Mountains of the Mind (30 page)

It was a winter afternoon and I had walked up into a high valley in the Canadian Rockies, following a river whose banks were formed of round boulders. The water of the lake at the head of the valley, on whose shoreline I stood, was frozen – the red reed beds at its periphery locked into place by the ice. A big storm was on its way, according to the radio weather report I had listened to back at the road. Away to the east, I could see thunderheads congregating, and the valley was flooded with storm-light. It was a fixing light, which cast the scene – stilled it, held it. But it was also a light which made the most ordinary objects seem marvellous: the individual rocks around the shore, the slopes of snow lying between the firs, the
pine-needles, like pairs of dividers, which had blown on to the lake ice.

A strong wind was blowing, and increasing in strength by the minute as the storm neared, herding the turbulent air before it. I had walked up here – a good three hours’ graft – because I wanted to catch the wildlife, but there was nothing to be seen. Prints in the snow showed that considerable natural traffic had passed through since the last snowfall: rabbits and hares, certainly – their black droppings punctuated the whiteness like a scatter of full stops – and deer, which had left their prints crisply, like pastry cut-outs. Birds, too, pressing their cuneiforms into the snow.

Across the valley, to the west, where the mountains which formed the headwall of the valley shelved into the lake, scores of middle-sized waterfalls should have been pummelling down into the water. That day, though, most of them were frozen into stiff shining curtains of ice. Although some of the bigger waterfalls remained unfrozen, the lake water near the shore was undisturbed.

But there was something even more strange about the waterfalls, and it took a few seconds before I realized what it was, and began to smile. All the waterfalls which were unfrozen were falling
up
the cliff-face. It felt briefly as if I had been turned on my head, or the whole cliff face flipped upside-down. But no; it was the wind. The storm-wind which was blowing against the rock face was so strong that it was bullying the waterfalls back up the cliff. Where the water spilled over a lip of granite, it was plummeting upwards into the sky. These weren’t waterfalls, they were waterrises.

I looked along the mountains on the far side of the lake, and I could see dozens of silver waterfalls doing the same. They looked like a row of chimneys, bellowing silver smoke into the air. I stayed and watched them for an hour or so as the storm approached.

During the sixteenth century a group of ground-breaking naturalists which became known as the Zurich School was formed. It is
remembered nowadays for its attentiveness to the diversity and detail of nature. The most important member of the Zurich School was Conrad Gesner (1516–65), a man with little tolerance for the superstitions of his age.

Gesner’s most famous act of rationalism took place on Mount Pilatus, the peak which rises above Lucerne. The citizens of that city lived in fear of the malignant ghost of Pontius Pilate which was reputed to inhabit Lake Pilatus. On 21 August 1555, Gesner and a friend climbed Mount Pilatus and cast stones down into the grey waters of the lake, in deliberate provocation of any supernatural entities which might have been lurking there. The waters didn’t erupt, the ghost of Pilate was not seen abroad, and no cataclysm immediately overtook Lucerne. Gesner’s symbolic exorcism of the citizens’ fears is now often taken to mark the beginning of the banishment of superstition from Western imagining of the mountains.

Gesner was a lover of the mountain world in a century when such a love was considered lunatic. In 1541 he wrote a letter to his friend James Vogel on the subject of mountain-going. It began stridently: ‘Men dull in mind find no cause for wonder anywhere; they idly sit at home instead of going to see what is on view in the great theatre of the world.’ And it continued in a similarly uncompromising tone:

Gesner was one of the first thinkers to propose the idea that the world of mountains was a world entirely apart: an upper realm in which physical laws operated differently and where conventional, lowland ideas of time and space were turned topsy-turvy. ‘Up there’, Nature was not like herself at all. The elements metamorphosed into one another, disregarding their natural states and interactions, and complicating the human relationship with matter. The hierarchy of the elements was reordered – the hot sun had no purchase on the ice, which remained defiantly solid before it. ‘Up there’, the transparent wind became visible: once filled with ice crystals or snow flakes, its billows and contours were given dramatic visual expression. The air, too, was clearer, and thinner; and the blue of the sky an entirely different hue and texture, more like tinted porcelain, from the overcast serge of a lowland sky. And ‘up there’ waterfalls could flow upwards, in disobedience of gravity.

As I gazed across the valley at the light flattening the scene, and at the rows of waterfalls, I thought of Gesner’s letter.
Of a truth the highest parts of the loftiest peaks seem to be above the laws that rule our world below, as if they belonged to another sphere.
He was right. The mountains are another world. In the mountains, I have felt my body tingle from toes to skull with the aerial charge of imminent lightning. I have struck grape-green phosphorescent sparks from the snow with my boots while tacking up a slope in the pre-dawn light. I have seen exquisite flowers of snow fall from the sky, and watched the collapse of rock towers which have stood for millennia. I have sat on a tightrope-ridge of rock with one leg in one country, the other in another. I have dropped into a crevasse, and been bathed in turquoise ice light.

Literature and religion are littered with stories of other worlds – uncharted oceans, secret realms, imaginary deserts, unclimbable peaks, unvisited islands and lost cities. The curiosity and attraction we instinctively feel towards the locked room, the garden over the wall, the landscape just beyond the horizon, the imagined country on the other side of the world; these are all expressions of the same desire in us to know somewhere apart, somewhere hidden. When Gesner called the mountains
another sphere
, he was locking into or launching an idea of huge imaginative power. Those early travellers who did penetrate what Thomas Burnet in 1684 called ‘the inchanted country’ came back with astonishing reports of eternal snows, dizzying geological structures and awesome catastrophes of rock and ice – scarcely believable, let alone conceivable, to those who had never seen such an environment.

To my mind, the finest of all other-world stories occurs in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, those four very ordinary English children, are evacuated to a house in the countryside to escape the Blitz. While they are exploring the house, Lucy pushes through some fur coats at the back of a big wardrobe – the sort that has a looking-glass in the door – and steps out into a world of eternal winter, where fauns carry umbrellas and the White Witch drives her sleigh across the snows. What makes Lewis’s story so potent is how close that other world is to real life. The extraordinary is there, hidden behind a rack of old coats, tucked away in a nook of the everyday. You just need to know where to look, and have the curiosity to do so.

Going to the mountains – into what one nineteenth-century poet called ‘that weird white realm’ – is like pushing through the fur coats into Narnia. In the mountainous world things behave in odd and unexpected ways. Time, too, bends and alters. In the face of the geological time-scales on display, your mind releases its normal grip on time. Your interest and awareness of the world beyond the mountains
falls away and is replaced with a much more immediate hierarchy of needs: warmth, food, direction, shelter, survival. And if something goes wrong in the mountains, then time shivers and reconfigures itself about that moment, that incident. Everything leads up to it, or spirals out of it. Temporarily you have a new centre of existence.

Returning to earth after being in the mountains – stepping back out of the wardrobe – can be a disorienting experience. Like Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy returning from Narnia, you expect everything to have changed. You half-expect the first people you see to grip you by the elbow and ask you if you are all right, to say
You’ve been away for years
. But usually no one notices you’ve been gone at all. And the experiences you have had are largely incommunicable to those who were not there. Returning to daily life after a trip to the mountains, I have often felt as though I were a stranger re-entering my country after years abroad, not yet adjusted to my return, and bearing experiences beyond speech.

The upper world of the mountains has not always been regarded as a wonderland, however. In the early history of the West, mountains provided an obvious residence for the supernatural. Just as the uncharted Poles became the repositories for myths either of Arcadia (the land of zephyrs and eternal daylight which lay beyond the barriers of ice) or of evil (the northern armies led by Gog and Magog which hung above the innocent southern races), so the upper realm of mountains, abstracted above the normal world by the simple fact of altitude, was regarded as the dwelling-place of both gods and monsters. Giant chamois, trolls, imps, dragons, banshees and other fabulously sinister beings were reputed to patrol the higher slopes of mountains, and divinities to dwell on their summits. John Mandeville described mountains of gold in Ceylon mined by ants as big as dogs. The Franciscan writer Salimbene of Parma recounted how Peter of Aragon climbed to the summit of a mountain to be met with ‘
tonitrua horribilia et terribilia valde
’ – thunderbolts and lightning – and a ‘
draco horribilis
’ which flapped away in surprise, its leathern wings blacking out the sun.

Local myths and legends gathered around each hill, and the phenomena of the high mountains – their shape, their storms, their glaciers, their light – were interpreted according to the pattern of these legends. Between 1580 and 1630, for instance, at the height of the European witch crazes, mountains were considered the retreat of witches; storms and blizzards were assumed to be the meteorological spin-offs of their saturnalia. In the early 1600s the Swiss scientist Jacob Scheuchzer drew up a famous compendium of the different species of dragons which he knew to exist in the Alps. To those who have seen how, with the sun above it, a bird can send a silhouette many times its own size slipping across the rocks below, Scheuchzer’s dracopoeia will not seem like quite such a flight of fantasy.

This superstitious attitude towards mountains survived in Europe well into the eighteenth century. When Windham and Pococke
arrived in Chamonix in 1741 they were warned off ascending Mont Blanc by the villagers who told them – Windham jotted down scornfully in his diary – ‘many strange Stories of Witches &c. who came to play their Pranks upon the Glaciers and dance to the Sound of Instruments’. In Windham’s scoffing tones can be heard the growing cultural cynicism of the Enlightenment towards such credulousness. It was the spread of rationalism in Europe which routed the imaginary dragons from the mountains.

There is also the belief in the upper world as the home of gods. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it has habitually been up mountains that prophets and seers have gone to receive divine counsel. Moses, for example, saw into the promised land from the summit of Mount Pisgah, and ascended Sinai to receive the ten commandments. Holy men and anchorites have long found in the upper world of the mountains an environment more conducive to contemplation than the secular bustle of the lowlands. My favourite mountain eremite is the eighteenth-century Disentian monk Placidus a Spescha, who would regularly climb to the summit of one of the mountains near his monastery in the Swiss Alps, and sleep there, wrapped in cowl and habit, to spend the night closer to his God.

Spescha has had many recent counterparts, who have been drawn like him to the mountain tops by a faith in the simple geometry of enlightenment, according to which ‘up’ means towards heaven. One such was Maurice Wilson. Wilson was a Yorkshireman by birth, a salesman by trade, and insane by the age of thirty. As a young man, he became obsessed with the idea that he could ascend mountains through a combination of fasting and prayer, thus coming closer to God. In the early 1930s Wilson decided that Mount Everest would be his ultimate target. In 1934, after flying an open biplane called
Ever Wrest
5,000 miles from London to Purnea (quite against the wishes of the English, Nepali and Indian authorities), Wilson began his illegal ascent of the mountain, which had not at the time been
climbed. Despite being under surveillance by the Indian police, he managed to slip out of Darjeeling in the early hours of a cold April morning disguised as a pilgrim – draped in a thick woollen mantle of royal blue, billowed about with a twelve-foot red silk sash, the whole outfit constellated with brocade and golden buttons – and started his approach of the mountain on foot and mule across the wind-scoured Tibetan plateau.