Mountains of the Mind (20 page)

Solar physics was a hot topic among articulate Victorians from the 1850s onwards. Kelvin’s discovery (which would not be discredited until the discovery of radioactive salts by Rutherford in the early years of the twentieth century) made a universal winter – another Ice Age – historically foreseeable. The Poles themselves, ‘the crystalline continents’, were inaccessible, but out on the glaciers of the Alps, or the Caucasus, or the Karakorum, it was possible for the Victorians to confront their fears of obliteration; to acquaint themselves with the means of their future destruction. They felt the same horrified awe that we might feel in visiting the gleaming, ranked warheads of a nuclear arsenal. The return of the Ice Age, indeed, was their nuclear winter.

I first saw John Ruskin’s drawing of the Glacier du Bois while leafing through the second volume of his thirty-nine-volume
Works
, appalled at the industry of the man. It is a startling sketch. Ruskin decided that it would be impossible to replicate the formal qualities of the ice itself: conventional realism would be thwarted by its appearance. So he sought instead to depict the relationship between the observer and the observed; to present not the ice as it was, but the ice as he saw it – to paint the act of perception.

In 1842, J. M. W. Turner, whom Ruskin venerated, had completed one of his finest canvases,
Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead
. There is, at first glance, no steamboat in this picture, only
snow storm. The canvas is aswirl with dark colours, a viscous whirlpool of cloud canted up to the vertical. Only after a few seconds, and with the help of the title, does the ship become visible, its round dark mill-wheel barely discernible through the spume, the fire from its furnaces gilding only a tiny area of heaving sea. Once the ship has been seen, then the long black-brown limb of storm reaching down from the thunderheads is understood to be nothing of the sort, but the billowing smoke-stack reaching upwards. Finally, at the very centre of the whirlpool, one spots deliverance – a hint of blue, the tinted iris of the storm, an eye-shaped glimpse of good weather. Not enough to make a Dutchman a pair of trousers, but blue sky nevertheless.

Ruskin’s drawing of the glacier is clearly modelled on Turner’s painting of the snowstorm. There is the same forceful sense of vortex, of centripetal energy. Spindrift – the loose particles of snow and ice blown by wind – lisps over every surface. A chough or raven flies just on the event horizon of the picture, as does a bristly old tree bole – both apparently about to be swirled inescapably down into the pale plug-hole of the sun. Even Ruskin’s signature, in the bottom left-hand corner, is bending under the strain, its ends being tugged inwards by the pull of the drawing. In the background the mountains stand in profile, like white knives, echoed by the pinnacled surface of the glacier. Ruskin comes nearer in this drawing than any other artist I have ever seen to catching the experience of being on a glacier. He brilliantly compounds its paradox of stasis and dramatic force. On a glacier, one is always aware of motion in the midst of stillness: there is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins observed of an Alpine ice-river, ‘an air of interrupted activity’.

I fell into a crevasse once, walking over the snowed-up surface of a Swiss glacier and whistling, as I tend to do on glaciers, the Doors’ song ‘Break on through to the Other Side’. I did. There was a creak, and then an awareness of collapse beneath my feet, like a trap-door opening.

The Glacier du Bois
, etching from a drawing by John Ruskin (1843).

I dropped vertically, and jammed at belly-level in the ice, the air punched from my lungs by the fall. My lower half had entered another element. It felt colder, much colder down there. My feet, heavy with boots and crampons, kicked in emptiness, until I realized this might dislodge me and I let them hang, toe-downwards, and spread my arms out across the snow, in the upper world. There was a sensation of unknowable depth beneath me and I was gripped by a terrible vertigo. It was the same feeling as when, aged thirteen, I stepped from the brink of a yacht into sea several miles off the coast of Corsica, where the charts showed a submarine trench of 4,000 feet. The water was clear, tinged with blue. My brother and I dropped two silver centimes and with scuba masks watched their slow bright tumble, head over tail, for what seemed like hours through the water. Suddenly I was seized with panic, with the fear of losing my buoyancy and tumbling helplessly downwards after the coins. I had to be pulled from the water by my father, who cupped me under my armpits and lifted me out in one fluid movement, trailing a tail of sea water.

My climbing partner hauled me gracelessly from the glacier, like a body from a swimming-pool, and I lay on the snow gasping, almost asthmatic with fear. That night, safe in an Alpine hut but sleepless on a thin mattress with other climbers turning all about me, my mind got to work on what had happened, luxuriating in the conditional tense. Had I dropped into the crevasse, the glacier would have gone about its business as surely as if I had not been there. Its internal machinery would have annihilated my body. Had I fallen, like the French Protestant minister, into a crevasse the size of a ‘grand and spacious hall’, the sides would have closed in over the months, and the space would have diminished from ballroom, to bedroom, to broom cupboard, to coffin.

Glaciers compounded two concepts that were especially exciting to the nineteenth-century imagination: great force and great time. In
Travels through the Alps of Savoy
, the Scottish glaciologist James Forbes drew attention to this last aspect of them. ‘A glacier is an endless scroll,’ he wrote, ‘a stream of time upon whose stainless ground is engraven the succession of events, whose dates far transcend the memory of living man. Assuming the length of a glacier to be roughly twenty miles, and its annual progression 500 feet, the block which is now discharged from its surface on the terminal moraine may have started from its rocky origin in the reign of Charles I!’ To walk down the ‘wide gleaming causeway’ of a glacier, therefore, was to walk backwards in time. To descend into a crevasse was to encounter ice that had been compacted when the Civil War was in progress. To behold a gargantuan avalanche or an ice-fall, as did Robert Ker Porter, an English aristocrat and soldier travelling in the Caucasus in the late 1810s, was to witness the collapse of ages – ‘the snows and ice of centuries, pouring down in immense shattered forms and rending heaps!’ Glaciers and the mountains around them forced the human mind to think in different ways, and at different speeds.

There is a lovely anecdote about Mark Twain, who visited Switzerland with his family in 1878. Having climbed high up the eastern side of Zermatt valley, they pondered the easiest way back down. ‘I resolved,’ Twain remembered in
A Tramp Abroad
, ‘to take passage for Zermatt on the great Gorner glacier.’

Twain, with a characteristically charming lack of gravity, was satirizing an attitude towards nature which has since come to predominate: we expect nature to do our bidding, to fall into step with us. Or we override it with technology, and render its rhythms superfluous. Our need for speed has led us to esteem the streamlined, the dynamic in all things, and that estimation has accelerated us out of sync with the natural world.

But slowness and stasis have their own virtues too, their own aesthetic, and it is well to be reminded of that from time to time. Early one spring I caught a minibus out of Beijing. It drove north past the frozen Mi yun reservoir – acre after acre of silver ice – which provides Beijing with much of its water, and up into the pleated landscape along whose narrow ridges the Great Wall marches. After three hours the bus turned off the main asphalt road and hairpinned laboriously up a rubbled track.

We stopped, finally, in the shadowed floor of a gorge. High above us on its north wall was a squat watchtower, supervising the land
around as it had done for 800 years. Spilling off the rim of the gorge was a frozen waterfall: thick pipes of dirty yellow ice three or four hundred feet in length, and between them vertical stripes of clean blue ice. The whole frozen fall looked like a Gothic pipe-organ, with its tubes and wind-tunnels radiating extravagantly up and out. The air was warm, and from the tips of the lowest icicles meltwater ran in continuous streams.

We strapped on crampons, picked up a pair of axes each, and spent the day climbing the fall. During a break I took off my climbing gear, and scrambled down to explore the frozen river into which the waterfall plunged. Seen from an oblique angle, the ice appeared blue ridged with silver. I dropped down on to it.

Where the ice filled the gaps between the shoreline stones it was the milky white colour of cataracts. The big resident boulders out in the middle of the river, which would in summer have generated whirlpools and rapids, were surrounded by smooth planes of transparent ice. Looking down into the ice I could see its deepness, marked by the birch leaves suspended in it and by plump white air bubbles which ascended like strings of pearls. There was a clatter, and I glanced up. A mink poured itself out of the shadows on one side of the river, skittered across the damp ice and galloped off over the flat stones on the other side. It printed them with wet pawmarks, black decals which in the dry air faded quickly back into the colour of stone.

My sense of wonder at the frozen waterfall and the halted river derived from the absolute stasis of something that would normally be absolutely turbulent. Perhaps our quickening obsession with speed has to do with our end-of-the-worldliness: the latent sense, unique to our modern age, that apocalypse might come either by ice (the death of the sun) or by fire (nuclear holocaust). I had wondered about this, though I had not found anyone else who did until, reading through Théophile Gautier’s journalism, I came across a passage from 1884: