Mountains of the Mind Read online

  It isn’t hard, with the benefit of hindsight, to see why altitude was so attractive to Romantic artists such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley. As a concept it coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. A summit was somewhere one could stand out – could be outstanding. The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness? ‘Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills … the more they congregate the more they corrupt each other,’ Rousseau had noted, an observation which would gain in potency and relevance as urbanization increased over the course of the nineteenth century. Cities teemed with merchants and thieves, but the mountains! – the mountains were devoid of sin. The mountain-top became a ubiquitous symbol of emancipation for the city-bound spirit, a crystallization of the Romantic-pastoral desire to escape the atomized, socially dissolute city. You could be lonely in a city crowd, but you could find solitude on a mountain-top.

  And of course it was upon a summit, in solitude, that the Romantic fondness for meditation could be both indulged and encouraged. Time and again in Romantic documents we find the traveller exclaiming at the inrush of lofty thoughts induced by height. ‘What great spectacles fill the soul of the philosopher who is on top of a peak!’ declared Pivery de Senancour in 1800. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure had been even more ecstatic two decades earlier: ‘What language can reproduce the sensations and paint the ideas with which these great spectacles [mountains] fill the soul of the philosopher who is on top of a peak? He seems to dominate our globe, to discover the sources of its motion, and to recognise at least the principal agents that effect its revolutions.’ Romanticism fused into the imagination of altitude a new element of attractiveness: that one was almost guaranteed enlightenment – spiritual or artistic epiphany – by getting high.* The mountain-top and the viewpoint became accepted sites of contemplation and creativity: places where you were brought to see further both physically and metaphysically. From the Victorian family eating their picnic on the North Downs and casting their eyes over London to the pioneering alpinist toiling upwards towards a virgin summit, all visitors to altitude were drawn in part by the conviction that they would be rewarded both with far sight and with insight: that mindscapes as well as landscapes would be revealed to them.

  In 1836 Charles Darwin could claim with some confidence that ‘Everyone must know the feeling of triumph and pride which a grand view from a height communicates to the mind.’ What a change that was from Bishop Berkeley’s displeasure at the ‘horrible precipices’ over which he passed in 1714. In little more than a century, height had come to connote a host of attractive characteristics. It equalled escape, it equalled solitude, it equalled spiritual and artistic epiphany. Height was also held to have physically hygienic properties: at altitude, the air was thought to be cleaner – and to be a cleanser. ‘There is assuredly morality in the oxygen of the mountains,’ announced John Tyndall in 1871. From the 1850s onwards, numerous high-altitude sanatoria were established in the European Alps, at which tubercular or asthmatic patients – among them Katherine Mansfield and Robert Louis Stevenson – resided, absorbing the mountain sunlight, breathing the mountain air and thrashing out big ideas over dinner. When my great-grandfather was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis, he was advised by his doctors to move to Switzerland. The air was no help; he died in 1934, and was buried in a mountain cemetery with a view of the peaks. But it was because of this that my grandfather was brought up in Switzerland, and it was there that he contracted his love of the mountains, which I in turn would catch from him.

  By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the veneration of height was almost automatic. For those inhabitants of Europe who didn’t care to run the risks of stepping on to a hillside, or couldn’t afford to, the experience of being at height was available in a multitude of forms. Books of landscape photographs and engravings, expedition journals and knockdown editions of Romantic poetry all provided stay-at-homes with at least second-hand versions of the facts and the feelings about altitude. Following the lead of earlier continental mountain painters such as Salvator Rosa and Josse de Momper, nineteenth-century artists including Philippe de Loutherbourg, J. M. W. Turner, Alexander Cozens and John Martin filled their canvases with precipitous scenery, using distorted scales, unconventional viewpoints and disrupted horizons to unbalance their viewers and pull them into the vertiginous worlds of their images. At the Leicester Square Rotunda or the Panorama Strand in the 1820s and 1830s, spectators could wander in the darkened central circular platform, while around them for 360° stretched a multiple vanishing-point painting of the Mont Blanc massif – an ‘alporama’. There for an hour or two they could fill their heads with the startling geometries of the mountainscape: the glint of snow and ice, and the black ribs of rock. The ambition of the alporama was hyperrealism, and it was successful – visitors had been known to experience acute disorientation, and even vertigo. And after the 1850s, what one passenger called the ‘delightful velocity’ of the railways hastened the return journey to Zermatt from sixty-six days to fourteen, and the entrepreneurship of one Thomas Cook – dubbed ‘The Napoleon of Excursions’ – brought the masses to see the Matterhorn: such a bracing shock after the low-altitude skylines of Britain’s cities.

  A common heritage of feeling was passed down through the generations and spread across a swathe of people. The difference between those who died on the mountains, those who took a Thomas Cook tour to the Alps and those who merely read about mountains or gazed at their representations was one of degree and not one of kind. All were susceptible to the spell of altitude, and all were part of its casting. There was a near-perfect marriage between the attention-seeking mountaineers and the ascension-seeking public. A new kind of altitude sickness had come to grip the common imagination, for so long antagonistic to the mountains: one in which the nausea came from not being at height. John Ruskin alluded to it when he confessed that in a totally flat landscape, he felt ‘a kind of sickness and pain’.

  In 1827 a young man named John Auldjo, fresh out of his degree at Cambridge and enthused by the descriptions he had heard about the Alps, arrived in Chamonix with the intention of becoming the seventh Briton to summit Mont Blanc. Soon after reaching the town, he was sought out by a local who had survived a badly fractured skull from rockfall on Mont Blanc in 1791. The old man pushed his dented head close to Auldjo’s face, and warned him not to attempt the ascent. Auldjo scoffed – though he did take the precaution of hiring six guides to ensure his safe passage up the mountain.

  A battalion of guides could not have saved Auldjo from the afflictions he suffered on the mountain, however. Altitude sickness, hypothermia, snow-blindness and narcolepsy were visited upon him on the way up; heat-stroke, dyspepsia, loss of motor control and eventually total collapse were added to those ailments on the way back down. He made the summit, but it was due only to the concerted efforts of his six guides that Auldjo survived. When Auldjo was at his hypothermic worst, and utterly incapable of movement, his guides huddled round him and heated him up using their own body warmth. Thus thawed, he was able to descend the final few hours of the mountain. He staggered back to a hero’s welcome in Chamonix, spent two days recuperating, then bid a tearful farewell to his guides and set off for London.

  On his return to England, Auldjo wrote up an account of his ascent which divided its time between describing his extreme suffering and describing the extreme beauty of the mountain. On the debit side, Auldjo noted manfully, the climb had been exceptionally arduous, and ‘the cold excessive’. However, he declared, all in all his suffering had been worth it for the view from the summit of Mont Blanc had revealed to him scenes ‘of dazzling brilliancy, too much almost for the eye to encounter and such as no powers of language could adequately portray’.

  Concluding his story, Auldjo observed that ‘perhaps will it not be decreed presumptuous in me to say that this brief narrative may be consulted with advantage by all those, who inf
luenced by a congenial spirit of adventure, may be disposed to engage in a similar undertaking.’ Presumptuous it certainly was not: Auldjo’s mixture of derring-do and sublime sensibility proved popular, and his book sold very well. Not only did his account help to enhance the fascination of Mont Blanc in the public imagination, it also familiarized the idea that a view – that ‘dazzling brilliancy’ he had seen from the summit – might be worth risking one’s life for. The number of summit attempts from Englishmen described a steep upwards curve in the years following 1828 – Auldjo’s book had caught the imagination of the country.

  Among those who read it was a young Londoner called Albert Smith, whose imagination was so inflamed by Auldjo’s description that he was moved to travel to Chamonix himself and attempt the mountain. In 1851 he climbed it successfully, and with considerably less discomfort than his hero, Auldjo. Smith’s ascent, as we know, became the subject of his best-selling show, which opened in London in March 1853. News of the mountain also spread to America, and among those who read the account of Smith’s ascent, and his theatrical descriptions of the incomparable view from the summit, was Henry Bean, who, on 5 September 1870, accompanied by his American friend Mr Randall, a Scots Reverend named George MacCorkendale, three porters and five guides, started his ascent of Mont Blanc.

  It all began so well. After an easy climb in pristine weather, the group overnighted at the Cabin des Grands Mulets. Having set off again in warm sunlight the following morning, the group were observed from the telescopes of Chamonix to have reached the summit of the mountain at 2.30 p.m. and they turned immediately to begin their descent. Then, with a terrible swiftness, a thundercloud closed around them and they were lost from view.

  Were we able, twenty-four hours later, to start off up the mountain and follow the path taken by Mr Bean and Mr Randall, we would leave the town of Chamonix and ascend steeply through the dense pine forests that texture the piedmont, over the ruptured ice of the Glacier des Pèlerins. Here we would enter the lower cloud of the storm which still wrapped the mountain, pass quickly and nervously beneath the echoey couloir of the Aiguille du Midi, which is sending down irregular fusillades of rockfall, and finally we would enter the blizzard which has enfolded the top of Mont Blanc, and which is so severe that once within it there is only whiteness in every direction.

  And here, somewhere on the expressionless snowscapes of the Col du Dôme, we would find Mr Bean. He is hunched in a snow-hole that he and one of the porters have dug using their alpenstocks and their stiffened hands as shovels. Mr Bean is on the outside facing inwards, barely grasping the stub of a pencil. His fingers are white and violet with frostbite, and rigid. His clothing is frozen into a herringbone-tweed carapace, which makes movement of any sort difficult. Leaning on the back of the porter, who is hunkered in the snow-hole with him, Mr Bean is writing a few words to his wife in a notebook that he has carried up the mountain. His pencil moves slowly and stiffly across the page. The scratch scratch of coarse lead on coarse paper is inaudible against the raving of the wind. He adds to the words he has already written:

  TUESDAY, SEPT. 6. I have made the ascent of Mont Blanc, with ten persons – eight guides, and Mr. MacCorkendale and Mr. Randall. We reached the summit at half past 2. Immediately after quitting it, we were enveloped in clouds of snow. We passed the night in a grotto hollowed in the snow, which afforded us but poor shelter, and I was ill all night.

  SEPT. 7 – MORNING. The cold is excessive. The snow falls heavily and without interruption. The guides take no rest.

  EVENING. My Dear Hessie, we have been two days on Mont Blanc, in the midst of a terrible hurricane of snow, we have lost our way, and are in a hole scooped in the snow, at an altitude of 15,000 feet. I have no longer any hope of descending.

  At this point Mr Bean’s handwriting becomes larger, loopier, less steady:

  Perhaps this note-book will be found and sent to you. We have nothing to eat, my feet are already frozen, and I am exhausted; I have strength to write only a few words more. I have left means for C’s education; I know you will employ them wisely. I die with faith in God, and with loving thoughts of you. Farewell to all. We shall meet again, in Heaven … I think of you always.

  What is both fascinating and macabre about this sequence of events is how clearly it allows us to see certain seductive, dangerous ideas about altitude being passed on from person to person – like the Black Spot in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – until at last they result in tragedy. It illustrates how emotional attitudes about concepts as indeterminate as height, views and summits are transmitted. John Auldjo is stirred by the accounts he has read by others who have seen or scaled the Alps, and decides to climb Mont Blanc. His own narrative inspires Albert Smith to emulate the feat, and Smith by means of his celebrated Piccadilly Show inspires tens of thousands of people to see Mont Blanc first-hand. Among those influenced by Smith is Henry Bean, who is moved to leave his wife and embark on his awfully big adventure. Auldjo and Smith survive; Bean, MacCorkendale, Randall and their eight nameless helpers die. All of these men were attracted to the mountains by two intertwined ideas: first, the abstract notion that reaching the summit of a mountain was a worthwhile end in itself; and second, the belief that the view from a great height – the ‘scenes of dazzling brilliancy’ which Auldjo described – could be sufficiently beautiful to merit risking one’s life to see it.

  Like everybody else who has perished in the mountains – the Russian Buddhas frozen on the top of Pik Pobeda; the father and son whose memorial my grandfather walked past on his way to school – Bean was sent to his death by ways of feeling set in motion many years before his birth. Because in the ways we perceive and react to forms of landscape we are prompted, primed and reminded by those who have gone before, no death in the mountains is isolated from historical circumstance. Although we might like to believe that our experience of altitude is utterly individual, each of us is in fact heir to a complex and largely invisible dynasty of feelings: we see through the eyes of innumerable and anonymous predecessors. The unexpected pleasures which Evelyn discovered at height; Friedrich’s iconic image of the traveller on his rocky promontory; Shelley’s aerial poetry; Auldjo’s ecstatic vision from the top of Mont Blanc – all of these played a part in transforming the way altitude has been imagined. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the imagination of millions is susceptible to what the mountaineer and writer Joe Simpson calls the ‘beckoning silence of great height’: the inverted gravity of mountain-going – the attractive force that pulls you ever upwards.

  * Not everybody likes climbing mountains, of course. Somebody funny, I can’t remember who, remarked sagely that ‘When a man’s circumference bears more than a certain ratio to his altitude, he prefers the plains in the bottom of his soul.’ This said, the invention of funiculars, cable-cars, chair-lifts and all the other heavy machinery of ascent is testimony to the urge felt to get high even by those not naturally predisposed to walking up mountains.

  * When Keats came to climb actual mountains, he found them not as amenable to inspiration. Of an attempted ascent of a Lake District peak in 1818, we have this account: ‘I should, I think, [have got] to the summit, but unfortunately I was damped by slipping one leg into a squashy hole.’ This is one of the more harmless disjunctions between mountains of the mind and real mountains.

  * The last word on the creative power of the Alps should probably go to Wagner, who included alpenhorns in the score for Tristan und Isolde. ‘[The works] I conceived in that serene and glorious Switzerland, with my eyes on the beautiful gold-crowned mountains,’ he bashfully declared after the first performance, ‘are masterpieces, and nowhere else could I have conceived them.’

  6

  Walking off the Map

  All the most exciting charts and maps have places on them that are marked ‘Unexplored’.

  ARTHUR RANSOME, SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS, 1930

  The most exciting map I have ever held was a photocopied sheet which supposed
ly represented the far east of the Tian Shan mountains, near where Kyrgyzstan borders China and Kazakhstan. It was exciting because it was so rudimentary – there was a cross to signify a peak, a circle for a lake and a line for a ridge. No contour lines curling around the mountains. No shading to represent dangerous cliffs. And definitely none of those reassuring Ordnance Survey acronyms: FB for footbridge, PO for post office and PH for pub.

  In the centre of the map was outlined the Y-shaped valley carved out of the mountains by the Inylchek glacier. This central highway of the Tian Shan was well enough known. It had first been penetrated by the Russian explorer P. P. Semenov in 1856 and 1857 (he became known afterwards, in the literal way of nineteenth-century Russian nomenclature, as Semenov-Tian-Shanskii). Undeterred by the bands of Kyrgyz brigands which roved the territories around Lake Issyk-Kul, Semenov had pushed as far east as the Santash pass. This area had long been a contested march between China and the different potentates of the Central Asian plains; it was allegedly on the Santash pass that Tamburlaine had instructed each man of his army to add a stone to a pile on their way to war with China. When his depleted army crossed back over the pass after the campaign, each man picked up a stone. Tamburlaine counted the stones which were left, and thereby knew exactly how many soldiers he had lost in China.