Mountains of the Mind (22 page)

More recently, the mountain summit has become a secular symbol of effort and reward. ‘ To peak’ is to reach the high point of an endeavour. To be ‘on top of the world’ is to feel incomparably well. Undoubtedly, the sense of accomplishment which comes from reaching a mountain-top has historically been a key element of the desire for height. This is unsurprising – what simpler allegory of success could there be than the ascent of a mountain? The summit provides the visible goal, the slopes leading up to it the challenge. When we walk or climb up a mountain we traverse not only the actual terrain of the hillside but also the metaphysical territories of struggle and achievement. To reach a summit is very palpably to have triumphed over adversity: to have conquered something, albeit something utterly useless. It is the imagined significance of the summit – which is, after all, nothing but a patch of rock or snow raised higher than any other by the contingencies of geology; a set of co-ordinates in space; a figment of geometry; a point without a point – which has largely given rise to the industry of ascent.
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A sense of success is not the only pleasure which lies in height, however. There is also a joy to be found in the sensory experience of
altitude: a bliss which isn’t competitive, but contemplative. Height makes strange even the most familiar of scenes. To look over a city you have lived in all your life from the top of a tower is to see it afresh. The poet George Keates, a friend of Voltaire, put it well when he wrote that at height ‘a new Creation bursts upon our Sight’. View the features of a landscape from the top of a mountain, and they look very different – rivers resemble ribbons, lakes silver blades and boulders flecks of dust. The land resolves itself into abstract patterns or unexpected images.

One October I reached the summit of Bla Bheinn, a mountain on the Isle of Skye. It was a bright day, but the top 300 feet of the mountain were swaddled in cloud, and I didn’t realize until I entered the cloud that the summit was also blanketed with snow. When I reached the top I stopped and stood for a while, wrapped in white snow and white cloud. I could not see more than twenty feet in any direction. It was hard to make out where the land ended and the sky began, except where black rocks jagged through the whiteness. As I stood there, a blizzard of snow-buntings whirled unexpectedly across in front of me, their black under-wings startling against the snow’s whiteness, the little flock turning as one bird. Black and white, the chessboard colour scheme of high mountains.

And then suddenly, briefly, the clouds cleared from around me. The coastline was laid out like a map to north and south, the dark fingers of the land clasping the silver fingers of the Atlantic. A window opened in the cloud cover far out at sea, and the sun projected a golden island of light down on to the water. Then it closed again, and the cloud closed round me, and I turned away to begin the descent.

We are now less amazed by the perspective from above, bombarded as we are with images taken from aeroplanes or satellites. But imagine how startling it must have been to the early summiteers, who had never seen anything like this aerial view, suddenly to find
themselves looking down on the world. To these travellers the visionary amplitudes of altitude felt like approximations of divine sight. Reading through early accounts of ascent, time and again one encounters the successful mountain-climber comparing himself to what the Greeks called the
kataskapos
– the looker-down, the heavenly observer, suddenly and marvellously blessed with a cartographer’s perspective on the world.

For a long time, Noah held the altitude record. Opinion differs sharply as to the location and height of the biblical Mount Ararat, upon the slopes of which the Ark was deposited by the subsiding flood-waters. And according to the expedition log (the Book of Genesis) Noah never actually made it to the summit. Nevertheless, it was indisputable that he had been to a considerable altitude. William Whiston, an eighteenth-century Cambridge cosmogonist, calculated that the mountain upon which the Ark came to rest was six miles high – that is, nearly 32,000 feet: 3,000 feet or so higher than Mount Everest. Had Whiston’s arithmetic been correct, and had the Ark been laden as described in Genesis, its humans and other animals would have died swiftly of hypothermia, hypoxia and the other fatal effects of extreme altitude. Shem, Ham, Japheth and Noah’s other implausibly fertile sons and daughters would not have gone forth and multiplied. The world would not have been restocked with flora, fauna or humanity.

So perhaps Whiston erred on the high side. But then early estimates of altitude, like early estimates of geological time, were deeply muddled. This is unsurprising. There was no need for accurate calculations of height. Almost no one climbed mountains, and for those few who did it was not a comparative undertaking. Measuring the
depths of seas, or the extent of coastlines, was far more necessary than measuring height. Pliny the Elder claimed the highest mountain in the world reached 300,000 feet above sea-level: out by over 270,000 feet. Until the eighteenth century the volcanic Peak of Tenerife was thought by many to be the highest mountain in the world because it rose straight from the sea so prominently on one of the major maritime trade routes. It is in fact well under half the height of Everest.

To those early travellers who were obliged to go to altitude – the merchants and pilgrims who crossed the Alpine passes on their way to and from Rome, for example – it was obvious from the nausea, dizziness and headaches they experienced that there was a bad fit between height and the human body. Of the many early accounts of what is now referred to as AMS – Acute Mountain Sickness – perhaps the most vivid is to be found in the diary of Jose de Acosta, who in 1580 found himself unable to complete a journey in the Andes due to an attack of what the Andeans called
puna
. ‘I was surprised with such pangs of straining and casting’, wrote de Acosta, ‘as I thought to cast up my heart too, having cast up meate fleugme and choller, both yellow & greene.’ Travellers sought to combat the effects of altitude by clasping vinegar-soaked sponges to their mouths and noses; this seems to have done little to mitigate the symptoms of altitude, or to increase the pleasures of the journey.

There is scant evidence that any widespread aesthetic appreciation of views was in operation in Europe before the eighteenth century. Those who did find themselves at height among the mountains were often more concerned with the prospect of survival than with the prospect. The idea of the beautiful view, which now seems to us as instinctive a reaction to a landscape as is possible, does not seem to have had currency in the common consciousness, or at least not to have been triggered by mountains. Quite the opposite, in fact: until well into the 1700s, travellers who had to cross the Alpine passes often chose to be blindfolded in order to prevent them being terrified
by the appearance of the peaks. When the philosopher Bishop Berkeley traversed Mont Cenis on horseback in 1714, he recorded being very much ‘put out of humour by the most horrible precipices’. Even the anonymous author of
Les Délices de la Suisse
(1730), probably the earliest tourist brochure for Switzerland, was appalled by the ‘prodigious height’ of the Alps, and their ‘eternal snows’. ‘These great excrescences of the earth,’ he wrote, ‘to outward appearance have neither use nor comeliness.’ He chose to advertise instead the neatness of the towns, and the happiness and health of Swiss cattle.

The usual starting-point for histories of altitude is the Italian poet Petrarch’s description of his ascent, with his energetic brother Gherardo, of Mont Ventoux – a benign 1,910-metre lump in the Vaucluse – in April of 1336. Upon reaching the summit of the mountain, Petrarch was amazed by the vista:

Petrarch and Gherardo descended in the gathering darkness to an inn at the foot of the mountain, and by the light of a candle the poet
jotted down his account of the day. Petrarch’s ascent is undoubtedly momentous for the history of height. Its importance is tempered, however, because of the insistence with which Petrarch turns his experience into a religious allegory. Nothing in his description – the path he takes up the mountain, the view from the summit, the clothes he wears – can be only itself: rather, all are significant details in an account bristling with symbolism. Some scholars suggest that the ascent did not take place at all, but was simply a convenient fictional framework over which to drape Petrarch’s metaphysical musings, and an opportunity to draw a pious moral. ‘How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountain-tops,’ Petrarch concluded, ‘but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.’

To witness the first flashes of interest in mountain-tops not just as spiritual emblems but as actual physical forms which are affecting to behold, we must look to the 1600s, when the template for the famous Grand Tour – the edifying trip around the cities and landscapes of continental Europe which, in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, it became usual for moneyed (or disgraced) young men to take – was just being forged. These Grand Tourists would return as the bearers and disseminators of new cultural attitudes towards landscape in general and mountains in particular. Among the first generation of young Britons who chose to sample the Tour was the diarist John Evelyn, whose journal would bring him such posthumous fame (it was written between 1641 and 1706, discovered in a laundry-basket in 1817 and published for the first time the following year).

One November evening in 1644 Evelyn and two companions were trotting past the outer walls of the Rocca castle in the mountains of northern Italy. Through the evening air came the sound of a big church bell, rung by one of the Capucin monks who lived on an island in the nearby lake of Bolsena. Only a few weeks earlier, while
crossing the Alps into Italy, Evelyn had been repelled by the ‘strange, horrid and fearful’ appearance of the mountains. In his diary entries for those days he had railed against the Alpine peaks, rehearsing the conventional seventeenth-century objections to mountains: that their steepness prevents the free range of the eye; that they are ‘desarts’ – barren of life and of no use to anyone.

What a surprise it was to Evelyn that so soon after that unpleasant experience he should find himself thrilled by height. For, as he rode further up the mountain, he was rewarded with one of the most exciting and beautiful effects of altitude – the cloud inversion, when the mountain-goer discovers him or herself suddenly to be above the clouds.

Reading the travelogues of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, one stumbles occasionally across moments like this, when a
mind discloses its instinctive relationship to a form of landscape; slips briefly out of the straitjacket of received opinion and creates new ways of feeling. The excitement about height which Evelyn experienced would remain unusual, however, until in the mid-eighteenth century it moved swiftly to the foreground and became an orthodoxy which continues to hold sway today: the adoration of height for height’s sake. When this shift of perception came, it would require as much originality
not
to be delighted by height as it had previously required to find it delightful.