Mountains of the Mind (16 page)

On average, one person dies each day during each summer climbing season in Chamonix. You don’t know they’ve gone, these people. There are no empty seats in the bars being protectively watched by red-eyed friends, no parents wandering stunned about the hot streets, wheezing with grief. The only clue is the
whop-whop
of rotor-blades as the rescue helicopters criss-cross the air above the town. Everyone in the bars looks up when a helicopter comes over; speculates briefly on where it’s headed.

One spring I was trekking across the Glacier du Géant, the high-altitude glacial bowl which spreads between France and Italy in the mountains to the south-east of Chamonix. You can walk from one country to the other across this glacier bowl: it’s about five miles wide. En route, you pass crevasses which are capacious enough to take a row of houses. Looking into them, you can see the cross-section of the glacier: the multi-coloured strata of ice – white near the surface, passing through shades of cobalt, ultramarine and sometimes sea-green. The ice layers at the bottom of these big crevasses consist of snow which fell several centuries ago.

All around you, out of the shining field of the glacier, jut the famous
aiguilles
of the Mont Blanc range – the needles and towers of russet rock which thrust thousands of feet into the air. On a clear day the colour scheme of the glacier bowl – red rock, blue sky, white ice – is as bright and defined as the
tricolore
itself. Most of the
aiguilles
have
names. There is
Le Grand Capucin
– The Great Monk – who keeps a silent ministry beneath his habit of brown rock, and
La Dent du Géant
– The Giant’s Tooth – which angles upwards like a caffeine-stained fang, or a 600-foot version of the accent that tops its name. People climb the
aiguilles
. Walking along the glacier, you can often see a tiny speck of red or white stuck into a seam on one of the rock faces, thousands of feet up.

That day we were traversing the glacier bowl from Italy to France. We had only just begun the crossing when I spotted, a hundred yards or so from the beaten track, what looked to be a clump of hardy flowers growing from the glacier. It seemed improbable; there was no earth for the flowers to grow in, only ice. I paced over to have a look.

It was a little green ball of clay, or plasticine, about the size of a fist, half-buried in the ice. Into it had been poked a dozen silk flowers, with short wire stalks. The silk of the petals must once have been colourful, but the weather had reduced all the flowers to a sepia brown. Slung round the stalk of one of them was a tiny card inside a plastic wallet: like one of the identity-tags that babies wear in maternity clinics. I nudged it over with the tip of my ice-axe. Moisture had got inside the wallet and made the ink run, but I could still make out a few blurred words:
Chérie
…
morte
…
montagnes
…
au revoir
.

I wondered what had happened to her. How she had died, and where. Who was grieving for her. Whether her whole family had come up here to plant this little garden for her. Then I walked back to the path and carried on towards France.

We crossed the glacier without incident. I returned home two days later. Waiting on my answer-phone was the news that somebody else I knew had died in the mountains. He had just completed a climb on Ben Nevis, and was unroping on the gentler ground at the top of the climb when a tiny, freakish avalanche pushed him back
over the edge of the 1,000-foot gully he had just ascended. He was twenty-three. One of the burnt-yellow helicopters that the Scottish Mountain Rescue use had flown his body out from the Allt a’ Mhuilinn, the glen that runs up into the granite horseshoe of Ben Nevis and Carn Mor Dearg.

I stood there with the phone in my hand after the message had ended, and pressed my forehead against the cool wall. I hadn’t seen him since we had climbed together on the cliffs on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh one New Year’s Eve. Drunk and laughing, we had walked through the snowing streets of Edinburgh, seeing the flakes falling in each orange cone of street-light. We had marched up to the craggy side of Arthur’s Seat, and there we had spent an hour or so climbing, clambering straight up the icy rock face or trying traverses. I remembered us both side by side, ten feet off the ground, leaning outwards from the cold rock to look for the next hold, hair combed straight back off our heads by gravity.

In the hot summer of 1860 the glaciers of Chamonix were alive with the rustle of crinoline. Up on the Mer de Glace, beneath an Alpine sky undisturbed save by the elegant minarets of the nearby
aiguilles
, little guilds of men and women clambered about on the acres of ice. The men were dressed in dark tweed, the women in voluminous black dresses, with thin gauzes of muslin dropping down from the brims of their hats to protect their complexions from the Alpine sun, which glanced up off the ice to scorch the insides of nostrils and the undersides of eyelids. Both sexes wore cleated boots and everybody clutched a four- or five-foot alpenstock, fanged with metal at its bottom end.

A guide – a Chamoniard – attended each group, pointing out the sights of the glacier and ensuring that no one was lost to fatigue, or to the yawning crevasses (though every so often someone was). At the lower part of the Mer de Glace, where the ice was most violently ruptured, adventurous parties picked their way upward along precipitous banks of ice, flanked on either side by blue abysses into which they shouted and heard their voice returned from the depths in a
basso profundo
. Further up the glacier, towards the Col du Géant, the sun had sculpted the ice into a menagerie of legendary beasts and other strange likenesses. ‘Like the mutilated statuary of an ancient temple,’
wrote one visitor, ‘like the crescent moon, like huge birds with outstretched wings, like the claws of lobsters and like antlered deer.’ Boulders, bigger than houses, which the locals claimed had been struck off the surrounding mountains by the electric bolts of heaven, lay about on the surface of the glacier, and it pleased those who came back to Chamonix every summer to note how far downstream their favourite rocks had perambulated in a year. When the good weather held for days on end, the surface of the glacier would be melted by the radiance of the sun, except for the ice beneath the rocks, which would be left clasped aloft on thick gelid pedestals. The daring ate their lunch in the shade of these rocks – glacier-tables, as they were known – while the even more daring scrambled up on to their flat tops to do the same.

The crevasses in the glacier were of considerable interest to the visitors. The braver of the women would edge towards their lips, held either by a rope around the waist, or more usually by the strong arm of their guide. Once on the brink they could peer into the crevasse, could see how further down the dirty white snow changed its complexion and its colour to a translucent blue, or, if the light were entering from a different angle, an intense green. The better equipped among them pulled out a cyanometer to gauge the tint of the icy walls, which they had already used to measure the remarkable cerulean of the sky, or the pale blue light that leaked into the holes their alpenstocks made in the snow.

Later that evening, sitting by the fire at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, the visitors swapped stories of the people who had perished on the ice; of how a French Protestant minister had slipped into a narrow crevasse on the Grindelwald glacier, just wide enough to admit a man, and a guide had descended after him on the end of a rope to find the minister’s body lying awkwardly in the far corner of ‘a grand and spacious hall of ice, of immense size, with a finely vaulted roof ’; or of the young woman who just the year before had been crushed to death by a block of ice
which had dropped from the arch of frozen water that marked the end of the Glacier du Bois, and which drew so many visitors.

For those who were disinclined to make the substantial climb up to the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons spilt itself over the brim of the valley and pushed down through the dark pines which forested its slopes and kept the avalanches pent up during winter, until it almost reached the Chamonix–Servoz road. From the base of the glacier, muscular rills of silty water escaped down the runnels they had carved on the northward side of the road: eventually they would mingle with the blue headwaters of the Rhône.

Here, right by the roadside, there were marvels aplenty: no need to exhaust oneself unnecessarily, agreed the parties that came to witness them. Chamoniards in breeches pointed them out – how the glacier toppled the ancient pine trees as though they were saplings and splintered them as though they were kindling; how, when the sun was high and hot, the ice could be heard creaking and groaning like ship’s mahogany in a storm; how near its snout the glacier was disrupted into a thousand obelisks of ice.

There was, observed many of the visitors to the Glacier des Bossons, something frighteningly improper about its location, the way it made its slow and violent way down into the valley, leagues below its rightful altitude. Life had to go about its business in the shadow of this truculent, almost obscene, mass of ice; peasants had to gauge its likely career and build their huts and houses out of its way. The glacier got many of them anyway, for they drank its meltwater on a daily basis, thus silting up their kidneys and causing goitres to flourish beneath their chins.

None of this was a problem for the visitors, of course, who rather enjoyed fossicking through the Alpine
maquis
in search of the tiny, acidic strawberries that glowed like embers right in the shadow of the ice, or finding the troupes of deep blue gentians that grew only a few paces from the glacier side. And after all, these feelings of pleasurable
horror at the spectacle of the moving ice – the deliberate inducement of which was a motive for visiting Chamonix in the first place – were soon forgotten when the coachman cracked his whip and the visitors’ carriage rumbled off towards Geneva, the railway station and iceless England.

Not everyone was enchanted by the glaciers. Back in the 1830s, a disgruntled visitor had composed a quatrain for the album in the Hôtel Imperial: ‘Give me the glace Tartoni makes, / And take your Mer de Glace for me, / I’d rather eat
his
ice and cakes / Than cross again that frozen sea.’ That page of the album was now well thumbed, for the ditty had become something of a sight in itself – rumour had it that the man had been lost to an avalanche up near the Jardin the following day, and that this rhyme was his last word.

Were it not for the supposed death of the man, that page might have drawn attention to itself anyway, for it was an unusual sentiment in an album filled to the margins with expressions of awe. The Imperial’s guest-book, like that of every other hotel in Chamonix, was a
Festschrift
for the glaciers and the peaks, echoing with ‘magnificents’ and ‘sublimes’, just as the amphitheatres of the mountains echoed with them in the daytime. For the majority of visitors – whether climbers, strollers or just spectators – these mighty ice rivers left deep and abiding grooves of wonder in the mind. ‘The
Glacier
,’ wrote Karl Baedeker decisively in the preface to his
Handbook for Travellers to Switzerland
, the vade mecum of every tripper to Switzerland from 1863 onwards, ‘is the most striking feature of the Alpine world, a stupendous mass of the purest azure ice. No aspect of Switzerland is so strikingly and at the same time so strangely beautiful.’ What a peculiar obsession it was, though – how curious that people should feel the urge to admire and to disport themselves upon these masses of ice.

But then the glaciers were superb enigmas in an age which, beset by mechanization and materialism, was hungry for mysteries. Their
history and their motion were imperfectly understood. No one really knew how they moved their bulks over the land, or even whether glacial ice was a liquid, a solid or some category-defying hybrid substance which both flowed (like a liquid) and fissured (like a solid). It had also since the 1840s become apparent that at some point in the spans of geological time glaciers had been far more extensive than they presently were. The existence all over Europe of polished and furrowed beds of rock, which looked as though they had been ploughed flat by an inconceivably powerful force, suggested this to be the case, as did the distribution of large angular blocks of rock upon the surface of the land, often dozens of miles from their nearest possible site of origin.