Mountains of the Mind (19 page)

Nothing was impervious to this apocalyptic ice, which obliterated with the same eager and remorseless energy as the unearthly fire of Revelations.

This Apocryphal vision of a global glacial catastrophe would, over the course of the nineteenth century, come to be realized as true. Geological science would reveal that an Ice Age was something which had happened at least once in the history of the earth, and physical science would suggest that it might happen again in the future. The later nineteenth century had to come to terms with the concept that humanity lived in an epoch bracketed by ages of ice. It was a concept so awful, and so total, that it took the common imagination – especially in green and clement Britain – decades to assimilate it. The horror was mitigated, for Christians at least, only by the knowledge that such an event would be a divine purgative – a purification by cold.

Visiting the Savoy glaciers in the blighted summer of 1816, Percy Shelley had no such religious insulation to keep himself cosy. ‘Who
would
be, who
could
be an Atheist in this valley of wonders!’ Coleridge had asked in the preface to his ‘Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chaumoni’. Reaching Chamonix in mid-July, Shelley had answered Coleridge’s pompously modal question by signing himself into the hotel guest-book as ‘
Atheos
’ – atheist.

The evening after his arrival Shelley paid a visit to the Glacier des Bossons. Of all the physical forms which he encountered in the Alps, the glaciers appear to have affected him the most profoundly. He brooded over his experiences among the mountains in two capacious, meditative letters, sent to his novelist friend Thomas Love Peacock, and his thoughts on the glaciers are worth quoting at length, because they were published, and read by many in Britain, and because they startlingly pre-figure the vision of a future ice age which was to haunt the later nineteenth-century imagination:

And so Shelley continued, spinning out his nightmare of an earth turned into a necropolis of ice. He was writing with half a mind to publication, and his language tends occasionally towards the melodramatic, but there is no doubting the disturbance the glaciers caused him. Given time enough, he thinks, there is nothing on earth to stop these perpetually moving glaciers from pouring out of their rightful environment, overflowing the vale, and melding with the ice-caps to encase the world in ice. And time – as we have already seen – was something that geological science had recently been discovering in abundance.

The future freezing of the earth would have seemed more than usually plausible in that summer of 1816. The previous year Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, had erupted and its pall of dust and cinders had been carried across the world on the trade winds. The particles of debris coalesced into strange aerial shapes over Europe and America and sometimes performed dancing light shows, such as those regularly reported by explorers in the polar regions. Lurid, Turnerian sunsets burnt every evening, though the days were far colder than usual. The global temperature dropped by up to two degrees centigrade, harvests failed, and thousands died of famine or froze to death. There was no summer. Even the sun seemed disrupted – large sunspots were visible to the naked eye and in the streets of London people squinted up at them through shards of smoked glass.

Little wonder, then, that on that uncommonly cold July day Shelley’s imagination saw in the glaciers the agents of the world’s end. Byron, who was holidaying on the continent with Shelley that year, also sensed something terrifyingly inexorable in the way the ‘glacier’s cold and restless mass / Moves onward day by day’, and the shroud of ash which had been pulled over the skies provoked in him a similar vision of death by freezing: the globe desolated by ice, and home to no man. ‘I had a dream which was not all a dream’, began his famous poem ‘Darkness’, which he wrote that same summer:

Shelley and Byron’s visions of a world plunged into deep-freeze were no doubt dismissed by some as the hypotheses of poets with too much time on their hands. Subsequent scientific discoveries,
however, were to prove them not winsomely melancholic, but appallingly accurate.

The idea of the Ice Age did not diffuse into the cultural consciousness, but arrived with very little preparation, docking like an unexpected liner. The man widely held responsible for bringing the Ice Age to public knowledge was Louis Agassiz, a visionary and erratic Swiss scientist who had built a reputation as a palaeontologist before moving into the embryonic discipline of glaciology in the late 1830s. The better to pursue his research, he founded a rudimentary laboratory high in the Bernese Oberland: a wooden cabin perched on the shaley moraine of the Unteraar glacier. The cabin itself became part of his experiments on glacial motion, being conveyed downhill on its bed of rocks at – Agassiz calculated – a regal mean rate of 349 feet per annum until, during the spring of 1840, it collapsed in on its unoccupied self. (Agassiz arrived at his laboratory that summer to discover a heap of debris, the separate items of which were beginning to move in interestingly different directions. He was obliged to seek shelter elsewhere.)

It was high in the Oberland that Agassiz began to form his spectacular conclusions about the one-time extent of the glaciers. ‘Since I saw the glaciers,’ he wrote to an English geologist, ‘I am quite of a snowy humor, and will have the whole surface of the earth quite covered with ice, and the whole prior creation dead by cold.’ It was not an idle boast. In 1840 Agassiz published
Études sur les Glaciers
– or ‘The Ice Book’ as it was referred to by the British – a work which was rumoured to have been written in a single night of fervid creativity. That same year he toured Britain, lecturing on his radical new theory: that Europe, and quite probably much of the rest of the world, had as recently as 14,000 years ago been thickly sheathed in ice. The Alpine glaciers, in Agassiz’s opinion, had been greatly extended, and the Arctic ice-cap had encroached south across the latitudes; relentlessly excavating, denuding and reorganizing, ironing
out the plains of Eastern Europe, filling hills and dales alike with glaciers. Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory was being proved true, at least retroactively.

Agassiz’s purpose was scientific, but his style, like his personality, was dramatic, as can be seen in an article he wrote for the
Edinburgh New Philological Journal
in 1841. The earth, he claimed, had been plunged into:

To the early Victorian mind, still very much in thrall to the Sublime, Agassiz’s was a thrilling vision, excitingly awful in its totality. The ice had hunted life to its last lurking-place, had obliterated ‘everything organic’, and had rewritten the land. Agassiz’s proposals were at first dismissed as ridiculous. But he possessed persuasive ocular proof – the striated rocks, the angular erratics, the inexplicable Till – and his campaign gradually began to gain support. ‘You have made all the geologists glacier-mad here,’ a Scottish scientist wrote to Agassiz after he delivered a lecture in Glasgow, ‘and they are turning Great Britain into an ice-house.’

It is difficult for us to understand how drastically the idea of the Ice Age rewrote the nineteenth-century world-view. It affected almost
every scientific discipline – natural history, chemistry, physics – and obliged the rethinking of much of anthropology, natural history and theology. More immediately, familiar landscapes had suddenly to be looked at with very different eyes. In Llanberis in Wales, in Windermere in the Lake District, in the Cairngorms or in Switzerland, the evidence of the passage of the Ice Age could now be seen: scooped corries, U-shaped valleys, gigantic boulders, and the blade-like ridges which had been sharpened by glacial action. John Ruskin, in the fourth volume of
Modern Painters
, described how in the Alpine valleys ‘there are yet visible the tracks of ancient glaciers … the footmark, so to speak, of a glacier is just as easily recognisable as the tracks of a horse that had passed along a soft road which yet retained the prints of its shoes’. Ruskin’s image – the glacier as a horse, the hard mountain as a soft road – made the ancient superbly immediate; collapsed the deep past into the familiar present.

A three-layer panorama from 1860 showing the modern ‘Adamitic’ world (top layer) separated by the ‘sharp sword’ of the Ice Age (second layer) from the reptiles and mammals of the Tertiary and Secondary periods. Lithograph by W. R. Woods, from Isabella Duncan’s
Pre-Adamite Man
(1860).

Glaciers became big news. Major cultural critics of the day – Ruskin, John Tyndall – discussed their import. Words were exchanged in the pages of the quarterlies over the cause of motion of glaciers and over the precise physical nature of glacial ice. Ruskin, with characteristic aplomb and perhaps with a desire to put an end to the pettifogging, declared them to be ‘one great accumulation of icecream, poured upon the tops, and flowing to the bottoms, of the mountains.’

The considerable column inches devoted to glaciers between the 1840s and the 1870s, and the revelation of the Ice Age, increased the number of glacier-goers, who were eager to see at first-hand these masses of ice which had shaped the surface of the world. The ‘little glaciers of the present day’ were, as Tyndall put it, ‘mere pigmies as compared to the giants of the glacial epoch’, but that was just fine, for it pleased the imagination to attempt that enlargement of pigmy to giant. Visitors to the glens of Scotland imagined them being sculpted by glaciers that had long since deliquesced, and visitors to the extant Alpine glaciers imagined them for what they had once been: mighty rivers of ice encasing the earth.

What profoundly horrified the later Victorians – as it had horrified Shelley – was the possibility that the Ice Age might come again; this time as tragedy. In 1862 the physicist William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, had made public his belief that the sun was cooling without renewal of its energy. Not only was there nothing new under the sun, but the sun itself was nothing new, and was ageing day by day. Owing to the slow and irreversible seep of entropy, the solar system was condemned to what had been christened ‘Heat Death’. It was Buffon’s nebular hypothesis all over again, except that
this time it was not the globe which was cooling down, but its lantern and radiator, the sun. The universe was pulsing away on a limited wattage, science had proved, and the icy earth would at some point in the future swing blind and blackening through space.