Mountains of the Mind (24 page)

Altitude has one effect which even the most fervent fan of the horizontal can’t deny: you can see further. From the tops of mountains on the Scottish west coast you can look out towards the Atlantic and see the curvature of the earth, can watch the dark rim of the sea’s horizon bending at either end. From the summit of Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus you can look into the Black Sea to your west and to your east into the Caspian Sea. From the top of a Swiss Alp you begin to discuss the world with an uncommon largesse – Italy is to my left, Switzerland to my right, France straight ahead. Your topographic units are suddenly countries instead of counties. Indeed, on a clear day, the only limits to how far you can see are the mechanical limits of your vision. Otherwise you are panoptic, satellitic, an all-seeing I: simultaneously thrilled and terrified by what Marshall McLuhan called the ‘vast, swallowing distances of visual space’. And that is an unforgettable sensation.

Great height gives you greater vision: the view from the summit empowers you. But in a way, too, it obliterates you. Your sense of self is enhanced because of its extended capacity for sight, but it also comes under attack – is threatened with insignificance by the grand vistas of time and space which become apparent from a mountain-top. The traveller-explorer Andrew Wilson felt this keenly in the Himalaya in 1875:

This is the human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the individual mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.

The adoration of the summit, which intensified over the eighteenth century, reached its peak in Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth. There is a painting from 1818 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, usually called
The Traveller above a Sea of Clouds
, which is now, thanks chiefly to the greetings-card industry, familiar to almost everyone. Friedrich’s
Traveller
became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art. He now looks implausible to us, ridiculous even: the little rock hummocks protruding from the nimbus at his feet, his absurdly clichéd stature – one foot raised; a big-game hunter with his foot upon the cavernous ribcage of his dead beast. But as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a summit is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.

Two years before Friedrich painted his archetype, John Keats started worrying that he was suffering from writer’s block. He decided that altitude might relax his mind, and took to imagining himself at height when he wanted to write: a Romantic version of counting sheep to get to sleep. It worked – or at least it gave him a subject to write about:

Height, at least in its imaginary form, was the laxative which Keats’s blocked mind thought it needed: the ‘mountain-top’ again proved to be a spiritual vantage-point as well as a physical one.
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Shelley, too, was profoundly affected by the qualities of altitude. ‘Wind, light, air,’ he declared, ‘stir violent emotions in me.’ Air is the distinctive element of his poetry (as water is of Byron’s). Vaporous and ethereal, his writing returns again and again to the ‘upper air’, to the ‘keen sky-cleaving mountains’, the ‘ermine snow’ and the ‘cold sky’ – his poetry sublimates itself into gaseousness, spirals exultantly up into nothing. On first looking up at the Alps in 1816, as he rode in along the Chamonix–Servoz road, Shelley was overwhelmed. His hands were fortunately not in charge of the reins, and he was free to goggle at the mountains. He described his reaction in a famous letter. ‘I never knew – I never imagined what mountains were before,’ he wrote. ‘The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight,
a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness
.’

It isn’t hard, with the benefit of hindsight, to see why altitude was so attractive to Romantic artists such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley. As a concept it coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. A summit was somewhere one could stand out –
could be outstanding. The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness? ‘Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills … the more they congregate the more they corrupt each other,’ Rousseau had noted, an observation which would gain in potency and relevance as urbanization increased over the course of the nineteenth century. Cities teemed with merchants and thieves, but the mountains! – the mountains were devoid of sin. The mountain-top became a ubiquitous symbol of emancipation for the city-bound spirit, a crystallization of the Romantic-pastoral desire to escape the atomized, socially dissolute city. You could be lonely in a city crowd, but you could find solitude on a mountain-top.

And of course it was upon a summit, in solitude, that the Romantic fondness for meditation could be both indulged and encouraged. Time and again in Romantic documents we find the traveller exclaiming at the inrush of lofty thoughts induced by height. ‘What great spectacles fill the soul of the philosopher who is on top of a peak!’ declared Pivery de Senancour in 1800. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure had been even more ecstatic two decades earlier: ‘What language can reproduce the sensations and paint the ideas with which these great spectacles [mountains] fill the soul of the philosopher who is on top of a peak? He seems to dominate our globe, to discover the sources of its motion, and to recognise at least the principal agents that effect its revolutions.’ Romanticism fused into the imagination of altitude a new element of attractiveness: that one was almost guaranteed enlightenment – spiritual or artistic epiphany – by getting high.
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The mountain-top and the viewpoint became accepted sites of
contemplation and creativity: places where you were brought to see further both physically and metaphysically. From the Victorian family eating their picnic on the North Downs and casting their eyes over London to the pioneering alpinist toiling upwards towards a virgin summit, all visitors to altitude were drawn in part by the conviction that they would be rewarded both with far sight and with insight: that mindscapes as well as landscapes would be revealed to them.

In 1836 Charles Darwin could claim with some confidence that ‘Everyone must know the feeling of triumph and pride which a grand view from a height communicates to the mind.’ What a change that was from Bishop Berkeley’s displeasure at the ‘horrible precipices’ over which he passed in 1714. In little more than a century, height had come to connote a host of attractive characteristics. It equalled escape, it equalled solitude, it equalled spiritual and artistic epiphany. Height was also held to have physically hygienic properties: at altitude, the air was thought to be cleaner – and to be a cleanser. ‘There is assuredly morality in the oxygen of the mountains,’ announced John Tyndall in 1871. From the 1850s onwards, numerous high-altitude sanatoria were established in the European Alps, at which tubercular or asthmatic patients – among them Katherine Mansfield and Robert Louis Stevenson – resided, absorbing the mountain sunlight, breathing the mountain air and thrashing out big ideas over dinner. When my great-grandfather was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis, he was advised by his doctors to move to Switzerland. The air was no help; he died in 1934, and was buried in a mountain cemetery with a view of the peaks. But it was because of this that my grandfather
was brought up in Switzerland, and it was there that he contracted his love of the mountains, which I in turn would catch from him.

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the veneration of height was almost automatic. For those inhabitants of Europe who didn’t care to run the risks of stepping on to a hillside, or couldn’t afford to, the experience of being at height was available in a multitude of forms. Books of landscape photographs and engravings, expedition journals and knockdown editions of Romantic poetry all provided stay-at-homes with at least second-hand versions of the facts and the feelings about altitude. Following the lead of earlier continental mountain painters such as Salvator Rosa and Josse de Momper, nineteenth-century artists including Philippe de Loutherbourg, J. M. W. Turner, Alexander Cozens and John Martin filled their canvases with precipitous scenery, using distorted scales, unconventional viewpoints and disrupted horizons to unbalance their viewers and pull them into the vertiginous worlds of their images. At the Leicester Square Rotunda or the Panorama Strand in the 1820s and 1830s, spectators could wander in the darkened central circular platform, while around them for 360° stretched a multiple vanishing-point painting of the Mont Blanc massif – an ‘alporama’. There for an hour or two they could fill their heads with the startling geometries of the mountainscape: the glint of snow and ice, and the black ribs of rock. The ambition of the alporama was hyperrealism, and it was successful – visitors had been known to experience acute disorientation, and even vertigo. And after the 1850s, what one passenger called the ‘delightful velocity’ of the railways hastened the return journey to Zermatt from sixty-six days to fourteen, and the entrepreneurship of one Thomas Cook – dubbed ‘The Napoleon of Excursions’ – brought the masses to see the Matterhorn: such a bracing shock after the low-altitude skylines of Britain’s cities.

A common heritage of feeling was passed down through the generations and spread across a swathe of people. The difference between those who died on the mountains, those who took a Thomas Cook tour to the Alps and those who merely read about mountains or gazed at their representations was one of degree and not one of kind. All were susceptible to the spell of altitude, and all were part of its casting. There was a near-perfect marriage between the attention-seeking mountaineers and the ascension-seeking public. A new kind of altitude sickness had come to grip the common imagination, for so long antagonistic to the mountains: one in which the nausea came from
not
being at height. John Ruskin alluded to it when he confessed that in a totally flat landscape, he felt ‘a kind of sickness and pain’.

In 1827 a young man named John Auldjo, fresh out of his degree at Cambridge and enthused by the descriptions he had heard about the Alps, arrived in Chamonix with the intention of becoming the seventh Briton to summit Mont Blanc. Soon after reaching the town, he was sought out by a local who had survived a badly fractured skull from rockfall on Mont Blanc in 1791. The old man pushed his dented head close to Auldjo’s face, and warned him not to attempt the ascent. Auldjo scoffed – though he did take the precaution of hiring six guides to ensure his safe passage up the mountain.