Mountains of the Mind (29 page)

I tried to imagine Lieutenant Carter there, crouched down, scratching away with his bayonet tip, etching himself in time. I could understand his behaviour: a person far from home, wanting to write himself in some way into this frighteningly indifferent landscape. I left Carter’s graffito behind and walked on up for the ten minutes it took me to reach the top of the hill. I looked out at the dunes for a while, then heaped together three or four loose lumps of sandstone to form a makeshift cairn, and turned to head back down the path.

The Victorians were in many ways the unknown’s most implacable foes. Yet even as they worked so energetically to eradicate it, they began also to feel the need for the continued existence of inaccessible places – places of great imaginative potency. There emerged an impulse to preserve the unknown for its power of resonance, for its quality of nullity.

George Eliot, always so attuned to the national mood, sensed this feeling early on in its development. There is a moment in
Middlemarch
when the young Will Ladislaw declares that ‘he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination’. To many in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Ladislaw’s sentiment seemed an increasingly just one. The century had been spent trying to enlarge the frontiers of knowledge, and that effort had now evoked a claustrophobia at the diminishing limits of the unfamiliar. The age of realism had discovered that it yearned for mysteries.

This claustrophobia was in no small part a consequence of technological modernity – telegraph lines tying the world up in a cat’s cradle of communication, train tracks and steamships criss-crossing it faster and more frequently – which was exercising its distinctive trick of compressing time and space, of bringing the distant nearer
faster. In 1900, on the cusp of full-blown modernity, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim had to go as far as Borneo to find somewhere ‘beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines’. Towards the end of the 1800s in both Britain and North America, calls were made (as one writer put it) ‘rigidly to economize the regions of dream’ – to conserve the world’s remaining wildernesses from the intrusions of industrial modernity. ‘The case for the safeguarding of natural beauty,’ wrote the mountaineer F. W. Bourdillon,

By the end of the First World War, the two polar blanks on the map had been filled in, or at least the two poles had been ‘touched’. The geographical mysteries which had so attracted the young Joseph Conrad to Africa had all been solved. The only region which apparently remained pristine was the Tibetan plateau, on the southern edge of which was Mount Everest: the so-called ‘Third Pole’, the last fastness of the unknown. It wasn’t unknown to the Tibetans and the Nepalis, of course, who had worshipped the mountain for centuries without feeling the slightest inclination to climb it.
*
But as so often
in the history of exploration, the existence of indigenous people did not in any way diminish the Western explorers’ sense that they were the first into the area.

In 1920, when it was first made public that an expedition would be launched to climb Everest, there was an outcry at the prospect that the entire surface of the globe was to be filled in. ‘It will be a proud moment for the man who first stands on the top of the earth,’ lamented an editorial in the
Daily News
, ‘but he will have the painful thought that he had queered the pitch for posterity. For my part, I should like to think that some corner of the globe would be preserved for ever inviolate. Men will never lose the sense of wonder, but they will always try to do so, and such a sanctuary would have a world wide effect.’ The
Evening News
took a much stronger line, declaring that ‘Some of the last mystery of the world will pass when the last secret place in it, the naked peak of Everest, shall be trodden by those trespassers.’

Precisely the same worry at the dwindling of the unknown has dogged our own era. ‘The surface of the globe,’ wrote the explorer Wilfred Thesiger in his autobiography,
The Life of My Choice
, ‘having now, thanks to the internal combustion engine, been thoroughly explored, no longer affords scope for the adventurous individual in search of the unknown.’ It is not only the movement of individuals which destroys the unknown, of course, but the movement of information. The global information networks which have been established during the past century – the internet foremost among them – mean that almost nothing remains unrepresented in some medium or other. At the click of a mouse we can summon up images, verbal or visual, of almost anything we wish for. There seems barely any room left for the unknown or the original. So we, like the Victorians before us, have taken steps to relocate the unknown. We have displaced our concept of it upwards and outwards, on to space – that notoriously final frontier – and inwards
and downwards, to the innermost chambers of atom and gene, or the recesses of the human psyche: what George Eliot called ‘the unmapped country within us’.

In a way, though, there is no such thing as the unknown. Because wherever we go, we carry our worlds with us. Consider, for instance, the gentleman mountaineer Douglas Freshfield, who in 1868 explored the then little-known Caucasus range, navigating only by the vague indications and blue smears of an old Russian map. In his journal, Freshfield comforted himself over and over again by seeing the alien landscape in terms of Victorian Britain. A pair of unclimbed peaks is ‘of steep writing desk form’, a glaciated cirque is ‘as flat as a cricket ground’. A ‘day of rainstorms and gleams’ is ‘like English Lake weather’, a rich Caucasian dessert he finds ‘rather like Devonshire cream’. So many of the nineteenth-century exploration accounts do the same: the jungle pool carpeted with iridescent algae appears ‘as smooth as billiard baize’, the lustrous water of a distant ocean glitters ‘like the Serpentine on a bright day’.

We don’t come fresh to even the most inaccessible of landscapes. ‘History,’ as the American writer Susan Solnit has observed, ‘which is itself an act of imagination, is carried in the mind to the remotest places to determine what one’s acts mean even there.’ So traversing even the most uncharted landscape, we are also traversing the terrain of the known. We carry expectations within us and to an extent we make what we meet conform to those expectations, as Freshfield did. A raft of largely undetectable assumptions and preconceptions affects the way we perceive and behave in a place. Our cultural baggage – our memory – is weightless, but impossible to leave behind.

So perhaps the unknown exists most perfectly in anticipation, in the imagination. The journey, the climb, the expedition, the discovery, are most purely experienced in the future tense, before the feet are set, before the comparisons are made. Had I gone into that unexplored valley in the Tian Shan, I would almost certainly have found it very like other snowy valleys I have visited. I would have been disappointed by its familiarity.

Yet we
are
still capable of being surprised by strangeness, of being shocked by the new. In the right frame of mind, to walk from one room in a house to another can be exploration of the highest order. To a child a back garden can be an unknown country. The best writers of children’s books have understood this. Richard Jefferies’s overlooked
Bevis, the Story of a Boy
(1882) follows the adventures of two boys, Mark and Bevis. They first ‘discover’ a lake near their home, which they imagine to be an uncharted inland sea surrounded on all sides by impenetrable jungle. They then build a boat, and set out to explore the reaches of the sea. On their journey they discover and name a New Formosa, a New Nile, Central Africa, the Antarctic, the Unknown Island and many more territories besides.

Jefferies described the book as a celebration of the wondrousness of childhood, a time ‘where there was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground’. Arthur Ransome would use the same idea to more acclaim several decades later in his
Swallows and Amazons
, where Roger, Titty, John and Susan set sail across Windermere – which they know just as ‘the lake’ – on a voyage of exploration. The northern and southern tips of the lake are to the children the
terrae incognitae
of the Arctic and Antarctic, and it is surrounded to the east and west by the unexplored High Hills, and to the north-east by the Great Mountains. What Jefferies and Ransome both realized, and explored, was how the alchemy of the imagination can turn a lake into an entire world; can turn the thoroughly known into the thoroughly unknown. No
matter that Windermere – the lake on which Roger, Titty and the others sailed – was thick with yachts and houseboats; to the children they were its explorers, its pioneers, the first to sail across it.

The map, drawn by Steven Spurrier, which accompanied the first edition of
Swallows and Amazons
(1930). Note the High Hills, the Great Mountains, and the unexplored antipodes of the Arctic and Antarctic. Reproduced by permission of the Spurrier family.

Snow is the ideal surface for would-be explorers. It has the appealing quality of refreshing itself, of obliterating the traces of those who have been before. To walk across a fresh snow-field is to be in a very real sense the first person to have trod that path. J. B. Priestley caught some of the quality of novelty and of exploration that snow brings in a brilliant passage from his
Apes and Angels
: ‘The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?’

One New Year’s Day I got up at dawn, and walked out to Parker’s Piece, the grassy common in the centre of Cambridge. There was no one else around. Snow had fallen early that morning, and then stopped. The sun was emerging from behind the rooftops. Only two chalky plane trails, slashed over each other like a gigantic teacher’s cross, blemished the blueness of the sky. I stood for a few minutes and watched as the plane trails disappeared, depleting themselves from the ends inwards. Then I started walking across the open ground. The surface of the snow had frozen into a crust. It was not solid enough to hold my weight, and with each pace I crunched through into its downy, stuffed interior. When I reached the far side, I looked back. My line of footprints bisected the field of snow like the perforations on the white backs of postage stamps. I could have been the first person ever to cross the land, and that morning I was.