Mountains of the Mind (27 page)

The concept of the unknown has not always possessed an allure in and of itself. For centuries the chief incentives for exploration were economic, political or egotistical ones: the desire for money, or territory, or glory. The unknown
per se
held no allure; wise explorers plotted out their journeys on the maps of the familiar. Once again, it was the later eighteenth century which incubated the longing for the unknown in the Western imagination. During the second half of the 1700s in Europe there emerged a new and distinctive appetite for remote countries, for different territories, tastes and sensations – for orders of experience we might now call exotic; meaning literally
on the outside
. In short, for discovery. This sharpening desire for discovery reflected various frustrations. Chief among these was a spreading fatigue at the pieties and stagnancy of urban bourgeois existence. The known and the predictable became qualities to be kicked against, and a hunger grew for regions where one could expect the unexpected. The unknown came to be seen as a gateway to these alternative orders of experience. Charles Baudelaire put it well several decades later: ‘
Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau
.’ Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.

From the 1770s onwards, this potent intellectual lust for the unknown was translated dramatically into action. The sixty years straddling the turn of the eighteenth century were the golden age of exploration. Through the ice-thickened water of the Arctic north, among the Pacific islands and across the deserts of Africa, adventurers and explorers travelled in search of wealth and beauty. Above all, these people were driven by a desire for novelty. Their paramount goal was to penetrate the unknown, and to see the unseen. Discovery became an end in itself, an ethos which accorded with the
intellectual fascination of those decades for originality in all its forms. The ideal Enlightenment being, observed the essayist William Duff in 1767, should occupy himself in ‘exploring unbeaten tracks and making new discoveries’. In 1764, shortly after he had ascended to the throne, George III initiated a campaign of sea-bound exploration. The mandate he gave his explorers was a simple one: ‘to make new discoveries in the southern hemisphere’. So electrified was a young Scotsman named James Bruce at the prospect of being the first man to ‘yield a discovery’ in George III’s reign that he took himself off to explore the mountains and rivers of Abyssinia.

The explorers who visited these wild regions were the film-stars of their age; at once glamorous and notorious. When they returned – if they returned – they wrote up their exploits, and illustrated them with fold-out maps on which were marked, in lines of dots and dashes, their sallies into the unknown. In 1822 the British Arctic explorer John Franklin got back to London after three years on the Arctic tundra. It was rumoured that he and his starving crew had survived on a diet of boot-leather, lichen and, eventually, each other. Franklin’s account of the expedition was a bestseller, and secondhand copies changed hands for far more than the original asking price. Lieutenant William Edward Parry, a doggedly passionate Arctic explorer, became so famous from his repeated trips north that he was mobbed by fans in the street.
*

Even after the supposedly golden age of exploration had drawn to a close in the 1830s, the idea of the geographical unknown remained an energizing force in nineteenth-century foreign policy. Britain, France, Russia, Spain, Belgium: all the great expansionist powers of that century dedicated themselves to tingeing the blanks on the map with their chosen colour – green for France, orange for Russia and pink for Britain. (In America, of course, a different struggle was taking place: the struggle to push the frontier of so-called civilization towards the Pacific – to squeeze the unknown out of existence against the western seaboard in the name of Manifest Destiny.) Volley after volley of expeditions was fired off by the imperial nations in a bid to stake, claim and supposedly civilize the unknown regions of the world.

As each blank was filled in, so a new one was nominated to take its place. The source of the Nile, the North-West Passage, the North and South Poles, Tibet, Everest: each generation of the nineteenth century found a new geographical mystery to puzzle over and obsess about. The German explorer Julius von Payer spoke for much of the reading public, as well as for his fellow explorers, when he remarked that ‘No more exciting situation can be imagined, than that of an explorer in unknown lands especially when nature seems to have surrounded him with an impenetrable wall, and the earth is as yet untrodden by man.’

The British, seemingly more than any other imperial power, were fuelled by the desire to make the whole globe known; to grid it and to girdle it with maps. In 1830 the Royal Geographical Society was founded ‘for the advancement of geographical science’, and before Victoria’s reign was long under way the aim of filling in the remaining white spaces on the world map had been raised to the status of both cultural orthodoxy and policy issue. ‘If there is talk of an unknown land into which no Englishman has penetrated,’ declared a
Times
editorial from 1854, ‘he must be the
first to visit the place.’ In 1846 John Barrow, at the time the Second Secretary to the Admiralty, proclaimed that ‘The North Pole is the only thing in the world about which we know nothing; and that want of all knowledge ought to operate as a spur to adopt the means of wiping away that stain of ignorance from this enlightened age.’ Barrow wasn’t telling the truth – Antarctica and the Himalaya were far less known about than the North Pole – but his impassioned rhetoric nicely catches the fervour with which the mid-century British wanted to solve the globe’s mysteries.

Undoubtedly, the widespread fetishization of exploration and discovery during the nineteenth century affected contemporary perceptions of mountains. For those who could not be fully fledged explorers, but who felt the pull of the unknown, going to the mountains offered an attractive paraphrase of the experience of exploration. And what made mountains especially appealing for European explorers
manqués
was their proximity to home. You didn’t need to travel impossibly far to get to the mountains, or convince an Admiralty funding board of the worth of your trip. What was needed to experience the mountainous unknown was not a prolonged horizontal journey – the year it might take to sail south to the Antarctic, for example, or the many weeks battling north through ship-high waves and ship-wide icebergs to the Arctic – but a briskly vertical one. In just a day, and equipped only with determination, a pair of sturdy shoes and a knapsack of victuals, you could ascend from the benevolence of a Swiss meadow to the Arctic asperities of a high Alpine peak.

In many ways, too, the mountains offered a more authentic experience of the unknown than other more apparently daring exploits. ‘Gentlemen now walk across Siberia with as little discomposure as ladies ride on horseback to Florence,’ wrote James Forbes in 1843:

In Forbes’s words can be heard an
ennui
at the civilization of the wider world (the Atlantic has become a highway, Siberia a pavement, Italy a manège, Athens a traffic-jam), a sentiment which would gain in power as the century wore on. But there is also an audible excitement at the discovery of the
terra incognita
of the Alps which was buried in the heart of civilized Europe, previously hidden from view by the camouflage of altitude.

In the Alps were innumerable virgin peaks, and beyond the Alps lay the unmapped, unexplored, unclimbed expanses of the Greater Ranges – the Andes, the Caucasus, the Himalaya … An editorial in the first edition of
Peaks, Passes and Glaciers
(1859), a popular anthology of writing by members of the Alpine Club, drew attention to the ‘unlimited field for adventure’ offered by mountaineering in the Alps, ‘not to mention the numerous ranges which the Englishman’s foot is someday destined to scale’. Plus, presumably, the rest of the Englishman’s body.

Drawn by this abundance of
terra incognita
, from the 1850s until the 1890s Italian, French, German, Swiss, American and British mountaineers swarmed over the Alps; bagging, climbing, naming and, most significantly of all, mapping.

On early European maps, mountains were represented figuratively as molehills, or little brown blossoms of rock. The Cottonian World Map (
circa
1025–50), for example, depicts several crude caramel-coloured hummocks, about which strolls a winged and humpbacked monster loosely resembling a lion. Where knowledge faded out, legend began: the fantastical creatures which populated these early maps were embodiments of the unknown: little cartoons of ignorance. By the fifteenth century, however, these magical portmanteau beasts – body of a lion, head of a snake – would be more or less extinct from maps, chased off their edges by the spread of knowledge, though they would survive for far longer in the imaginations of mariners, explorers and travellers.

Even after the beasts had disappeared, mountains continued to be represented figuratively, as were forests (as miniature groves of stylized fir trees) and seas (as rows of blue wavelets frozen in mid-lap). The mountains of these early maps were drawn as they might appear if one were looking at them from the level of a valley: the ‘plan view’ – the view from on top – had not yet been conceived of. A Portuguese map of Europe from the late fifteenth century used rows of tiny brown mounds, arranged in neatly geometric patterns, to represent mountainous areas: it looks as though a well-drilled and industrious team of moles has been at work on the continent. Odder still is the representation of the Alps on the Canepa Portolan map of 1489, where the mountains are slung upside down and luridly coloured. They resemble bunches of red and green grapes.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cartographic techniques became more nuanced and more standardized, and greater attention began to be paid to differentiating between landscape features. In 1681 Thomas Burnet observed critically that ‘The Geographers are not very careful to describe or note in
their Charts, the multitude or situation of Mountains.’ He proposed that all ‘Princes’ should have ‘draughts of their own Country and Dominions’ which properly depicted ‘how the Mountains stand’, and ‘how the Heaths, and how the Marches are plac’d’. Burnet justified his suggestion on the mildly erotic grounds that ‘’tis very useful to imagine the Earth in this manner, and to look often upon such bare draughts as shew us Nature undrest; for then we are best able to judge what her true shapes and proportions are.’

Under the pressure of expectation of the Renaissance, cartographers devised ways of suggesting three-dimensionality. The ubiquitous molehill was adapted to create cone-shaped, flattened or craggy mountains. Shadowing was introduced to suggest relief from the ground around, and hachures – short lines of shading – began to be used to provide information about slope and steepness: the steeper the slope, the denser and darker the hachures. Frederick the Great instructed his Prussian military topographers that ‘Wherever I can’t go, let there be a blot.’ Contour lines were an invention of the sixteenth century, but they could not properly be used until advances in survey techniques provided the detail required for them.

The charm and the pleasure of a map lie in its reticence, its incompleteness, in the gap it leaves for the imagination to fill. As the traveller Rosita Forbes noted, a map holds ‘the magic of anticipation without the toil and sweat of realisation’. In my family, the maps would always be bought well in advance of the next trip to the mountains. New maps are noisy and ill-behaved. When you open them, they put up resistance, try to spring back into their folded form. They clack and crack as folds are reversed, and stiff panels of paper pop in and out of shape. We would wrestle our maps flat on to a floor, weight their four corners with books and then kneel down to plot possible routes across them. Early on, my father taught
me to read contour lines, so that the whole map rose magically out of itself.

Maps give you seven-league boots – allow you to cover miles in seconds. Using the point of a pencil to trace the line of an intended walk or climb, you can soar over crevasses, leap tall cliff-faces at a single bound and effortlessly ford rivers. On a map the weather is always good, the visibility always perfect. A map offers you the power of perspective over a landscape: reading one is like flying over a country in an aeroplane – a deodorized, pressurized, temperature-controlled survey.