height ‘a new Creation bursts upon our Sight’. View the features of a landscape from the top of a mountain, and they look very different – rivers resemble ribbons, lakes silver blades and boulders flecks of dust. The land resolves itself into abstract patterns or unexpected images.

  One October I reached the summit of Bla Bheinn, a mountain on the Isle of Skye. It was a bright day, but the top 300 feet of the mountain were swaddled in cloud, and I didn’t realize until I entered the cloud that the summit was also blanketed with snow. When I reached the top I stopped and stood for a while, wrapped in white snow and white cloud. I could not see more than twenty feet in any direction. It was hard to make out where the land ended and the sky began, except where black rocks jagged through the whiteness. As I stood there, a blizzard of snow-buntings whirled unexpectedly across in front of me, their black under-wings startling against the snow’s whiteness, the little flock turning as one bird. Black and white, the chessboard colour scheme of high mountains.

  And then suddenly, briefly, the clouds cleared from around me. The coastline was laid out like a map to north and south, the dark fingers of the land clasping the silver fingers of the Atlantic. A window opened in the cloud cover far out at sea, and the sun projected a golden island of light down on to the water. Then it closed again, and the cloud closed round me, and I turned away to begin the descent.

  We are now less amazed by the perspective from above, bombarded as we are with images taken from aeroplanes or satellites. But imagine how startling it must have been to the early summiteers, who had never seen anything like this aerial view, suddenly to find themselves looking down on the world. To these travellers the visionary amplitudes of altitude felt like approximations of divine sight. Reading through early accounts of ascent, time and again one encounters the successful mountain-climber comparing himself to what the Greeks called the kataskapos – the looker-down, the heavenly observer, suddenly and marvellously blessed with a cartographer’s perspective on the world.

  For a long time, Noah held the altitude record. Opinion differs sharply as to the location and height of the biblical Mount Ararat, upon the slopes of which the Ark was deposited by the subsiding flood-waters. And according to the expedition log (the Book of Genesis) Noah never actually made it to the summit. Nevertheless, it was indisputable that he had been to a considerable altitude. William Whiston, an eighteenth-century Cambridge cosmogonist, calculated that the mountain upon which the Ark came to rest was six miles high – that is, nearly 32,000 feet: 3,000 feet or so higher than Mount Everest. Had Whiston’s arithmetic been correct, and had the Ark been laden as described in Genesis, its humans and other animals would have died swiftly of hypothermia, hypoxia and the other fatal effects of extreme altitude. Shem, Ham, Japheth and Noah’s other implausibly fertile sons and daughters would not have gone forth and multiplied. The world would not have been restocked with flora, fauna or humanity.

  So perhaps Whiston erred on the high side. But then early estimates of altitude, like early estimates of geological time, were deeply muddled. This is unsurprising. There was no need for accurate calculations of height. Almost no one climbed mountains, and for those few who did it was not a comparative undertaking. Measuring the depths of seas, or the extent of coastlines, was far more necessary than measuring height. Pliny the Elder claimed the highest mountain in the world reached 300,000 feet above sea-level: out by over 270,000 feet. Until the eighteenth century the volcanic Peak of Tenerife was thought by many to be the highest mountain in the world because it rose straight from the sea so prominently on one of the major maritime trade routes. It is in fact well under half the height of Everest.

  To those early travellers who were obliged to go to altitude – the merchants and pilgrims who crossed the Alpine passes on their way to and from Rome, for example – it was obvious from the nausea, dizziness and headaches they experienced that there was a bad fit between height and the human body. Of the many early accounts of what is now referred to as AMS – Acute Mountain Sickness – perhaps the most vivid is to be found in the diary of Jose de Acosta, who in 1580 found himself unable to complete a journey in the Andes due to an attack of what the Andeans called puna. ‘I was surprised with such pangs of straining and casting’, wrote de Acosta, ‘as I thought to cast up my heart too, having cast up meate fleugme and choller, both yellow & greene.’ Travellers sought to combat the effects of altitude by clasping vinegar-soaked sponges to their mouths and noses; this seems to have done little to mitigate the symptoms of altitude, or to increase the pleasures of the journey.

  There is scant evidence that any widespread aesthetic appreciation of views was in operation in Europe before the eighteenth century. Those who did find themselves at height among the mountains were often more concerned with the prospect of survival than with the prospect. The idea of the beautiful view, which now seems to us as instinctive a reaction to a landscape as is possible, does not seem to have had currency in the common consciousness, or at least not to have been triggered by mountains. Quite the opposite, in fact: until well into the 1700s, travellers who had to cross the Alpine passes often chose to be blindfolded in order to prevent them being terrified by the appearance of the peaks. When the philosopher Bishop Berkeley traversed Mont Cenis on horseback in 1714, he recorded being very much ‘put out of humour by the most horrible precipices’. Even the anonymous author of Les Délices de la Suisse (1730), probably the earliest tourist brochure for Switzerland, was appalled by the ‘prodigious height’ of the Alps, and their ‘eternal snows’. ‘These great excrescences of the earth,’ he wrote, ‘to outward appearance have neither use nor comeliness.’ He chose to advertise instead the neatness of the towns, and the happiness and health of Swi
ss cattle.

  The usual starting-point for histories of altitude is the Italian poet Petrarch’s description of his ascent, with his energetic brother Gherardo, of Mont Ventoux – a benign 1,910-metre lump in the Vaucluse – in April of 1336. Upon reaching the summit of the mountain, Petrarch was amazed by the vista:

  As if suddenly wakened from sleep, I turned about and gazed toward the west. I was unable to discern the summits of the Pyrenees, which form the barrier between France and Spain; not because of any intervening obstacle that I know of but owing simply to the insufficiency of our mortal vision. But I could see with the utmost clearness, off to the right, the mountains of the region about Lyons, and to the left the bay of Marseilles and the waters that lash the shores of Aigues Mortes, altho’ all these places were so distant that it would require a journey of several days to reach them.

  Petrarch and Gherardo descended in the gathering darkness to an inn at the foot of the mountain, and by the light of a candle the poet jotted down his account of the day. Petrarch’s ascent is undoubtedly momentous for the history of height. Its importance is tempered, however, because of the insistence with which Petrarch turns his experience into a religious allegory. Nothing in his description – the path he takes up the mountain, the view from the summit, the clothes he wears – can be only itself: rather, all are significant details in an account bristling with symbolism. Some scholars suggest that the ascent did not take place at all, but was simply a convenient fictional framework over which to drape Petrarch’s metaphysical musings, and an opportunity to draw a pious moral. ‘How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountain-tops,’ Petrarch concluded, ‘but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.’