Mountains of the Mind Read online

  Two summers after the Scottish holiday, our family set off to tour the National Parks of the American desert states. In Utah we saw the rock faces of Zion, the arches of Arches and the fretted pink obelisks of Bryce Canyon, which were arrayed up and down the valley like baroque missiles. I think it was near Zion that we pulled up at a roadside pump to feed our big American car with petrol. At one edge of the gravel forecourt was a man wearing a baseball cap. He was sitting on a dining-room chair, with an electric circular saw mounted on a frame in front of him, and a pyramid of rough rock spheres stacked like oranges to his left. We walked over to the man, and there was a conversation between him and my father. ‘Pick a rock,’ my father said, turning to me. The man stood up and watched me as I examined the rock pile. I wondered if they were dragon’s eggs. I weighed one in my hand. It felt lighter than I expected. I whispered to my mother that it was light.

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ said the man, taking the rock from me, sitting back down on the chair and placing his legs either side of the saw blade. ‘Light means there’s space inside. Have that one.’

  He gunned the saw. Its silver-grey fangs seemed to spin first one way, then the other, and then blurred into a single immobile edge. The saw’s engine began rhythmically to puff blue smoke into the air of the forecourt. ‘Watch this,’ my father mouthed to me over the noise of the saw. I wondered what would happen if the saw fell forwards into the man’s lap. Using a handle, the man lowered the saw’s edge slowly on to my rock egg, which he had vised into position. It took a minute or so for the saw to move, squealing, through the rock. When it was done the man cut the engine and raised the saw upwards, out of the rock. The rock dropped from the vise on to a blanket he had placed beneath it and fell apart like a halved apple. He dried off the halves with a yellow towel, and held them out to me. ‘You’ve been lucky,’ he said slowly. ‘You chose well. You chose a geode. Most people aren’t as lucky as you.’ I held a half in each hand, and looked at them. Each half was hollow inside, like a cavern, and the walls of each cavern were lined with numberless tiny blue crystal teeth. As we drove out of the forecourt, gravel bits clattering up against the chassis of the car, I held the two halves together to remake the rough rock sphere, and then pulled them apart, astonished again and again by what I saw.

  Between about 1810 and 1870, the scale of deep time was constructed and labelled. It will be familiar to anyone who has opened a geology textbook; as resonant a litany as the shipping forecast: Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Quarternary … The compressive power of language – more powerful even than the geophysical forces it was describing – was set to work on the geological past, and hundreds of millions of years were effortlessly compacted into a few letters. A late developer among the sciences, during the nineteenth century geology rushed on precociously fast, naming and labelling as time unrolled further and further behind it. Popular geology handbooks proliferated, and the reading public was brought increasingly to understand what the more lyrically inclined geologists were starting to call the ‘symphony of the earth’ – the repeating pattern of uplift and erosion which produced mountains and seas, basins and ranges. Innumerable articles were published on geology and its revelations in periodicals across Europe and America. Everyone was made privy to the secrets of the earth’s past. ‘The wind and the rain have written illustrated books for this generation,’ wrote Charles Dickens in a piece for his periodical Household Words in 1851, ‘from which it may learn how showers fell, tides ebbed and flowed, and great animals, long extinct, walked up the craggy sides of cliffs, in remote ages. The more we know of Nature, in any of her aspects, the more profound is the interest she offers to us.’

  As well as being excited by the spans of time uncovered by geology, the nineteenth-century imagination was aroused by the concept of geophysical force – the inconceivable power necessary to knead sandstone like pastry, to collapse trees into shiny seams of coal and to crush marine life into blocks of marble. Romanticism had left the collective nineteenth-century nervous system attuned to appreciate excess, and this inherited lust for the grandiose and the gigantic in part explains the enthusiasm with which geology was embraced.

  In mid-century Britain, John Ruskin read widely in the writings of geology, and in turn began to write brilliantly himself about the slow-motion drama of mountain scenery. The 1856 publication of Ruskin’s Of Mountain Beauty was, like the appearance in 1830 of Lyell’s Principles, a seminal moment in European landscape history. ‘Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery’, pronounced Ruskin at the outset, and he brooked no quarrel with that statement throughout the rest of the book. Where Lyell was a teacher, Ruskin was a dramaturge. Before his gaze, the landscape offered up the stories of its making. Meditating on the nature of granite, with its medley of minerals and colours, Ruskin dreamt of the violence inherent in its making: ‘The several atoms have all different shapes, characters, and offices; but are inseparably united by some fiery, or baptismal process which has purified them all.’ Basalt he perceived to have at one stage in its career possessed ‘the liquefying power and expansive force of subterranean fire’. Seen through the optic of Ruskin’s prose, geology became war or apocalypse; the view from the top of a mountain became a panorama over battlegrounds upon which competing armies of rock, stone and ice had warred for epochs, with incredible slowness and unimaginable force. To read Ruskin on rocks was – and still is – to be reminded of the agencies involved in their making.

  In America, too, between 1820 and 1880 there emerged a dynasty of landscape artists – Frederick Edwin Church foremost among them – who drew their inspiration from the dramatic natural scenery of the States. While they were clearly influenced by the British triumvirate of Ruskin, Turner and John Martin, these painters were filled also with a distinctively American desire to express both awe at and pride in the landscape of their country: to celebrate God’s chosen land. To this end, they produced immense and often lurid canvases of American wildernesses – the red rock citadels of the desert states, the mountainous throne-rooms of the Andes, the flaring skies and mirror lakes of the Rockies, or the vaporous magnificence of the Niagara Falls. Their giant pictures emphasized the puniness and transience of man: often one or two minuscule human figures can be seen in a corner of the canvas, dwarfed by the massive profiles of the landscape. These artists were also thoroughly versed in botany and geology: some of the pictures contained so much landscape detail that, when they were first exhibited, viewers were supplied with opera glasses so that they could see the extraordinary geological accuracy of the painting – a reminder of how intertwined were geology and representations of mountains.

  Oil painting is an appropriate medium to represent the processes of geology, for oil paints have landscapes immanent within them: they are made of minerals. Oil paints were first devised in the fifteenth century, when Flemish painters – the van Eyck brothers foremost among them – tried mixing linseed oil with various natural pigments, and found they had created a substance which was not only more vibrant in colour, but also more malleable in terms of drying time than traditional egg tempera. Many of the pigments they blended with the oils were mineral in origin. Unburnt pit-coal was used to render the shadows of flesh, particularly by the Flemish and Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Black chalk and common coal were used to furnish a brown tint. The light blues employed to render mountains as films in the far background in the work of, say, Claude or Poussin would have come from copper carbonates or compounds of silver. The ‘scumbling’ effect of which the Dutch masters were so fond for their skyscapes (it gives a cloud-like texture to the skies which superbly imitates the consistency of cirrostratus) was achieved using ground glass as a pigment and ashes as a context. ‘Sinopia’, or red earth, was used to give rouging tints to faces or clothing, or to provide the first tracing of a fresco on to plaster. Geology, therefore, is intimate with the history of painting; in oil
paintings of landscapes, the earth has been pressed into service to express itself.

  An even closer coincidence between medium and message can be found in the ‘scholar’s rocks’ which became popular in the T’ang and Sung dynasties of China. Seven centuries before Romanticism revolutionized Western perceptions of mountains and wilderness, Chinese and Japanese artists were celebrating the spiritual qualities of wild landscape. Kuo Hsi, a celebrated eleventh-century Chinese painter and essayist, proposed in his Essay on Landscape Painting that wild landscapes ‘nourished a man’s nature’. ‘The din of the dusty world,’ he wrote, ‘and the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while, on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks.’ This venerable Eastern esteem for wilderness explains the popularity of scholar’s rocks, single stones which have been carved into intricate, dynamic shapes by the powers of water, wind and frost. They were harvested from caves, river-beds and mountainsides, and mounted on small wooden pedestals. The stones – which scholars kept on their desks or in their studies, much as we might now keep a paperweight – were valued for how they expressed the history and the forces of their making. Each detail on a rock’s surface, each groove or notch or air-bubble or ridge or perforation, was eloquent of aeons. Each rock was a tiny, hand-held cosmos. Scholar’s rocks were not metaphors for a landscape, they were landscapes.

  Many of these rocks have survived and can be seen in museums. If you stare at one closely enough, and for long enough, you lose your sense of scale, and the whorls, the caverns, the hills and the valleys which nature has inscribed in them can seem big enough to walk through.

  Not everybody, it should be said, was exhilarated by the advances of geology in the nineteenth century. There was a widespread feeling that geology, like the other sciences, had in some way displaced humanity. Scientific inquiry and methodology had been invited into the heart of the human project, and from there it had proved – in the most merciless and irrefutable way possible – that human beings were no more or less important than any other agglomeration of matter in the universe. It had eroded the Renaissance world-view of man as the measure of all things. The desolating expanses of time revealed by geology were more persuasive proof than any other of humankind’s insignificance. To understand that mountains decayed and fell was inevitably to sense the precariousness and mortality of human endeavours. If a mountain could not withstand the ravages of time, what chance a city or a civilization? ‘The hills are shadows,’ wrote Tennyson in his elegy for stasis In Memoriam, ‘and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands; / They melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like clouds they shape themselves and go.’ And ‘From’ flowed into ‘form’: philology was showing that language was subject to the same ceaseless shiftings as everything else. Not even words stood for what they once did. Nothing endured any longer except change.

  By and large, however, the disclosures of geology were found inspiring rather than menacing. As well as explaining the forces of the earth, Ruskin urged his public to interpret landscapes for their absence as much as their presence: what had been subtracted from the hills by cataclysm or by the ceaseless work of erosion. In Ruskin’s writing, hills on imaginary hills arose before one’s eyes in a fantasia of contingency, might-have-been and once-was. Like a magnificent Prospero, Ruskin summoned up the ghosts of mountains past; had them arise in the space above the skylines and ridges of the present day. Wild nature, he taught, was a ruin of something once even more astonishing – a dilapidation of what he called ‘the first splendid forms that were once created’. Even the Matterhorn, whose upwards flourish drew admirers in their thousands to the Zermatt valley, Ruskin pointed out to be a sculpture: gouged, chiselled and pared from a single block by the furious energies of the earth. As John Muir would do later in the United States, John Ruskin taught his many readers that the geological past was everywhere apparent – if only one knew how to look.

  John Ruskin also believed that mountains moved. And this was perhaps his most important contribution to the formation of our mountains of the mind. Before publishing Of Mountain Beauty, Ruskin had spent years pacing the lower paths of the Alps; sketching, painting, observing, meditating. He had concluded that the apparently arbitrary jaggedness of mountain ridges was an illusion. In fact, examined with due diligence and patient eyes, mountains revealed their fundamental form of organization to be the curve, and not the angle as might be concluded by superficial observation. Mountains were inherently curved, and mountain ranges were shaped and arranged like waves. They were waves of rock – ‘the silent wave of the blue mountain’ – and not waves of water.

  Moreover, said Ruskin, mountain ranges, like hydraulic waves, were prone to motion. They had been cast up by colossal forces, and were still being moved by them. That the movement of mountains could only be imagined and not witnessed was – as James Hutton had pointed out – a function of the minute life-span of a human being. They were not static, but fluid: rocks fell from their summits, and rainwater poured off their flanks. For Ruskin, this perpetual motion was what made mountains the beginning and end of all natural scenery. ‘Those desolate and threatening ranges of dark mountain,’ he wrote:

  which, in nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon with aversion or terror and shrunk back from as if they were haunted by perpetual images of death are, in reality, sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than all the bright fruitfulness of the plain …

  Ruskin’s intuition that mountains moved was proved unexpectedly correct during the course of the twentieth century, in what is the final significant shift in Western imaginings of the past of mountains. In January 1912, in an incident now legendary among earth scientists, a German called Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) stood up before an audience of eminent geologists in Frankfurt, and told them that the continents moved. Specifically, he explained that the continents, which were composed primarily of granitic rock, ‘drifted’ on top of the denser basalt of the ocean floor, like patches of oil on water. Indeed, 300 million years ago, Wegener informed his increasingly incredulous audience, the landmasses of the world had been united into a single supercontinent, an ur-landmass, which he called Pangaea (meaning ‘all-lands’). Under the divisive power of various geological forces, Pangaea had been riven into many pieces and these pieces had subsequently drifted apart, ploughing over the basalt to their present positions.

  The mountain ranges of the world, Wegener argued, had been created not by the cooling and wrinkling of the earth’s crust – a theory which had come back into vogue at the start of the twentieth century – but by the crash of one drifting continent into another, causing buckling around the impact zone. The low-lying Urals, for example, which nominally separated European Russia from Siberia, were, according to Wegener, the product of an ancient collision between two mobile continents which had occurred so long ago that the effects of mountain building in the impact zone had been largely flattened by erosion.

  For proof, said Wegener, just look at the globe. Look at the dispersal of the continents. Move them around a bit and they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Slide South America towards Africa and its eastern coast locks into Africa’s western perimeter. Wrap Central America around the Ivory Coast, and North America over the top of Africa and you have half a supercontinent already. The same trick, he pointed out, worked for India’s angled western littoral, which fits snugly against the straight side of the Horn of Africa, just as Madagascar slots neatly back on to the divot on the south-eastern coast of Africa.

  Wegener had harder evidence to support his claim. He had spent years working in the extensive fossil archives of the University of Marburg, and had deduced that identical fossil specimens had been found in the rock record at precisely the zones Wegener suggested had once been united: on the west coast of Africa, for example, and the east coast of Brazil the coal deposits and fossils matched. ‘It is just as if we were to refit the torn pieces of a newsp
aper by matching their edges,’ he wrote, ‘and then check whether the lines of print ran smoothly across. If they do, there is nothing left but to conclude that the pieces were in fact joined in this way.’

  Reconstructions of the Map of the World for three periods according to Wegener’s displacement theory. From Alfred Wegener’s The Origins of Continents and Oceans, trans. J. A. Skerl, 3rd edn (London: Methuen & Co., 1924).

  Wegener was not the first to suggest the interconnectedness of the continents. The sixteenth-century cartographer Ortelius had noticed the jigsaw-puzzle composition of the continents, and had suggested that they were once attached, but had been sundered by drastic floods and earthquakes. He was disbelieved. The endlessly perceptive Francis Bacon mentioned in 1620 in his Novum Organum that the continents could fit together ‘as if cut from the same mould’, but seems to have thought no more about it. And in 1858, a French-American called Antonio Snider-Pelligrini devoted an entire treatise – Creation and Its Mysteries Revealed – to showing how the continents had once been united.

  But in the mid-nineteenth century there was simply no context for such a radical overhaul of geological theory; no other pieces of knowledge with which the theory itself could fit. A mainstay of nineteenth-century geology was a belief in the existence of enormous land-bridges which had at one point joined the world’s continents, but had since then crumbled into the oceans. These land-bridges explained the existence of the same species on different landmasses, and seemed far more plausible than mobile continents.

  In 1912, therefore, Wegener was arguing against the grain of prevailing wisdom: if his theory were correct, it would nullify many of the founding assumptions of nineteenth-century geology. Worse still, Wegener was an intruder, a trespasser on the turf of the geologists. For his main field of research was meteorology – he was a pioneer in weather-balloon study and a specialist in Greenland, where he led several successful, and one fatal, Arctic research expeditions. How could a weatherman presume to dismantle at a single stroke the complex and magnificent edifice of nineteenth-century geology?