Mountains of the Mind Read online

  It was Semenov’s reports which enticed subsequent Russian explorers and cartographers to the region, including the malevolent but brilliant Nikolai Przhevalsky. A proudly European Polish-Russian of Cossack descent, Przhevalsky detested the Asian peoples among whom he spent so much of his life. In his last book he suggested exterminating all Mongolians and replacing them with Cossacks, a policy which Stalin – rumoured to be Przhevalsky’s son – would go some distance towards enforcing. Przhevalsky overcame his abhorrence of non-Europeans sufficiently to lead four expeditions across Central Asia, including one to the far east of Kyrgyzstan. He died among Asians too, in 1888, in Karakol, the town at the eastern tip of Lake Issyk-Kul which in Russian is now named after him. His shining black statue surveys one of that town’s dusty squares, and there is a little-visited museum devoted to his memory, filled with the bric-à-brac of his trade: saddle-bags, maps, weapons and – oddly – troupes of stuffed animals.

  After Przhevalsky came the Munich-born explorer Gottfried Merzbacher. The impulse which drove Merzbacher into these mountains was not a political one – Przhevalsky had been a key player in the Great Game – but rather a desire to know. Merzbacher had read Semenov’s accounts of the region, and had been fascinated by his description of the ‘gigantic nodal point’ of the Tian Shan range, a spotless and colossal pyramidal mountain of pink marble which he had named Khan Tengri – the Lord of Heaven. The Russian geologists who later visited the area confirmed Semenov’s speculations but, like Semenov, lacked the mountaineering skills to penetrate far enough into the hostile range to reach the peak.

  From 1902 to 1903, with the help of two Tyrolean guides and an escort of Cossacks, Merzbacher attempted to pick a way through the maze of ridges and glaciers to Khan Tengri. The mountains did not give up their secret easily: Merzbacher was avalanched, attacked by hornets, hounded by abysmal weather, mutinied on by his staff and nearly crushed by a rock earthquake which also triggered an ice-fall. Most seriously of all, as far as Merzbacher was concerned, his toothbrush was lost in a river crossing. But he survived all of these adversities, and in August 1903 he discovered the Inylchek glacier and, at the end of it, nearly on the border with China, he found the Lord of Heaven.

  The Inylchek glacier provided Merzbacher with a road into the mountains. Over many millennia it had bulldozed and levelled all the terrain it had encountered, grinding down with infinite patience mountains more than 20,000 feet high. Without it, Merzbacher would not have been able to get near Khan Tengri. Even with its aid, it took him many days of hard walking to ascend the glacier.

  When we came to the Tian Shan we were whisked up the Inylchek glacier by helicopter: a fast forty-minute flight which first followed the grey melt-river that came bellowing out of the glacier’s snout, and then the grubby blue ice of the glacier itself. For all its convenience, it was not a happy journey.

  The helicopters flew out of a remote Russian military base located in a valley deep in the Tian Shan. The base had been established during the Sino–Soviet tensions of the 1960s as a listening-post for eavesdropping on Chinese communications. I was in Kyrgyzstan as part of a small and – in retrospect – dangerously under-experienced team. We had come with the intention of bagging unclimbed peaks. After flying in to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, we had travelled for several days by train, bus, taxi and foot, to Karakol. From there, it had taken a seven-hour journey in an eight-wheeled lorry, over the rubbly mining roads which led through the western reaches of the mountains, to get to the military base. The night we arrived, we talked to a pair of tall, stern Americans who had flown back down to the base from the glacier. They told us the flight was far more dangerous than the mountains, and that among the rocks on the south bank of the glacier they had seen the corpses of three helicopters.

  At 6 a.m. on the morning of our flight, I pushed aside the tent-flap to see our pilot, Sergei, apparently Sellotaping the tail-rotor back on to the helicopter. He gave a cheery smile and a thumbs-up. Half an hour later, when the ground crew seemed satisfied that the helicopter was in no way airworthy, fifteen of us were weighed – ominously – on an ancient set of abattoir-scales, and then ushered aboard. Also travelling with us, it appeared, were fifty watermelons, dozens of pallets of food and a dead goat. Finally, the ground crew heaved a 100lb red gas canister into the cabin. It was placed between my legs as the rotor-blades began their slow build-up of noise. ‘In the case of a crash, hug it like your mother,’ yelled the head mechanic through the helicopter door before he slammed it shut. It was clearly an exit line he’d used before.

  During the flight, I clasped the canister between my thighs with the tenacity of a wrestler. I felt lucky – at least I ’d die first and fastest. As we reached the nose of the glacier, a cold updraft caught the helicopter and the whole vehicle shuddered; for a second I thought we were going to plummet from the sky. But it stabilized, and flew on to touch down on the turbulent ice. We opened the doorway to the roar and thump of the rotors, and leapt down heavily one by one on to the glacier, where the downdraft was sending ice crystals scurrying away in ever increasing circles.

  This glacier was the Y-shaped area marked in the centre of my rudimentary map. I–N–Y–L–C–H–E–K: the letters were strung out along its length. The peaks which bordered the glacier were named and spot-heighted. Beyond them, however, the details faded out. No names. No heights. Just crosses, lines and circles. And beyond that – blankness. The unknown.

  Later that day, once we had set up our tents, I followed a faint track which led up the moraine towards China. After half a mile or so it turned behind a rocky spur and into a glacial cirque. I stood and watched the business of the cirque for a while – chunks of serac calving from a small hanging glacier, leaving patches of fresh blue ice behind them; a chough with its bright orange beak mewing to an invisible mate; a rough pyramid of shale shivering and reassembling itself as the main glacier shifted beneath it. As I walked on, the flimsy sunlight flashed off something close to me. There was a small metal plaque fastened to an outcrop of mud-brown rock. And another, and another. I walked over to the rock. It was a cemetery for those who had died on the mountains. There were fifteen plaques bolted to the rock: thirty-one names. Most of the dead were Russian; there was also a German, two Americans and an Englishman. Niches had been chipped into the rock beneath all but one of the Russian plaques, and objects had been placed in them as offerings or elegies: the grim haberdashery of death. There was a cheap plastic doll, its peroxide-blond hair and scarlet dress startling against the quiet tones of the rock. Two blackened candlewicks in a fat puddle of red wax. A brittle head of edelweiss. A ceramic Madonna, permanently weeping tiny lapis tears.

  The Englishman had no niche, just a plaque on which rust was dully blooming. ‘Paul David Fletcher, Tian Shan, 16 August 1989,’ it read. And below that, in bolder letters, ‘’ – ‘Englishman.’ Why had he come here, I wondered briefly? What had he expected to find in this place? Not death, certainly. My mind kept returning to the plaques I had seen, particularly to Fletcher’s, I suppose because of the automatic selfishness of the memory: because he of all the dead resembled me the most closely. I wondered again what, ten years ago, had drawn him to the Tian Shan, thousands of miles from England. What had he imagined that inaccessible landscape held for him?

  I wandered back to camp, and was introduced to our guide, Dmitri. Dmitri was built like a polar bear and bearded like Santa Claus. He claimed to be the ice-climbing champion of the Arctic Circle, and I was inclined not to doubt him, at least not aloud.

  A few nights after arriving on the glacier, we were sitting around a table with Dmitri in his hut, a ramshackle structure of tarpaulin and planking. It was blizzarding outside. Even with the screech of the storm-wind, we could still hear the sounds of the mountains – the musketry of rockfall and, less frequently, the bomb-rumble of an avalanche. In the middle of the table, illuminating the proceedings, was a halogen lamp; a wasp’s nest in a glass jar, glowing yellow-white. When I stared at the
lamp and then glanced away at the darkness of the hut, the impression of the gauze haunted my sight, so bright it was branded temporarily on to my retina. I looked around the table; the intense light lit the front of our faces, and the backs of our skulls faded away into darkness.

  On the table Dmitri had placed two tin bowls. In one were triangles of orange melon, and in the other a dozen creamy garlic cloves. Dmitri husked an onion. Its flesh was very white. Holding the bulb of the onion together with the finger and thumb of one hand, he cut it across four times with a knife. Then he let his hand go, and tapped the onion with the knife, like a magician touching a top hat with his wand. Eight white wedges of onion rocked backwards on to the table, like the petals of a flower opening. Finally he lined up five little thick-glass tumblers, and filled them with a vodka so strong it was viscous, like petrol.

  We drank and ate. Afterwards, my eyes watering from the onion and the vodka, I asked Dmitri about what lay beyond the ink lines of my map, on the blank page.

  ‘There is nothing there. Only unclimbed peaks.’

  ‘Can we get there?’

  ‘Of course. We can walk in,’ he looked round at us, with gentle contempt in his eyes, ‘or better, but for dollars, we can fly in, by helicopter. Last year we dropped a group there’ – he waved his hand vaguely towards the south – ‘and they climbed four new peaks in a week. If you like we can go to the next valley along, beyond the ridge. It is not explored.’

  The following morning, I stood with Dmitri on the moraine of the glacier, my hungover head ringing in the sunshine, and asked him where the unexplored valley was. He pointed south-east to where a high bowed ridge of snow cupped the blue sky. No one had ever been into the territory beyond that ridge.

  Suddenly I felt almost sick with the desire to go there. I sat down on a glacial boulder, which was already warm from the sun. I unfolded my map, and looked from the ridge to the map, and to the ridge again.

  The whiteness of the sheet said it perfectly. We would be the first people to set foot on that snow, to lay eyes on those mountains. We would climb invincibly and brilliantly; we would summit four difficult peaks and christen one each. Afterwards our names would always be associated with those mountains, that valley. Our memory would be indivisible from the landscape we had travelled so far to see.

  We didn’t go, of course. It would have been too expensive and it would also, given our inexperience, have been almost suicidal. Instead we climbed a peak across the glacier which had been climbed only once before, seven years previously, by a Czech team. With each step I tried to forget the memory of their going, and pretend to myself that we were the trailblazers, the pioneers, the path-breakers: that we were the first to have stood on that summit and been stunned into silence by that view. But we weren’t, and at the time that disappointed me more than I could say.

  The view up the Inylchek glacier towards the unexplored valley. The valley begins behind the first unclouded peak on the skyline.

  The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen on to which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations. Like Echo’s cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it. The blank spaces on a map – ‘blank spaces for a boy to dream gloriously over’, as Joseph Conrad once called them – can be filled with whatever promise or dread one wishes to ascribe to them. They are places of infinite possibility. The pungent longing I felt for that immaculate valley beyond the ridge was a longing for my own disguised dreams. And my dreams, of course, were driven by the desire to go somewhere no one had gone before, to do something no one had done before: the desires for priority and originality which are so deeply entrenched in the Western imagination.

  The concept of the unknown has not always possessed an allure in and of itself. For centuries the chief incentives for exploration were economic, political or egotistical ones: the desire for money, or territory, or glory. The unknown per se held no allure; wise explorers plotted out their journeys on the maps of the familiar. Once again, it was the later eighteenth century which incubated the longing for the unknown in the Western imagination. During the second half of the 1700s in Europe there emerged a new and distinctive appetite for remote countries, for different territories, tastes and sensations – for orders of experience we might now call exotic; meaning literally on the outside. In short, for discovery. This sharpening desire for discovery reflected various frustrations. Chief among these was a spreading fatigue at the pieties and stagnancy of urban bourgeois existence. The known and the predictable became qualities to be kicked against, and a hunger grew for regions where one could expect the unexpected. The unknown came to be seen as a gateway to these alternative orders of experience. Charles Baudelaire put it well several decades later: ‘Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau.’ Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.

  From the 1770s onwards, this potent intellectual lust for the unknown was translated dramatically into action. The sixty years straddling the turn of the eighteenth century were the golden age of exploration. Through the ice-thickened water of the Arctic north, among the Pacific islands and across the deserts of Africa, adventurers and explorers travelled in search of wealth and beauty. Above all, these people were driven by a desire for novelty. Their paramount goal was to penetrate the unknown, and to see the unseen. Discovery became an end in itself, an ethos which accorded with the intellectual fascination of those decades for originality in all its forms. The ideal Enlightenment being, observed the essayist William Duff in 1767, should occupy himself in ‘exploring unbeaten tracks and making new discoveries’. In 1764, shortly after he had ascended to the throne, George III initiated a campaign of sea-bound exploration. The mandate he gave his explorers was a simple one: ‘to make new discoveries in the southern hemisphere’. So electrified was a young Scotsman named James Bruce at the prospect of being the first man to ‘yield a discovery’ in George III’s reign that he took himself off to explore the mountains and rivers of Abyssinia.

  The explorers who visited these wild regions were the film-stars of their age; at once glamorous and notorious. When they returned – if they returned – they wrote up their exploits, and illustrated them with fold-out maps on which were marked, in lines of dots and dashes, their sallies into the unknown. In 1822 the British Arctic explorer John Franklin got back to London after three years on the Arctic tundra. It was rumoured that he and his starving crew had survived on a diet of boot-leather, lichen and, eventually, each other. Franklin’s account of the expedition was a bestseller, and secondhand copies changed hands for far more than the original asking price. Lieutenant William Edward Parry, a doggedly passionate Arctic explorer, became so famous from his repeated trips north that he was mobbed by fans in the street.*

  Even after the supposedly golden age of exploration had drawn to a close in the 1830s, the idea of the geographical unknown remained an energizing force in nineteenth-century foreign policy. Britain, France, Russia, Spain, Belgium: all the great expansionist powers of that century dedicated themselves to tingeing the blanks on the map with their chosen colour – green for France, orange for Russia and pink for Britain. (In America, of course, a different struggle was taking place: the struggle to push the frontier of so-called civilization towards the Pacific – to squeeze the unknown out of existence against the western seaboard in the name of Manifest Destiny.) Volley after volley of expeditions was fired off by the imperial nations in a bid to stake, claim and supposedly civilize the unknown regions of the world.

  As each blank was filled in, so a new one was nominated to take its place. The source of the Nile, the North-West Passage, the North and South Poles, Tibet, Everest: each generation of the nineteenth century found a new geographical mystery to puzzle over and obsess about. The German explorer Julius von Payer spoke for much of the reading public, as well as for his fellow explorers, when he remarked that ‘No more exciting situation can be imagined, than that of an exp
lorer in unknown lands especially when nature seems to have surrounded him with an impenetrable wall, and the earth is as yet untrodden by man.’

  The British, seemingly more than any other imperial power, were fuelled by the desire to make the whole globe known; to grid it and to girdle it with maps. In 1830 the Royal Geographical Society was founded ‘for the advancement of geographical science’, and before Victoria’s reign was long under way the aim of filling in the remaining white spaces on the world map had been raised to the status of both cultural orthodoxy and policy issue. ‘If there is talk of an unknown land into which no Englishman has penetrated,’ declared a Times editorial from 1854, ‘he must be the first to visit the place.’ In 1846 John Barrow, at the time the Second Secretary to the Admiralty, proclaimed that ‘The North Pole is the only thing in the world about which we know nothing; and that want of all knowledge ought to operate as a spur to adopt the means of wiping away that stain of ignorance from this enlightened age.’ Barrow wasn’t telling the truth – Antarctica and the Himalaya were far less known about than the North Pole – but his impassioned rhetoric nicely catches the fervour with which the mid-century British wanted to solve the globe’s mysteries.

  Undoubtedly, the widespread fetishization of exploration and discovery during the nineteenth century affected contemporary perceptions of mountains. For those who could not be fully fledged explorers, but who felt the pull of the unknown, going to the mountains offered an attractive paraphrase of the experience of exploration. And what made mountains especially appealing for European explorers manqués was their proximity to home. You didn’t need to travel impossibly far to get to the mountains, or convince an Admiralty funding board of the worth of your trip. What was needed to experience the mountainous unknown was not a prolonged horizontal journey – the year it might take to sail south to the Antarctic, for example, or the many weeks battling north through ship-high waves and ship-wide icebergs to the Arctic – but a briskly vertical one. In just a day, and equipped only with determination, a pair of sturdy shoes and a knapsack of victuals, you could ascend from the benevolence of a Swiss meadow to the Arctic asperities of a high Alpine peak.