Mountains of the Mind Read online

  I read Annapurna three times that summer. It was obvious to me that Herzog had chosen wisely in going for the top, despite the subsequent costs. For what, he and I were agreed, were toes and fingers compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it. This was the lesson I took away from Herzog’s book: that the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain-top – from death in valleys preserve me, O Lord.

  Twelve years after I first read Annapurna – twelve years during which I had spent most of my holidays in the mountains – running my finger along the spines in a second-hand bookshop in Scotland, I came across another copy. That night I sat up late and read it through again, and again fell under its spell. Soon afterwards, I booked flights and a climbing partner – an Army friend of mine called Toby Till – for a week in the Alps.

  We arrived in Zermatt in early June, hoping to climb the Matterhorn before the summer crowds clogged it up. But the mountain was still thickly armoured with ice: too dangerous for us to attempt. So we drove round to the next valley, where the thaw was supposed to be a little more advanced. Our plan was to camp high overnight, and then the following morning ascend a mountain called the Lagginhorn by its easy south-east ridge. At 4,010 metres, I reflected briefly, the Lagginhorn was almost exactly half the height of Annapurna.

  It snowed that night, and I lay awake listening to the heavy flakes falling on to the flysheet of our tent. They clumped together to make dark continents of shadow on the fabric, until the drifts became too heavy for the slope of the tent and slid with a soft hiss down to the ground. In the small hours the snow stopped, but when we unzipped the tent door at 6 a.m. there was an ominous yellowish storm light drizzling through the clouds. We set off apprehensively towards the ridge.

  Once we were on it, the ridge turned out to be harder than it looked from below. The difficulty came from the old, rotten snow which was cloaking the ridge to a depth of several feet, together with six inches of fresh fall lying on top of it, uncompacted and sticky. Rotten snow is either granular, like sugar, or forms a crunchy matrix of longer, thinner crystals which have been hollowed out and separated from one another. Either way, it is unstable.

  Instead of picking our way cleanly from rock to rock, we had to clamber along the snow, never sure if there was a rock beneath each foot placement, or air. There was no path broken to guide us, either: evidently nobody had been up the ridge since the previous summer. And it was cold, too, violently cold. Where my nose ran, the liquid froze to my face in plump trails. The wind made my eyes water, and the eyelashes on my right eye froze together. I had to separate them by pulling my eyelids apart.

  After two hours of work we were nearing the summit, but the angle of the ridge was becoming more severe and our progress had become even slower. I could feel the cold chilling me deep inside. My brain, too, felt slower, more slurred, as though the temperature had congealed my thought processes, turned them viscous. We could have turned back, of course. We carried on.

  The final fifty feet of the mountain were very steep indeed, and deep in old, unsound snow. I stopped and assessed the situation. It looked as though the mountain could shuck all the snow off at any moment, like shrugging off a coat. Now and again little avalanches scurried past me. I heard the clatter of a rock-fall on the east face of the mountain.

  I was jammed into the snow with the toes of my boots, the slope rearing up in front of my face. I tilted my head right backwards and looked up to the skyline. Clouds were hurtling over the summit, and for a moment it felt as though the mountain was toppling slowly on to me.

  I turned back and called down to Toby, twenty feet below me, ‘Do we go on? I don’t like the look of this stuff at all. I reckon the whole lot could go at any time.’

  Below Toby, the slope narrowed down to a chute which funnelled out over the precipices on the south face of the ridge. If I slipped, or the snow gave way, I’d slide past Toby, pull him off, and we’d free-fall hundreds of feet down to the glacier.

  ‘Of course we do, Rob, of course we do,’ Toby called up.

  ‘Right.’

  I had only one ice-axe with me, but the slope was severe enough to need two. Some improvisation was necessary. I transferred the axe to my left hand and made the fingers of my right hand as rigid as possible. I would try to stab them into the snow, using them as an axe-head to give myself purchase. Nervously, I started to climb.

  The snow held, the ad hoc axe worked, and suddenly we were there, on a summit the size of a kitchen table, clasping the iron-piping cross which peeked out of the thick snow on the summit, terrified and elated at once. To every side of us the mountain fell away. It felt as though we were balanced on the pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower. The clouds had cleared and a glossy white light had replaced the murk of the early morning. I spotted the yellow dot of our tent thousands of feet below. Seen from this height, the glacier which we had crossed the previous day to reach the base of the ridge resolved itself into a pattern of shallow pale billows. I could see dozens of tiny meltwater lakes which had formed in the hollows between the billows, winking at me like shields in the sun. Their blueness was startling. To our west, the light of the rising sun poured down the mountain faces of the Mischabel range. The wind was fierce, drumming against the skin of my cheeks until it was numb, and pushing coldly through the gaps in my clothing.

  I looked down at my hands. I had been wearing thin gloves all the way up and, from jabbing them into the ice slope, three fingertips on the right-hand glove had been ripped off. I couldn’t feel those fingers. In fact, I realized with a strange lack of alarm, I couldn’t feel the hand at all. I held it up close to my streaming eyes. The fingertips which were exposed to the freezing air had turned a waxy yellow colour and become translucent, like old cheese.

  I didn’t have any spare gloves. But there wasn’t time to worry about it anyway, because the rotten snow which had just about tolerated our weight during the ascent would already be melting in the morning sun. We needed to get down as fast as possible.

  We moved quickly and efficiently during the descent, until we reached what looked like our final obstacle. It was a snow bridge, a thin, sagging ridge of snow maybe thirty feet long suspended between two rock pinnacles – like a sheet pegged up at either end. It was far too sharp and fragile to walk along the top of, and there was no way to climb down and round it. We’d have to climb out along its side, as we had done on the way up, with even less guarantee that the whole structure wouldn’t collapse and send us plummeting down to the glacier.

  Toby began to kick himself a little bucket seat in the soft snow.

  ‘I take it from your behaviour that you’d like me to go first?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, please, that’d be grand.’

  I edged out along the near-vertical side of the ridge, kicking my feet into its side, the rope bowing horizontally between me and Toby. Where I kicked my feet in, the snow slid away like wet sugar, with a hiss. Here I am, I thought, standing on a more or less vertical wall of slushy snow, edging crabwise across its face, with frostnip in three fingers and only one axe. I cursed Maurice Herzog. Then I glanced down.

  Between my legs I could see a whole lot of nothing. I kicked another crampon in, and a big slab of rotten snow lurched off from beneath my foot and cart-wheeled away towards the glacier, disintegrating as it went. I hung there, my arms raised above me, watching the snow tumble. A tingling began in my buttocks and then scampered to my groin and my thighs, and soon my whole midriff was encased in a humming, jostling swarm of fear. The space felt vast and malevolently active, as though it were inhaling me; pulling me off into its emptiness.

  One axe only – why did I bring only one? Again, I used my right hand, the hand with the waxy fingers, to stab into the snow. The fingers didn’t hurt, which helped. And so I carried on, keeping up a rhythm. Kick, kick, stab, stab, swear. Kick, kick, stab, stab, swear.

  We made it, of course – I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise – and as we sledged d
own the remaining slopes to our tent on our rucksacks, we whooped with joy and relief at having got the summit and made it back.

  Sitting on a boulder outside the tent two hours later, I stared at my fingers with a fatigued disinterest. It had turned into a bright day, warm and windless, and the landscape was illuminated with the exact, egalitarian sunlight of high places. Sound carried precisely through the thin air, and I could hear the clanking and talking of climbers descending the Weissmies, half a mile or so away. My right hand didn’t particularly feel like part of me. But, I was vaguely relieved to notice, only the pads of three fingers were affected, and those not to any serious depth. When I tapped them against the rock they made a hard, hollow sound, like wood knocking on metal. I got out my penknife and started to whittle at them. On the flat grey rock between my knees grew a pile of little iotas of skin. Eventually, when I had whittled down to pink skin, and my fingers had started to hurt at each scrape of the knife, I cremated the pyre of shavings in the orange flame of a lighter. They went with a crackle and the scent of charred flesh.

  Three centuries ago, risking one’s life to climb a mountain would have been considered tantamount to lunacy. The notion barely existed, indeed, that wild landscape might hold any sort of appeal. To the orthodox seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century imagination, natural scenery was appreciated largely for the extent to which it spoke of agricultural fecundity. Meadows, orchards, grazing fields, the rich sillion of crop lands – these were the ideal components of a landscape. Tamed landscapes, in other words, were attractive: landscapes which had had a human order imposed upon them by the plough, the hedgerow and the ditch. As late as 1791 William Gilpin noted that ‘the generality of people’ found wilderness dislikeable. ‘There are few,’ he continued, ‘who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature’s rough productions.’ Mountains, nature’s roughest productions, were not only agriculturally intractable, they were also aesthetically repellent: it was felt that their irregular and gargantuan outlines upset the natural spirit-level of the mind. The politer inhabitants of the seventeenth century referred to mountains disapprovingly as ‘deserts’; they were also castigated as ‘boils’ on the earth’s complexion, ‘warts’, ‘wens’, ‘excrescences’ and even, with their labial ridges and vaginal valleys, ‘Nature’s pudenda’.

  Moreover, mountains were dangerous places to be. It was believed that avalanches could be triggered by stimuli as light as a cough, the foot of a beetle, or the brush of a bird’s wing as it swooped low across a loaded snow-slope. You might fall between the blue jaws of a crevasse, to be regurgitated years later by the glacier, pulped and rigid. Or you might encounter a god, demi-god or monster angry at having their territory trespassed upon – for mountains were conventionally the habitat of the supernatural and the hostile. In his famous Travels, John Mandeville described the tribe of Assassins who lived high among the peaks of the Elbruz range, presided over by the mysterious ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. In Thomas More’s Utopia the Zapoletes – a ‘hideous, savage and fierce’ race – are reputed to dwell ‘in the high mountains’. True, mountains had in the past provided refuge for beleaguered peoples – it was to the mountains that Lot and his daughters fled when they were driven out of Zoar, for instance – but for the most part they were a form of landscape to be avoided. Go around mountains by all means, it was thought, along their flanks or between them if absolutely necessary – as many merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries had to – but certainly not up them.

  During the second half of the 1700s, however, people started for the first time to travel to mountains out of a spirit other than necessity, and a coherent sense began to develop of the splendour of mountainous landscape. The summit of Mont Blanc was reached in 1786, and mountaineering proper came into existence in the middle of the 1800s, induced by a commitment to science (in the sport’s adolescence, no respectable mountaineer would scale a peak without at the very least boiling a thermometer on the summit) but very definitely born of beauty. The complex aesthetics of ice, sunlight, rock, height, angles and air – what John Ruskin called the ‘endless perspicuity of space; the unfatigued veracity of eternal light’ – were to the later nineteenth-century mind unquestionably marvellous. Mountains began to exert a considerable and often fatal power of attraction on the human mind. ‘The effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great,’ Ruskin could claim proudly of his favourite mountain in 1862, ‘that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it.’ Three years later the Matterhorn was climbed for the first time; four of the successful summitteers fell to their deaths during the descent.

  By the end of the century the Alpine peaks had all been climbed – mostly by the British – and almost all the Alpine passes mapped. The so-called Golden Age of mountaineering had come to an end. Europe was considered by many to be passé, and mountaineers began to turn their attention to the Greater Ranges, where they exposed themselves to extreme hardship and even greater risks in their bids to reach the summits of Caucasian, Andean and Himalayan mountains – Ushba, Popocatépetl, Nanga Parbat, Chimborazo, or Kazbek, where Vulcan was said to have chained and bolted Prometheus to the rock.

  The imaginative potency of these greater peaks around the turn of the nineteenth century was formidable, and they frequently became objects of obsession within the minds of their individual admirers. Kanchenjunga, the 8,000-metre peak visible in good weather from the white-roofed hill-station of Darjeeling, enthralled decades of sahibs and memsahibs escaping the lowland heat of the Indian summer. ‘Clear and clean against the intense blue sky the snowy summit of Kinchinjunga,’ intoned Francis Younghusband, the Great Gamer who led the British attack on Tibet in 1904, ‘ethereal as spirit, white and pure in the sunshine … We are uplifted.’ An avid public followed the fortunes of Martin Conway’s bold 1892 expedition to Gasherbrum in the Karakorum via dispatches to The Times of London. And Everest, the highest and most potent of them all, came to enchant the British entière, who considered it very much their mountain. Among the enchanted was George Mallory, whose death on its shoulder in 1924 shocked the nation. A newspaper obituary for Mallory and Irvine drew admiring attention to the ‘close link of minds between the people at home and the assailants themselves’.

  Today, the emotions and attitudes which impelled the early mountaineers still prosper in the Western imagination: indeed if anything they are more unshiftably ensconced there. Mountain-worship is a given to millions of people. The vertical, the ferocious, the icy – all these are now automatically venerated forms of landscape, images of which permeate an urbanized Western culture increasingly hungry for even second-hand experiences of wildness and wilderness. Mountain-going has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities of the past twenty years. An estimated 10 million Americans go mountaineering annually, and 50 million go hiking. Some 4 million people in Britain consider themselves to be hill-walkers of one stripe or another. Global sales of outdoor products and services are reckoned at $10 billion annually, and growing.

  What makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die. In seven murderous weeks in the Alps in the summer of 1997, 103 people were killed. The average annual death toll on the Mont Blanc massif comes to almost three figures. Some winters more people perish in the mountains of Scotland than on the roads surrounding them. When Mallory climbed Everest, it was the last bastion of unconquerable earth, the ‘Third Pole’. It is now a gargantuan, tawdry, frozen Taj Mahal, an elaborately frosted wedding-cake up and down which climbing companies annually yo-yo hundreds of under-experienced clients. Its slopes are studded with modern corpses: most lie within what has become popularly known as the Death Zone, the altitude bracket within which the human body enters a gradual but unstoppable process of degeneration.

  Over the course of three centuries, therefore, a tremendous revolution of perception occurred in the West concerning mountains. The qualities for which mountains wer
e once reviled – steepness, desolation, perilousness – came to be numbered among their most prized aspects.

  So drastic was this revolution that to contemplate it now is to be reminded of a truth about landscapes: that our responses to them are for the most part culturally devised. That is to say, when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess – savageness, for example, or bleakness – and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory. Although people have traditionally gone into wild places in some way to escape culture or convention, they have in fact perceived that wilderness, as just about everything is perceived, through a filter of associations. William Blake put his finger on this truth. ‘The tree,’ he wrote, ‘which moves some to tears of joy is, in the eyes of others, only a green thing which stands in the way.’ The same, historically, holds for mountains. For centuries they were regarded as useless obstructions – ‘considerable protuberances’, as Dr Johnson dismissively dubbed them. Now they are numbered among the natural world’s most exquisite forms, and people are willing to die for love of them.

  What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans – a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountain has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves. Mountains are only contingencies of geology. They do not kill deliberately, nor do they deliberately please: any emotional properties which they possess are vested in them by human imaginations. Mountains – like deserts, polar tundra, deep oceans, jungles and all the other wild landscapes that we have romanticized into being – are simply there, and there they remain, their physical structures rearranged gradually over time by the forces of geology and weather, but continuing to exist over and beyond human perceptions of them. But they are also the products of human perception; they have been imagined into existence down the centuries. This book tries to plot how those ways of imagining mountains have altered over time.