Mountains of the Mind (15 page)

We woke to find the train hustling and clanking its way through an icy glen. Snow rested in deep cross-sections to either side of the track; a white jacket unzipped by the snow-plough. The glen curved round ahead of the train, and when I leaned out of a corridor window, the wind cold on my face, I could see the rails carrying the sunlight off into the distance in two bright, converging tightropes.

From the train station we thumbed a lift up to the Cairngorm car park, and began the walk-in to the jagged black-and-white ramparts of the Northern Corries. It felt good to be out in the wind, which pushed at us in big soft buffets. High above the summits of the corries a crow surfed the turbulence, stiff-winged and silhouetted. When we reached the foot of the corries, we picked a narrow, near-vertical 300-foot gully which would take us up on to the plateau. From there we could, depending on the mood of the weather, head deeper into the hinterland or just turn back for home.

It was slow, hard going up the gully, even with axes and crampons to help us. The big southerly wind had scoured the plateau of snow and flung it all into the north-facing gullies, hundreds of tons of it,
and it rushed incessantly down upon us like a thick white river, surging about our knees. It was, I reflected briefly as I stopped to gasp for breath, wonderful snow. Plumes of it whipped up and danced in mid-air, choreographed by the strange swirls and vortices of wind that filled the corries. The rock-ribs to the right and left of the gully were densely varnished with ice, and from every overhang was suspended a rigid chandelier of blue icicles.

By the time we reached the plateau, an hour later, the weather had severely deteriorated. It was snowing hard. Visibility had decreased to a hundred feet and the temperature had suddenly dropped. My eyebrows felt heavy, as though something were pulling them away from my forehead, and when I put a gloved hand up I found they were dense with ice. We knelt a few feet from the head of the gully, trying to coil the rope. In the cold it was as inflexible as a steel hawser. Its two ends lashed stiffly about in the wind which, having seemed so exhilaratingly playful a few hours before, had become a hurricane. I remembered the warning I had read in a guidebook to the area:
The highest recorded wind speed on the Cairngorm plateau is a gust of 176 mph: more than sufficient to flip over a car.

There was no question of trying to make it back. It was impossible even to stand up – the wind would have bludgeoned us over the edge. And we couldn’t go back down the gully. On hands and knees we crawled for a few hundred yards to where a bank of snow had drifted up and frozen, and spent an hour hacking out a rough snow-cave. For the next twelve hours we huddled together shivering in the cave, hands lodged in each other’s armpits for warmth, waiting for the wind to drop. All that night I longed for the temperate and horizontal fens.

In Cambridge I had forgotten how hostile the Cairngorms could be. In my mind’s eye I had seen them in their most benevolently beautiful state: graceful whale-backs of snow and ice, cast in a bronze
winter sunlight. The actuality had been a very different matter. With mountains, the gap – the irony – that exists between the imagined and the actual can be wide enough to kill.

As the traffic in the Alps and other mountains became heavier over the course of the nineteenth century, so the mortality rate rose. From the start there had been dissenting voices: John Murray’s
Handbook
to Switzerland, for example, pronounced those who went up Mont Blanc to be ‘of unsound mind’. Such warnings went largely unheeded, though, and more and more people fell foul of what Edward Bulwer-Lytton called ‘the sudden dangers none foreknow’: the collapsing cornice, the unexpected rockfall, the avalanche.

The dangers of mountaineering were shockingly emphasized in 1865, two years after Ruskin wrote his letter to his father on the morally improving effect of danger, by the infamous Matterhorn disaster. While descending after the first ascent of the mountain, three Englishmen – a lord, a vicar and a young man from Cambridge – and a Swiss guide crashed 4,000 feet off a sheer face of the mountain to the glacier below. The three other climbers were saved only because the rope attaching them to the fallers snapped. When a rescue team reached the glacier, they found a trio of naked and mutilated corpses. The men’s clothes had been ripped from them during the fall. Croz, the Swiss guide, had lost half his skull, and the rosary he wore was embedded so deeply into the flesh of his jaw that it had to be cut out using a penknife. Of Douglas, the lord, nothing was to be found except a boot, a belt, a pair of gloves and a coat sleeve.

The Matterhorn disaster, as it became known, took the shine off
the Golden Age of mountaineering. Britain in particular reacted with a mixture of horror and fascination at this apparent waste of life. Blue British blood had been spilt in the pursuit of altitude, and many rightly sensed that there was considerably more spillage to come. Charles Dickens, an armchair aficionado of that sanest of endeavours, polar exploration, thought mountain-climbing ludicrous and trumpeted his opinion about town. ‘BRAG!’ he bellowed unsympathetically. ‘The scaling of such heights … contributes as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weathercocks of all the cathedral spires of the United Kingdom.’ The weathercock newspapers, which only a few months previously had been praising the intrepidity of mountaineers, turned with the wind of the hour and inquired dolefully why Britons were so bent on ‘reaching the unfathomable abyss never to return’, or denounced mountaineering as ‘a depraved taste’.

The public, however, was more fascinated than horrified by the deaths, and displayed a predictable grim interest in the details of the disaster. To many, moreover, the act of dying in the mountain had conferred a majesty upon the men. A. G. Butler wrote an elegy for the fallers which elevated them to the status of demi-gods and likened mountaineering to a cosmic battle: ‘They warred with Nature, as of old with gods, / The Titans; like the Titans too they fell, / Hurled from the summit of their hopes …’ Never mind the messy details of death – the horrifying seconds of frictionless plummet, the bones and organs turned into a mass of jelly by the impact – in Butler’s verses the fallers’ fate was transformed into something atavistic and magnificent. Mountain-climbing wasn’t the sublimation of student japery, as Dickens had denounced it, but an epic endeavour: an encounter with the utmost of all foes, Nature. For that, any risk was worth it.

The Matterhorn disaster was a crucial moment in the history of
risk-taking in the mountains. Had disapproval spread to become the orthodoxy, mountaineering might not have flourished as it subsequently did. In the end, though, it was Butler’s hyperbolic adulation and not Dickens’s contempt which carried the day. Mountain-climbing thrived, the fascination which mountains and risk-taking held for the non-mountaineering public was fortified, and the graveyards in the small Alpine villages filled up with a steady stream of climbing dead. Edward Whymper, one of the climbers who survived, later provided an epitaph for the Matterhorn disaster and for mountaineering itself. ‘Climb if you will,’ he wrote, ‘but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.’ Whymper followed his own prescription and lived a long and enthusiastically cantankerous life – many others have not been so prudent or so fortunate.

There are many ways to die in the mountains: there is death by freezing, death by falling, death by avalanche, death by starvation, death by exhaustion, death by rockfall, death by ice-fall and death by the invisible aggression of altitude sickness, which can cause cerebral or pulmonary oedema. Falling is, of course, the ever-present option. Gravity doesn’t ever forget itself or go temporarily off duty. The French writer Paul Claudel put it nicely – we lack wings to fly, but we always have strength enough to fall.

Every year now, hundreds of people die in the world’s mountains, and many more thousands are injured. Mont Blanc alone has killed over 1,000 people; the Matterhorn 500; Everest around 170; K2
a hundred; the North Face of the Eiger sixty. In 1985 nearly 200 people died in the Swiss Alps alone.

I have seen the climbing dead all over the world. They congregate in graveyards in mountain towns, or in ad hoc cemeteries in base camps. It’s often impossible to retrieve or even find the bodies of those killed in the mountains, so many of the dead are present only as objects or tokens: rock faces with plaques neatly screwed on to them; names scratched into boulders; rude crosses made out of stone or wood; flowers huddled together under a poncho of cellophane. They are accompanied by the formulae of grief, which have done their duty so often, and which do it again without losing their power or their poignancy:
Here lies
…
Here fell
…
In memoriam
… All those uncompleted lives.

It’s easy to sentimentalize or glorify the climbing dead. But what should be remembered – what’s often forgotten – are the people left behind. All those parents, children, husbands, wives and partners who have lost their loved ones to the mountains. All those ruined lives which have to be completed. People who regularly take big risks in the mountains must be considered either profoundly selfish, or incapable of sympathy for those who love them. I recently met a woman at a party whose cousin had been killed in a fall the previous year. She was angry and baffled by what had happened. Why had he felt the need to mountaineer, she asked me, not wanting an answer. Why couldn’t he have played tennis, or gone fishing? What made her even more angry was that his brother was still climbing. Her aunt and uncle were desolated by the loss of one son, she said, and the other one was still pursuing the pastime which had killed his brother. Or at least he had been until the week before, when he had broken both legs in a fall. She had been glad when she heard this news, she said, because she guessed it would stop him ever climbing again: it would save his life, would stop him – she hissed with quiet fury as she said this – being so selfish. Later, I heard that he had recovered the
use of both legs, and was climbing again within a month of having had the plaster-casts removed.

In a situation like this there is an inescapable sense that some bad magic or mesmerism has been worked: that a love of the mountains has become something akin to brainwashing. It is an example of the dark side of mountaineering, a reminder of its potentially huge costs. There is no undeniable need to put one’s life at risk on a mountainside or a cliff-face. Mountaineering isn’t destiny – it doesn’t have to happen to a person.

I now almost fully acknowledge that there is nothing inherently noble about dying in the mountains: indeed that there is something atrociously wasteful about it. I have largely stopped taking risks. I rarely undertake climbs which require the security of ropes. I have discovered that it is eminently possible to spend time in the mountains and to be at far less risk than one would be, say, crossing city streets. I’m scared more easily, too: my fear threshold has been sharply lowered. That fizzing, nauseous, faintly erotic feeling of real terror grips me more quickly these days. Edges that five years ago I would happily have walked along, I now keep my distance from.
*
For me now, as for the vast majority of mountain-goers, the attraction of mountains is far more about beauty than about risk, far more about joy than fear, far more about wonder than pain, and far more about life than death.

The fact remains, though, that many people are still lured to take risks in the mountains, and do still die among them. Chamonix, in France, is probably the world’s greatest mecca for mountain-lovers, and the only place I know where the flagpoles have ruffs of steel spikes on them to stop people climbing them. It is a dense small
town; a clot of apartment buildings, churches and bars stuck in a gap in the Alps. It always surprises me to see it there. You come across it unexpectedly, winding up the steep-sided road from Geneva, not thinking there’s enough flat ground on which to build a house, let alone a town. And then suddenly there it is, lodged in the valley. Rising on every side of it are slopes of rock, smeared with glaciers, leading the eye upwards to the gleaming silver summit of Mont Blanc and to the ferrous-red pinnacles of rock which stand on every skyline.