Mountains of the Mind Read online

  A disjunction between the imagined and the real is a characteristic of all human activities, but it finds one of its sharpest expressions in the mountains. Stone, rock and ice are significantly less amenable to the hand’s touch than to the mind’s eye, and the mountains of the earth have often turned out to be more resistant, more fatally real, than the mountains of the mind. As Herzog discovered on Annapurna, and I discovered on the Lagginhorn, the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountains one climbs. These are matters of hard, steep, sharp rock and freezing snow; of extreme cold; of a vertigo so physical it can cramp your stomach and loosen your bowels; of hypertension, nausea and frostbite; and of unspeakable beauty.

  There is a letter which George Mallory wrote to his wife Ruth during the 1921 reconnaissance expedition to Everest. The advance guard of the expedition was camped fifteen miles from the mountain, between a Tibetan monastery and the tongue of the glacier which swept down from the base of Everest, where ice broke, as Mallory described it, ‘like the huge waves of a brown angry sea’. It was an arduous place to be; cold, high and wind-blasted, the wind given body by particles of snow and dust so that it snaked between the rocks in grubby currents. Mallory had spent that day – 28 June – making the first approaches to the mountain on which he would die three years later. It had been an exhausting day: up at 3.15 a.m., and not back until after 8 p.m., covering many miles over glacial ice, moraine and rock. Twice he had fallen into pools of freezing water.

  After the day’s end Mallory lay, exhausted, in his cramped and sagging little tent, and wrote a letter home to Ruth by the granular light of a Tilley lamp. He knew that by the time his letter reached her in England a month later, his work on the mountain would probably have been completed for that year, one way or another. Much of the letter was taken up with an account of the day’s efforts, but in his concluding paragraphs Mallory tried to describe to Ruth how he felt about being in such a place, attempting such a feat. ‘Everest has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen,’ he wrote to her. ‘My darling … I can’t tell you how it possesses me.’

  This book tries to explain how this is possible; how a mountain can come to ‘possess’ a human being so utterly; how such an extraordinary force of attachment to what is, after all, just a mass of rock and ice, can be generated. For this reason, it is a history which scrutinizes not the ways that people have gone into the mountains, but the ways that they have imagined they were going into them, how they have felt about them and how they have perceived them. For this reason it doesn’t deal in names, dates, peaks and heights, like the standard histories of the mountains, but instead in sensations, emotions and ideas. It isn’t really a history of mountaineering at all, in fact, but a history of the imagination.

  ‘ To me / High mountains are a feeling’, declared Byron’s Childe Harold, as he stared reflectively into the still waters of Lac Leman. Each of the following chapters tries to trace a genealogy for a different way of feeling about mountains, to show how that feeling was formed, inherited, reshaped and passed on until it became accepted by an individual or an age. The final chapter discusses how Mount Everest came to possess George Mallory, to cause him to leave his wife and family, and eventually to kill him. Mallory exemplifies the themes of the book, for in him all of these ways of feeling about mountains converged with unusual and lethal force. In this chapter, I have blended Mallory’s letters and journals together with my own suppositions to write a speculative recreation of the three Everest expeditions of the 1920s in which Mallory took part.

  To begin to trace these genealogies of feeling about mountains, we need to move backwards in time – back past me edging nervously along the sheet of snow in the Alps; back past Herzog standing on the top of Annapurna, the names of his illustrious predecessors chasing through his brain; back past Mallory at the base of Everest, scribbling his letter to Ruth on his camp-bed with the Tilley lamp roaring quietly away in the corner; back past four men falling down the cliffs of the Matterhorn in 1865; back towards the time when this modern repertoire of feelings about mountains was just beginning to form. Back, in fact, to the unseasonable cold of an Alpine pass in the summer of 1672, where the philosopher and churchman Thomas Burnet is guiding his young aristocratic charge, the Earl of Wiltshire, over the Alps and down to Lombardy. Because before mountains could become loved, a past had to be defined for them, and for that Burnet was to prove essential.

  2

  The Great Stone Book

  Our imaginations may be awed when we look at the mountains as monuments of the slow working of stupendous forces of nature through countless millenniums.

  LESLIE STEPHEN, 1871

  August 1672 – the high noon of a continental summer. In Milan and Geneva the citizens are sweltering beneath a strong European sun. Many thousands of feet above them, among the snows of the Simplon Pass – one of the major crossing points of the European Alps – shivers Thomas Burnet. Shivering with him is the young Earl of Wiltshire, great-great-grandson of Thomas Boleyn, the father of the ill-starred Anne. The boy, his family have decided, needs educating and Burnet, an Anglican churchman possessed of a prodigious and restive imagination, has taken what will be a decade-long sabbatical from his fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, to act as chaperone and cicerone to a succession of teenage aristocrats – of whom the young earl is the first.

  For Burnet it is an excuse to see the Catholic continent. They will cross the Simplon Pass with their sullen guide and his train of braying mules, and then travel southwards, past the long gleam of Lake Maggiore, through the orchards and villages of the foothills, across the green baize of the Lombardy Plains, and down finally to the pale and edifying cities of Northern Italy – Milan first among them – which the boy must see.

  Before that, though, the crossing. There is little to recommend the Simplon Pass. A rudimentary hostelry exists at its highest point, but it isn’t a pleasant place for a night’s sleep. The cold is intrusive, and there are bears and wolves in the area. And the hostelry itself is really a shack, staffed by Savoyards who grudgingly double as shepherds and hoteliers.

  Yet, despite these multiple discomforts, Burnet is happy. For here, among the mountains, he has discovered somewhere utterly unlike anywhere else: a place that has for the instant stalled his powers of comparison. This landscape is literally, to Burnet, like nothing else on earth. Despite the summer month, snow lies about in deep drifts, sculpted and frozen by the wind and apparently impervious to the sunshine. In the light it has a gold dazzle to it, while in the shadow it looks the creamy grey-white of cartilage. Rocks as big as buildings are scattered about, and throw complexities of blue shadow around themselves. The sound of distant thunder rolls in from the south, but the only thunderheads to be seen are thousands of feet beneath Burnet, massing over the Piedmont. He is, he realizes with delight, above the storm.

  Down in Italy are the celebrated ruins of Rome, which Burnet knows the young earl must tour as part of his education in antiquity. Burnet himself is not immune to the magnificence of Rome’s broken temples, and the gilded, weeping saints who fill the niches in the churches. But there is something up here, in what he will later describe as ‘these sonic mountainous parts’, amid the gargantuan rubble of the Alps, which to Burnet is infinitely more suggestive and overwhelming than Rome’s ruins. Even though his age demands that he find them hostile and repulsive, Burnet is unaccountably affected by the mountains. ‘There is something august and stately in the Air of these things,’ he wrote after the Simplon crossing, ‘that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions … as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination.’

  During his ten years on the continent Thomas Burnet and his various young wards would cross the Alps and the Apennines on several occasions. Gradually, the repeated sight of these ‘wild, vast, and indigested heaps of Stones and E
arth’ fostered in Burnet a desire to understand the origin of this alien landscape. How had the rocks come to be so dispersed? And why did the mountains have such a powerful psychic effect on him? So deeply did the mountains strike Burnet’s imagination and his investigative instincts that he decided he could not ‘feel easie, till I could give my self some tolerable account how that confusion came in Nature’.

  Thus it was that Burnet began work on his stylish, apocalyptic masterpiece, the first book to envisage a past for mountains, those most apparently timeless of objects. Burnet was writing at an ominous period in Europe. In 1680 and 1682 unusually lurid comets were seen in the skies. Edmond Halley, having taken celestial sightings from the top of a volcano, had tracked and named his own fiery messenger, and had (correctly) forecast its return in 1759. Thousands of pamphlets were printed across Europe predicting the catastrophes which would imminently blight the civilized lands – the deaths of monarchs, storm winds stripping the fields, drought, shipwrecks, pestilence and earthquakes.

  It was into this saturated atmosphere of signs and portents that Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth dropped in 1681, published at first in Latin in a discreet print-run of twenty-five copies, and carrying a pert little dedication to the King (which insinuated His Majesty’s stupidity). Burnet’s book looked not forward to possible future catastrophes, but backward to the biggest disaster of them all – the Flood. It was The Sacred Theory which began the erosion of the biblical orthodoxy that the earth had always looked the same, and it was The Sacred Theory which would crucially shape the ways in which mountains were perceived and imagined. That we are now able to imagine a past – a deep history – for landscapes is in part the result of Burnet’s decade-long rumination on ruination.

  Before Burnet, ideas about the earth lacked a fourth dimension – time. What, it was felt, could be more permanent, more incontestably there than mountains? They had been cast by God in their current poses, and would remain thus always and for ever. It was the biblical account of the Creation which, prior to the eighteenth century, determined how the earth’s past was imagined, and according to the Bible the beginning of the world had been a relatively recent event. In the 1600s several ingenious attempts were made to compute a date of origin for the earth from the information given in the Bible. Of these the best known was by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, whose dubiously scrupulous arithmetic resolved that the birth of the earth had begun at 9 a.m. on Monday 26 October 4004 BC. Calculated in 1650, Ussher’s chronology for the creation of the earth was still being printed in the shoulder notes of English Bibles in the early 1800s.

  The orthodox Christian imagination of Burnet’s time had thus been inoculated against perceiving a history to the earth. It was widely believed that the earth was less than 6,000 years old, and that it had not aged visibly in that time. No landscape had a past worth contemplation, for the world’s surface had always looked the same. Mountains, like everything else upon the earth, had been brought into being during that first frenzied week of creativity described in Genesis. They had been established on the third day, in fact, at the same time as the polar zones were frozen and the tropics were warmed, and their appearance had not altered much since, save for the cosmetic effects of lichen growth and a little light weathering. Even the Flood had left them untouched.

  Thus ran the conventional view. It was Thomas Burnet’s conviction, however, that the scriptural account of Creation as it was at that time understood could not explain the appearance of the world. In particular, Burnet puzzled over the hydraulics of the Flood. Where on earth, he wanted to know – where, literally, on earth – did the water come from for a Flood so profound that it could, as the Bible specified, ‘cover the very highest mountain-tops’?

  To achieve a global inundation of that depth, Burnet calculated, it would have taken ‘eight oceans of water’. However, the forty days of rain described in Genesis would have provided at most only one ocean: not sufficient liquid even to lap at the feet of most mountains. ‘Whither shall we go to find more than seven oceans of water that we still want?’ asked Burnet. He reasoned that if there had not been enough water, then there must have been less earth.

  And so he set forth his theory of the ‘Mundane Egg’. Immediately after Creation, he proposed, the earth had been a smooth oviform spheroid: an egg. It had been flawless in appearance and uniform in texture, without hill or vale to disrupt its lovely contours. Its porcelain surface, however, belied a complicated inner architecture. The ‘Yolk’ of the earth – its very centre – was filled with fire, and in increasing circles about that yolk, like round Russian dolls, were arranged ‘several Orbs, one including another’. And the ‘White of the Egg’ (Burnet was tenacious with his metaphors) was a water-filled abyss upon which the crust of the earth floated. Thus was the Burnetian earth composed.

  At birth, asserted Burnet, this young globe was unblemished on its surface, but it was not inviolable. Over the years the action of the sun desiccated the crust, and it began to crack and fracture. From beneath, the waters in the abyss started to press more urgently upon the weakened crust until, at a summons from the Creator, came ‘that great and fatal Inundation’ – the Deluge. The inner oceans and furnaces finally ruptured the shell of the earth. Sections of the earth’s crust plunged into the newly opened abyss, and the flood-waters roared up and over the remaining landmasses to create a ‘great Ocean rowling in the Air without bounds or banks’, as Burnet winningly described it. The physical matter of the crust was swirled about in a mêlée of rock and earth, and when the waters eventually receded they left chaos behind them. They left, in Burnet’s phrase, ‘a World lying in its Rubbish’.

  What Burnet was suggesting was that the globe as the inhabitants of his age knew it was nothing but ‘The Image or Picture of a great Ruin’, and a very imperfect image at that. At a single stroke, in punishment for the impiety of the human race, God had ‘dissolv’d the frame of the old World, and made us a new one out of its ruines, which we now inhabit’. And mountains, the most chaotic and charismatic of all landscape features, had not been created ab origine by God at all: no, they were in fact the residue left behind when the Deluge retreated, fragments of the earth’s shell which had been swirled round and piled up by the colossal hydraulics of the Flood. Mountains were, in effect, gigantic souvenirs of humanity’s sinfulness.

  A rash of publications followed the English translation of Burnet’s book in 1684. Irritated by his suggestion that the earth was defective in its present design, and by his challenge to conventional understanding of the scriptures, many wrote to disprove his sacred theory. Quickly, the controversy made Burnet’s ideas and the counter-arguments common intellectual currency – defenders and critics alike alluded to The Sacred Theory of the Earth simply as ‘the Theory’, and unspecified references to ‘the Theorist’ were understood to mean Burnet. Stephen Jay Gould estimates The Sacred Theory to have been the most widely read geologic work of the seventeenth century.

  ‘The Deluge and Dissolution of the Earth’, in Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 2nd edn (1691). The illustration shows three successive stages in the collapse of the earth’s crust into the watery abyss (a). The lowest and last shows the creation of the mountains (b) and the islands (c).

  So it was that, for the first time, the intellectual imagination became involved in positing possible pasts for the wild landscapes of the earth. Attention was drawn by the Burnet controversy to the appearance of mountains. No longer could they just be wallpaper or backdrop – they had become objects worthy of contemplation in their own right. Importantly, it was also Burnet who fixed the perception of mountains as forms both awful and exciting in the minds of those who came after him: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, was so stirred by Burnet’s prose that he planned to render The Sacred Theory into a blank-verse epic, and the theories of the Sublime formulated by Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke were both shaped by Burnet’s work. Burnet saw and communicated a majesty in mountaino
us scenery, and in doing so laid the groundwork for a wholly new way of feeling about mountains.

  Burnet suffered for his brilliance. Cambridge had thrown a cordon sanitaire about itself to prevent the importation of harmful or counter-doctrinal ideas, and by questioning scripture Burnet had breached this line. After the Glorious Revolution he was forced to retire from court duties, and was then passed over for the Archbishopric of Canterbury. But his reputation as a writer would outlive his uneasy achievements as an Anglican divine. For in suggesting that the surface of the earth might not always have looked the same, Burnet started the ongoing inquisition into the history of the earth. ‘I have,’ he boasted in the preface to The Sacred Theory, ‘retriev’d a World that had been lost, for some thousands of Years; out of the Memory of Man.’ He was right to boast. Burnet was the first of the geological time-travellers, an explorer backwards in history – a conquistador of that most foreign of all countries, the remote past.

  Frontispiece to Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 2nd edn (1691). The seven globes represent, with a clockwise chronology, the successive stages in the history of the earth as described in Burnet’s book.

  Although Burnet had challenged the belief that the visible world had always looked the same, he had not suggested that it was any older than the six millennia calculated by Ussher. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the first significant extensions of the earth’s age took place. One of the chief dissenters from the so-called ‘young earth’ orthodoxy was the flamboyant French natural historian, Georges Buffon (1707–88). In his compendious Natural History (1749–88), Buffon sketched a panorama of the earth’s history as divided into seven epochs, proposing that each of the days of Creation might in fact be a metaphor for a far longer period of time. Publicly, he estimated the earth to be 75,000 years old, although he sensed that this was too conservative a figure: in his notes was posthumously found a scribbled guess of several billion years.