Mountains of the Mind Page 5
Following the line of one of the stream-cuts, I scrambled up the eastern slope of the glen to the wrack-line. The heather was slippery with clumps of melting snow, and I often had to put a hand down into it to steady myself. As I neared the boulders I startled a ptarmigan, and it flew kekking up into the white sky, where it became a silhouette.
By the time I reached the boulders my hands were cold. I rubbed them noisily together, and then began to walk up the valley, from boulder to boulder, imagining the ice filling up the glen like a bath. Each rock was moated with dark earth, where the warmth it had gathered during the day had leached out and melted the surrounding snow. I kept walking along until the gradient steepened and I had to drop off again into the valley floor. The path took me near a patch of exposed rock perhaps ten square metres in area. I walked over, and crouched down to examine it. The horizontal striations scored into it showed that this rock had once been a scratching-post of the glacier which had created the valley and was one of the places where it had rubbed its tremendous underbelly along the ground.
I looked up from the rock. It had snowed recently, and the hills visible beyond the confines of the glen were grey beneath a thin fall of snow; their outlines softened. In the far distance their bulks could hardly be seen against the white winter air; only a few dark strokes defined them at all. They reminded me of charcoal sketch-work, or the simple lines of a Chinese water-ink painting.
After two hours I reached the gateway to the valley, guarded to the west by the cone of Stac-an-Iolaire, the Crag of the Eagle, and to the east by Bynack More and Bynack Beg. Looking down towards the forests of the north, I saw – russet against white – a herd of red deer, perhaps half a mile away from me, jogging across the hillside, picking up their knees where the heather or the snow deepened. I stood and watched for a few minutes the procession of the deer, the only moving objects in the landscape, and was suddenly swallowed up by time. Twenty thousand years ago, during the Upper Pleistocene era, the heathered granite across which the deer were moving would have been submerged beneath millions of cubic litres of ice. Sixty million years ago floods of basalt lava would have been sluicing the land, as Scotland tore violently away from the landmasses of Greenland and North America. One hundred and seventy million years ago, Scotland would have been drifting through the northern tropics, and arid reddish deserts would have covered the area on which I was standing. About 400 million years ago, a Himalayan-scale range of mountains would have existed in Scotland, of which only the eroded stubs remain.
To understand even a little about geology gives you special spectacles through which to see a landscape. They allow you to see back in time to worlds where rocks liquefy and seas petrify, where granite slops about like porridge, basalt bubbles like stew, and layers of limestone are folded as easily as blankets. Through the spectacles of geology, terra firma becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone a great power to hold time back, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance.
Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called ‘deep time’ – the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years – crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.
Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist – as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.
Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and the dozens of popular geological works which soon afterwards sought to emulate its success, opened the eyes of the nineteenth century to the dramatic hidden past of the earth. The common imagination began to respond to the aesthetics of inordinate slowness; to gradual changes wrought over epochs. And whatever one’s position vis-à-vis the grand tectonics of geological debate, or any of the many minor upsets and scuffles which disturbed the science in the nineteenth century, what was irrefutably wondrous – and terrifying – was the age of the earth: its inexpressible antiquity. In little under half a century, geology had unfolded the world backwards by billennia.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been the centuries when space was extended, when the realm of the visible had suddenly been increased by the invention of the microscope and the telescope. We have images from that era which remind us of quite how astonishing that sudden stretching of space must have been. There is the Dutch lens-grinder Antony van Leeuwenhoek, peering down his rudimentary microscope in 1674 to see a host of micro-organisms teeming in a drop of pond-water (‘The motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various upwards, downwards, and round about, that ’twas wonderful to see …’). There is Galileo scrying upwards through his telescope in 1609, and becoming the first human to realize that there are ‘lofty mountains’ and ‘deep valleys’ on the moon. And there is Blaise Pascal’s mingled wonder and horror at the realization that man is poised teeteringly between two abysses: between the invisible atomic world, with its ‘infinity of universes, each with its firmament, its planets, and its earth’, and the invisible cosmos, too big to see, also with its ‘infinity of universes’, stretching unstoppably away in the night sky.
The nineteenth century, though, was the century in which time was extended. The two previous centuries had revealed the so-called ‘plurality of worlds’ which existed in the tracts of space and the microcosms of atoms. What geology revealed in the 1800s was a multitude of ‘former worlds’ on earth, which had once existed but no longer did. Some inhabitants of these former worlds offered an excitement beyond the general thrill of antiquity. This was the range of monstrous creatures which had formerly lived on the earth: mammoths, mammals, ‘sea-dragons’ and dinosaurs (literally ‘fearfully great lizards’), as they were christened in 1842 by the palaeoanatomist Richard Owen. Fossilized bones and teeth had been plucked from the earth for centuries, but not until the early 1800s was it realized that some of these relics belonged to distinct, and extinct, species.
The French natural historian Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) did more than anyone to bring about this realization. For it was Cuvier who affirmed to the world the controversial fact of extinction, and in so doing created the conceptual framework needed to understand dinosaurs as fossil animals. Cuvier’s test-case was the woolly mammoth: by comparing the structures of fossilized mammoth bones with those of contemporary African and Indian elephants, he proved that the fossil bones belonged to a different species. In 1804, to an astonished audience at the Institut National in Paris, Cuvier announced that huge and hirsute elephants – no longer alive upon the earth – had once inhabited France and had almost certainly stomped and herded through what were now the immaculate gardens of Versailles. In terms of girth, Cuvier was a not inconsiderable man, and inevitably he was soon nicknamed ‘The Mammoth’.
‘The Rocks and Antediluvian Animals’, frontispiece to Ebenezer Brewer’s Theology in Science (1860).
Cuvier became a celebrity in his day, in part for his capacious brain (he was reputed to have memorized the 19,000 books in his library) but above all for his skill as an anatomist. Where James Hutton had been possessed of a remarkable ability to deconstruct rocks, Cuvier was able to recons
truct the megafauna of Europe from their petrified bones: to reimagine what the beasts that once roamed the earth might have looked like. He strung outsize skeletons together with wire, embedded archipelagos of bone in cement frames, and with the help of illustrators developed the first drawings of dinosaurs. To many, Cuvier’s work appeared more like thaumaturgy than taxidermy, for it conjured not only creatures but whole ages to life. ‘Is Cuvier not the greatest poet of our century?’ Balzac would later write ecstatically of him. ‘Our immortal naturalist has reconstructed worlds from blanched bones. He picks up a piece of gypsum and says to us “See!” Suddenly stone turns into animals, the dead come to life, and another world unrolls before our eyes.’
Stimulated by the new fervour for what had popularly become known as the Ancient Earth, fossil-hunting and palaeontology quickly became the European craze of the early nineteenth century. Every day, it seemed, a new dead species was discovered. An energetic sub-tribe of geologists, the fossil-hunters, sprang up. The fossil-hunters went with their knapsacks, hammers and soft brushes to where the rock was exposed: to the sea-side – like the rich Jurassic shale beds at Lyme Regis from which the renowned fossil-hunter Mary Anning prised ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs – to creeks, quarries and river-cuts, and, of course, to the mountains. Athletically inclined fossil-hunters clambered up cliff-faces, past the different folds and pleats of rock, and wrote of how they felt themselves to be moving at speed through time, ascending an epoch with a single movement.
Many fossil-beds were pillaged by the collectors – the Victorian predilection for rendering species extinct extended even to already extinct species. Moneyed amateurs filled rooms with their finds, and for their smaller specimens invested in ‘fossil chests’: waist-height cabinets with rows of slide-out, glass-topped drawers, divided beneath the glass by matchwood partitions into dozens of little square holding-pens. In each pen, carefully labelled, was placed a fossil: a shark’s tooth, say, or a fern impressed delicately on to a shard of shale. Fashionable little cemeteries of this sort stood in many affluent households, and people would come to gaze through the glass at these relics from former worlds, to ponder their own mortality and to contemplate the ineffable age of the earth.
The fossil craze is significant to our inquiry for two reasons. First, because it intensified the nineteenth-century fascination with the past ages of the earth. Fossils, Charles Lyell had adroitly observed in his Principles, are ‘ancient memorials of nature … written in a living language’, and palaeontology, like geology, taught people how to read a landscape as a history book: for what it told of the past. Indeed geology was the popular science of the first half of the 1800s. By 1861, even the Queen had a mineralogist by appointment. Geological tourism became a growth industry: those about to embark on a geological tour in the 1860s could pick from a range of lecture courses which would tutor them in the ways of rocks. For those who preferred the personal touch, Professor William Turl of Green Street in London offered (so his advert ran) ‘individual instruction for tourists so that they can acquire sufficient knowledge to identify all the ordinary components of the crystalline and volcanic rocks to be encountered in the European mountains’.
The second and connected significance of the fossil craze was that it encouraged thousands of people outdoors, and fostered a more hands-on approach to rocks and cliffs. Indeed, the foundations of Western geology were laid down in the mountains, and mountaineering has always walked hand-in-glove with geology. Many of the pioneering early geologists – Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, and the Scotsman James David Forbes, for instance – were also pioneering mountaineers.* Saussure’s four-volume Vo yages dans les Alpes (1779–96) was both a founding work of geology and one of the first wilderness travel books. When the Geological Society of London formed in 1807, its members, aware that the implications of their science ran against the religious grain of the time, were keen to be perceived neither as fuddy-duddies nor as iconoclasts. They ended up styling themselves ‘knights of the hammer’: chivalric men of science who sallied forth into the wilds in quest of knowledge. Robert Bakewell, in his Introduction to Geology (1813) observed that ‘an additional recommendation to the study of geology, [is] that it leads its votaries to explore alpine districts …’ As if to prove his point, the frontispiece to the first edition of his Introduction showed Bakewell sitting happily among the rock columns on the top of Cadair Idris.
Geology, therefore, for the early nineteenth-century public, came to suggest both a healthy outdoorsiness and a romantic sensibility: not just tinkering with old bones and stones. More than this, geology was perceived by many as a form of necromancy, which made possible a magical voyage into a past where one would encounter – as one knight of the hammer put it – ‘prodigies more wonderful than fiction’. After the 1820s, when the rudiments of classical geology diffused in Europe and America, it was realized by increasing numbers of people that the mountains provided a venue where it was possible to browse the archives of the earth – the ‘great stone book’, as it became called.
I had two stone books as a boy. One was slim paperback called A Guide to Rocks and Crystals, and it provided descriptions and photographs of hundreds of different stones, whose resonant names I would roll round my mouth – red and green serpentine, malachite, basalt, fluorspar, obsidian, smoky quartz, amethyst – until I had learned them. I spent hours beachcombing on the Scottish coast, not for the serendipitous discoveries of the tide-line – the single flip-flop which had leapt off a passing liner, the neon globe of a fishing-float or the vulcanized corpse of a jellyfish – though these were certainly wonderful, but for the rocks which cobbled the beaches. Crunching across that geological pot-pourri with my guide in hand, I swooped upon stone after stone, gathering them up and stashing them in a canvas shoulder-bag I carried, where they clunked and squeaked against each other. It felt like being given free range in the world’s finest sweet-shop: I could never quite believe I was allowed to take the stones away. I lugged them home, arranged them in troughs on the window-sill and kept them glossy and sleek with water.
I loved the colours of the stones, and their feel – the big flat ones which fitted warmly into the palm of the hand like a discus, and had rings of blue or red cutting through the background smoky grey; or the heavy granitic eggs, smoothed by epochs of oceanic massage; or flints, more jewel than stone, translucent as dark beeswax, and as deep to look into as a hologram. But what began truly to fascinate me, as I read more widely in geology, was the realization that each stone had a story attached to it: a biography which stretched backwards in time for epochs. I felt obscurely proud that my life had intersected with each of these inconceivably ancient objects; that because of me they were on a window-sill and no longer on a beach. Occasionally, I would take two stones and, cupping one in my hand, use it to shatter the other. There would be a crack, an orange sprig of fire and a smudge of rock-smoke. I would briefly be pleased that I had achieved what billennia of geophysical forces had not.
I paced over the Scottish hills and through the long glens of the Cairngorms looking for mineral treasures. My most sought-after specimens from the hillsides were lumps of rose quartz, tumbled into roundness by the rivers: beautiful with their chalky pink-and-white complexion, and their soft, pulsing luminosity. I also prized the Scottish granite, which with its fleshy pink feldspar and fatty flecks of quartz resembled a geological pâté. I read more widely about geology, and I began to understand the grammar of the Scottish landscape – how its constituent parts related to one another – and its etymology; how it had come to be. And I appreciated its calligraphy; the majuscule of the valleys and peaks, the intricate engravings of streams and rivulets, and the splendid serifs of ridge top and valley bottom.
From the summit or the slopes of every mountain I climbed with my family, my father would select a rock and carry it down in his orange canvas rucksack. He grouped them together, dozens of them, to make a rock garden. I remember a nubbed lump of gneiss, a black basalt pillow, a yard-long slab
of silver mica as bright as salmon skin, and a hunk of dark igneous rock in which dozens of tiny quartz nodules were embedded. The finest of all, to my mind, was a rounded boulder of yellow-white quartz, as smooth and soft to touch as thick cream.
The other geological book I owned as a child was the chauvinistic Boy’s Guide to Fossils. During one summer I spent in a cottage near the Scottish coast, it became my constant companion. Up among the cliff-top outcrops where the sediments lay with their rounded edges, my brother (seven) and I (nine) gathered belemnites. They were pointed and hard as bullet casings. We searched the seashore strata – hopelessly, I now realize – for trilobites. We levered rock nodes from the sea-cliffs with knives and smashed them open with hammers. We walked up to the hill lochs in the mountains above the sea, carrying little rods and minuscule black flies, and twitched trout from their water: dark little fish no more than a hand’s-span in length which seemed, to my newly elongated imagination, at least a billion years old – more coelacanth than trout. But beyond the belemnites, there were no real fossil finds that year. No ammonites or ichthyosaurs. Certainly no archaeopteryx or giant prehistoric sharks. Our lack of success didn’t stop me dreaming, of course: of pulling a plesiosaur skull from a soft chalk bank, or of striding over the Siberian permafrost, stubbing my toe on the tip of a tusk, and looking down into the ice to see a mammoth staring tremulously back out at me.