Mountains of the Mind Read online

  To witness the first flashes of interest in mountain-tops not just as spiritual emblems but as actual physical forms which are affecting to behold, we must look to the 1600s, when the template for the famous Grand Tour – the edifying trip around the cities and landscapes of continental Europe which, in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, it became usual for moneyed (or disgraced) young men to take – was just being forged. These Grand Tourists would return as the bearers and disseminators of new cultural attitudes towards landscape in general and mountains in particular. Among the first generation of young Britons who chose to sample the Tour was the diarist John Evelyn, whose journal would bring him such posthumous fame (it was written between 1641 and 1706, discovered in a laundry-basket in 1817 and published for the first time the following year).

  One November evening in 1644 Evelyn and two companions were trotting past the outer walls of the Rocca castle in the mountains of northern Italy. Through the evening air came the sound of a big church bell, rung by one of the Capucin monks who lived on an island in the nearby lake of Bolsena. Only a few weeks earlier, while crossing the Alps into Italy, Evelyn had been repelled by the ‘strange, horrid and fearful’ appearance of the mountains. In his diary entries for those days he had railed against the Alpine peaks, rehearsing the conventional seventeenth-century objections to mountains: that their steepness prevents the free range of the eye; that they are ‘desarts’ – barren of life and of no use to anyone.

  What a surprise it was to Evelyn that so soon after that unpleasant experience he should find himself thrilled by height. For, as he rode further up the mountain, he was rewarded with one of the most exciting and beautiful effects of altitude – the cloud inversion, when the mountain-goer discovers him or herself suddenly to be above the clouds.

  We pass’d into very thick, soled [solid] and darke body of Clowds, which look’d like rocks at a little distance, which dured [stayed with] us for neere a mile going up; they were dry misty Vapours hanging undissolved for a vast thickness, and altogether both obscuring the Sunn and Earth, so as we seemed to be rather in the Sea than the Clowdes, till we having pierc’d quite through came into a most serene heaven, as if we had been above all human Conversation, the Mountaine appearing more like a greate Iland, than joynd to any other hills; for we could perceive nothing but a Sea of thick Clowds rowling under our fete like huge Waves, ever now and then suffering the top of some other mountaine to peepe through, which we could discover many miles off, and betweene some breaches of the Clowds, Landskips and Villages of the subjacent Country: This was I must acknowledge one of the most pleasant, new and altogether surprizing objects that in my life I had ever beheld.

  Reading the travelogues of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, one stumbles occasionally across moments like this, when a mind discloses its instinctive relationship to a form of landscape; slips briefly out of the straitjacket of received opinion and creates new ways of feeling. The excitement about height which Evelyn experienced would remain unusual, however, until in the mid-eighteenth century it moved swiftly to the foreground and became an orthodoxy which continues to hold sway today: the adoration of height for height’s sake. When this shift of perception came, it would require as much originality not to be delighted by height as it had previously required to find it delightful.

  During the eighteenth century altitude became increasingly venerated. Of course, the Church had always made sure it took the high ground, physically and morally. On the hot hills of Italy and in the steep-sided valleys of Switzerland stood churches, chapels and crosses, surveying the land beneath them. And in cities across Europe the spires of cathedrals stretched longingly – aspired – towards the heights of the Christian empyrean. But a newly secularized feeling towards height was emerging, according to which the individual discovered pleasure and excitement in height for its own sake, and not as a paraphrase of heaven.

  This fresh attitude to altitude was a radical change of heart, and one which made itself felt in almost every cultural sphere, from literature to architecture to horticulture. In the early part of the century the so-called ‘hill poem’ established itself as a popular minor genre, in which the poet – much as Petrarch had done four centuries earlier – would describe first the physical act of walking up a hill, and then the cogitations that the view from the summit evoked in him. The hilltop, with the broadening of vision that it offered, also became attractive for leisure-seekers. Viewpoints and viewing stations were formalized and institutionalized across Europe, including ones at Etna, Vesuvius and Naples. Here were places where your eye could traverse pleasingly between different orders of life: where events, objects and existences which were usually dispersed in space and time could be experienced simultaneously and at a single glance. Altitude made possible the panorama: the Greek word for ‘all-sight’ or ‘all-embracing view’. From an Alpine mountain-top, wrote the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, one might observe on a single day the four seasons of the year. The great seventeenth-century French traveller Maximilien Misson noted that from the rough stone balconies of the Chartreuse St Martin, perched high above Naples, a spectator could survey the outline of the city itself – its harbour, breakwater, lighthouse and castles – then move southwards down the coast, over the scalloped coastline with its white rocks, and then northwards, to the black bulk of Vesuvius, with thick lines of smoke coiling upwards out of its crater like fakirs’ ropes.

  In Britain during the second half of the century, under the influence of the picturesque movement, a chic raggedness of design came to supplant the carefully proportioned ground-plan of the Enlightenment garden. The Enlightenment had bequeathed to the Big Houses of Britain a neat horticultural geometry – patterned rose gardens, spokes of gravel pathways radiating out from fountains that leapt agilely and repetitively from font to pond, clean vistas of card-table lawn scrolling away to invisible ha-has – but in the light of the later eighteenth century all this manicuring came to be deplored as too ordered, too regular. Many of the more modish landowners chose to turn their manicured estate lands into symbolic wildernesses. Grottoes, waterfalls, hermits and shattered obelisks, gloomy copses and rocky knolls: suddenly all this wildness was far preferable to neatly trimmed and aligned box-hedges or grandiosely uniform lawns. And when these landowners commissioned the conversion, they usually asked for a miniature crag or some similar vantage point from the top of which the extent of their gorgeously unkempt demesne could be viewed.

  ‘Sightseers on the Upper Crater of Mount Etna’, in J. Houel’s Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari (1787).

  One such landowner was Richard Hill – the ‘Great Hill’, as he inevitably became called – who succeeded to the Hawkstone Estate in Shropshire in 1783 and swiftly embarked on a fifteen-year redevelopment programme. While Richard orchestrated the digging of a two-mile-long lake and continued to make money through what one contemporary mysteriously called his ‘lucrative arithmetick’, his enthusiastic sisters – the two Miss Hills, as they were known – collected fossils, shells and other geological curios, which they then embedded in the soft interior walls of a cave complex that existed on the estate. It took them three years to complete their redecoration; when it was done Richard hired a hermit to live in the caves and (as the contract had it) ‘to behave like Giordano Bruno’.

  The sublimest jewel in Hawkstone’s crown was its 300-foot-high white sandstone outcrop – Grotto Hill. From the top of Grotto Hill, on a clear day, a panorama of thirteen of England’s shires was visible. Visitors flocked to the estate (as they still do) to marvel at the vista, and to induce in themselves a pleasurable little frisson of vertigo. Among the earliest of Grotto Hill’s summiteers was Dr Johnson, who for once provided a stock response to an experience. ‘He that mounts the precipices at Hawkestone,’ intoned the good doctor:

  wonders how he came hither, and doubts how he shall return … He has not the tranquillity, but the horror of solitude, a kind of turbulent pleasure bet
ween fright and admiration. The Ideas which it forces upon the mind, are the sublime, the dreadful, and the vast.

  Remember that this was a 300-foot cliff in rolling, sheep-dotted Shropshire, not an Alpine peak with no hope of rescue or retreat. But then Johnson’s hyperbole was cast in the language of his time. Here in provincial England was to be found at least an approximation of the enjoyment which some were already seeking out on grander mountainsides.

  A new style of feeling about altitude was taking hold, and the popularity of Hill’s hill was one of its many expressions. ‘What are the scenes of nature that elevate the mind in the highest degree, and produce the sublime sensation?’ asked Hugh Blair, lecturing in Edinburgh in the 1760s. ‘Not the gay landscape, the flowery field, or the flourishing city, but the hoary mountain … and the torrent falling over the rock.’ What really elevated the cultivated mind in the second half of the century was elevation. More and more people began to expose themselves to the pleasures – and the dangers – of height, and the notion of a summit as a goal in itself began to emerge. One sweltering summer afternoon in Cumbria, late in the century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge climbed to the top of a peak, and was rewarded as dusk fell with the view of an electric storm moving across the Lake District: jagged blue filaments of lightning flicking on and off, and the thunder like distant timpani. It was, he wrote exultantly when he got back down, ‘the most heart exciting of all earthly things I have beheld’. In the Alps, Mont Blanc was ascended by the Frenchmen Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat on a cold day in 1786: Balmat waving his hat from the summit to the villagers of Chamonix so many miles below, and Paccard unable to write down the temperature on the summit because his ink froze before it reached the paper. The very next year an efficient young English officer called Mark Beaufoy scaled Mont Blanc with a minimum of fuss. Asked why he had done so, he replied, as though it were a truth universally acknowledged, that he ‘was moved by the desire everyone has to reach the highest places on earth’. Summit fever was catching.

  Switzerland – 4 a.m. The sky was clear and already there was the promise of great heat in the day to come. We emerged into the cold black air from our tent, which was pitched on a flat area of the glacier. We had our head-torches on, which gave each of us a little cone of light by which to see. Specks of ice drifted in and out of the beams like phytoplankton. Although the moon was powerful, we still needed these torches, and their brightness ruined our night-vision. When I turned my light off and looked around, there was total darkness and then, like a developing photograph – the image swimming into sharpness in the chemical bath – the forms of the peaks around us came into focus.

  Chief among these, to our south-west, was the Nadelhorn and its slightly smaller neighbour, the Lenspitze. These two 4,000-metre peaks are joined by a long, crenellated rock ridge, so that the massif resembles a frozen tidal wave of ice and stone many thousands of feet high: a tsunami which geology has halted.

  In the dark, in the glare of our head-torches, we prepared ourselves: slipping on harnesses, looping and tying rope, leashing axes to our arms. Not for the first time I was reminded of medieval knights preparing for combat. There was a ritual to be observed, and each of us attended to the other like a squire to his master: checking and double-checking buckles and knots, tugging on straps, muttering quiet, urgent questions. It felt, excitingly, as though we were going into battle up there on the summit of the Nadelhorn.

  We began moving slowly in the semi-darkness across the glacial bowl which spreads out from the base of the wave. The frozen snow creaked beneath our feet. The rope trailed between us, catching occasionally on lumps of ice. Far away to the south I could see two glow-worms: the head-torches of a more serious party who were climbing straight up the curved inside face of the tidal wave, using axes and crampons to bite their way up 3,000 feet of near sheer ice. They would be hoping to move quickly and to reach the summit ridge before the hot morning sun played on the ice like a blowtorch, and turned it to butter beneath their feet.

  It was very cold; perhaps ten degrees below. I sensed sweat pricking on my forehead from the exertion and freezing instantly – when I raised my hand I could feel my skin was crisp with a thin varnish of ice. Other parts of me had frozen as well: my balaclava had become a steel helmet, and my gloves gauntlets.

  Our first task was to make steady time over the glacial bowl, and then to climb a steepening snow slope at its far side which led to a high pass called the Windjoch, famous for the north-westerlies which scour it. After a couple of hours’ work we reached the pass and, duly, out of the depleting darkness roared a powerful wind. We climbed steadily on up the north-east ridge as the day formed about us. The rocks looked slippery in the early morning light, which gleamed off the film of ice clinging to each of them. By the time we reached the summit, an airy little cone of rock and ice, the air had become hot around us.

  The Nadelhorn (4,327 metres/14,196 feet) at the right-hand end of the ridge; the Lenspitze (4,294 metres/14,087 feet) at the left-hand end.

  We lay there for half an hour or so in the warmth, hands clasped behind our heads. I rubbed crystals of salt from my face and looked around. To our south was the face of another big mountain which bulged with domes of snow. Behind them was the sky, now a pure blue except for one large and evolving cumulus cloud. I looked across and watched as it seemed to explode slowly out of itself, polished bosses emerging from somewhere inside it to complicate further its already complicated surface. I felt sure that if I unclasped a hand and reached out, I could run my hand over that surface and sense each whorl, ridge and valley on it. Then I looked down back into the glacial bowl which we had traversed in the dark that morning. There was no movement. It seemed an enormous basin of space and stillness into which, briefly, I wanted to dive.

  Altitude has one effect which even the most fervent fan of the horizontal can’t deny: you can see further. From the tops of mountains on the Scottish west coast you can look out towards the Atlantic and see the curvature of the earth, can watch the dark rim of the sea’s horizon bending at either end. From the summit of Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus you can look into the Black Sea to your west and to your east into the Caspian Sea. From the top of a Swiss Alp you begin to discuss the world with an uncommon largesse – Italy is to my left, Switzerland to my right, France straight ahead. Your topographic units are suddenly countries instead of counties. Indeed, on a clear day, the only limits to how far you can see are the mechanical limits of your vision. Otherwise you are panoptic, satellitic, an all-seeing I: simultaneously thrilled and terrified by what Marshall McLuhan called the ‘vast, swallowing distances of visual space’. And that is an unforgettable sensation.

  Great height gives you greater vision: the view from the summit empowers you. But in a way, too, it obliterates you. Your sense of self is enhanced because of its extended capacity for sight, but it also comes under attack – is threatened with insignificance by the grand vistas of time and space which become apparent from a mountain-top. The traveller-explorer Andrew Wilson felt this keenly in the Himalaya in 1875:

  At night, amid these vast mountains, surrounded by icy peaks, shining starlike and innumerable as the hosts of heaven, and looking up to the great orbs flaming in the unfathomable abysses of space, one realises the immensity of physical existence in an overpowering and almost painful manner. What am I? What are all these Tibetans compared with the long line of gigantic mountains? And what the mountains and the whole solar system as compared with any group of great fixed stars?

  This is the human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the individual mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.

  The adoration of the summit, which intensified over the eighteenth century, reached its peak in Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth. There is a painting from 1818 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, usually called The Traveller above a Sea of Clouds, which is now, thanks chiefly to the gree
tings-card industry, familiar to almost everyone. Friedrich’s Traveller became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art. He now looks implausible to us, ridiculous even: the little rock hummocks protruding from the nimbus at his feet, his absurdly clichéd stature – one foot raised; a big-game hunter with his foot upon the cavernous ribcage of his dead beast. But as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a summit is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.

  Two years before Friedrich painted his archetype, John Keats started worrying that he was suffering from writer’s block. He decided that altitude might relax his mind, and took to imagining himself at height when he wanted to write: a Romantic version of counting sheep to get to sleep. It worked – or at least it gave him a subject to write about:

  I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,

  … I gazed a while, and felt as light and free

  As though the fanning wings of Mercury

  Had played upon my heels: I was lighthearted

  And many pleasures to my vision started …

  Height, at least in its imaginary form, was the laxative which Keats’s blocked mind thought it needed: the ‘mountain-top’ again proved to be a spiritual vantage-point as well as a physical one.* Shelley, too, was profoundly affected by the qualities of altitude. ‘Wind, light, air,’ he declared, ‘stir violent emotions in me.’ Air is the distinctive element of his poetry (as water is of Byron’s). Vaporous and ethereal, his writing returns again and again to the ‘upper air’, to the ‘keen sky-cleaving mountains’, the ‘ermine snow’ and the ‘cold sky’ – his poetry sublimates itself into gaseousness, spirals exultantly up into nothing. On first looking up at the Alps in 1816, as he rode in along the Chamonix–Servoz road, Shelley was overwhelmed. His hands were fortunately not in charge of the reins, and he was free to goggle at the mountains. He described his reaction in a famous letter. ‘I never knew – I never imagined what mountains were before,’ he wrote. ‘The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness.’