Mountains of the Mind (32 page)

It is the light of the mountains which has always attracted more comment than any other aspect of their beauty. Early travellers wrote, amazed, of the billion tiny ‘flashes of fire’ which a sunlit slope of snow radiates, or how when the sun shines upon icy rocks ‘there are a thousand suns reflected instead of one’. Many were staggered by the magnificent effects of alpenglow. Alpenglow – which is caused by the reflection of the rising or setting sun off snowfields – makes the sky appear underlit by powerful pink or red lights of massive wattage, and steeps the mountains in mauve, carmine, cochineal. For a long time it wasn’t known what caused alpenglow. In the Eastern Alps it was rumoured to be the reflection of sunlight off a trove of bright treasure buried beneath the ice. Some of those who saw the alpenglow at its fiercest and most lurid thought that a conflagration must have taken place beyond the rim of the horizon; a colossal inferno.

Nowhere but in the mountains do you become so aware of the incorrigible plurality of light, of its ability to alter its texture rapidly and completely. Even the light of the desert doesn’t rival mountain
light for velocity of change. Light in the mountains can be harsh and volatile: the dazzle and flicker of a snowstorm in sunshine, for instance, like a flutter of blades; or the ostentatious splendour – the extravagant
son et lumière
show – of a thunderstorm. On a bright day snow and ice-fields glow with a magnesium intensity, a white light so concentrated that you cannot look directly at it for long without the risk of searing your cornea. At dusk, light can take on a matt, atomized quality, as though it were composed of vast and visible photons.

Mountain light can also be architectural: the spires and pillars of luminescence which certain cloud configurations build, or the fan-vaulting effect created when the sun shines from below and behind a jagged rock ridge. It can be visionary, as when you climb above the clouds and the light strikes off the fields of ice beneath you, and it seems as though there are brilliant white kingdoms stretching as far as the eye can see. There is the Midas light, the rich yellow light which spills lengthways across the mountains, turning everything it touches to gold. And there is the light which falls at the end of a mountain day, and unifies the landscape with a single texture. This light possesses a gentle clarity, and brings with it implications of tranquillity, integrity, immanence.

Trekking through Tibet en route to Everest in 1921, George Mallory experienced this light. By day he found Tibet to be an unsightly country of rough gravel plains and abrupt, jagged hillsides. For Mallory, the angles and textures of the landscape were all wrong; its appearance grated on his eye. But, ‘in the evening light’, he wrote back to his wife, Ruth, ‘this country can be beautiful, snow mountains and all: the harshness becomes subdued, shadows soften the hillsides; there is a blending of lines and folds until the last light, so that one comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony’.

Moonlight, as well as sunlight, can impart the oddest qualities to the mountains. Travelling into Chamonix for the first time on a
night coach, Goethe saw the moonlight reflected off the silver roof of Mont Blanc and briefly mistook it for another planet: ‘A broad radiant body,’ he wrote amazedly, ‘belonging to a higher sphere; it was difficult to believe that it had its roots in earth.’ On a clear night, moonlight can perform a more mundane electrolysis, turning the mountains silver. I remember early one summer, camped high in the Alps and unable to sleep out of nervousness for the next day’s climb, creeping outside in the small hours and watching these silent shapes about me, all silvered by the moon. They looked strangely temporary – like a great caravanserai of tents, pitched by happenstance and ready to be bundled up and rolled away the next day in preparation for the march.

Mountain light is spectacular. It can also, in conspiracy with the other elements at play in the mountains, be deceptive: producing mirages, tricks of the light. On snowfields or glaciers your normal spatial perspectives are warped by the whiteness and the uniformity of the landscape’s texture. Distances become hard to judge. Wandering the snow plains of the Alps in the 1830s and 1840s, the
Scottish scientist and mountaineer James Forbes found himself unable to focus on anything at all, astonished by the ‘effect of interminable vastness with which icy plains outspread for miles, terminated by a perspective of almost shadowless snowy slopes’. On the Glacier du Buet, the combination of sunshine and high snow produced a mirage of smoothness so persuasive that Jean de Luc became convinced he was ‘suspended in the air on one of these clouds’.

Some travellers had more bizarre and more specific hallucinations – an English climber on Everest in the 1930s reported giant teapots pulsating in the sky above the summit – and others more macabre ones. When Edward Whymper was lowering himself gingerly down the Matterhorn in 1865, only a few hours after three of his companions had plummeted to their deaths, he saw three crosses floating in the foggy air, one higher than the other two: a misty Golgotha marking the death of his three friends. The explanation for Whymper’s vision is now thought to be either embroidery on his
part – he was known to have an elastic sense of truth – or to have been a peculiarly complex form of the so-called Brocken Spectre. The Brocken Spectre, which was first seen and described by Bouguer in Peru in 1737, is a trick of the light which occurs on bright days, when the observer is standing between the sun and a bank of mist or cloud. The observer’s shadow is cast on to the mist, and the sun is refracted by the water suspended in the air to produce halos of colour around the shadow. I have seen a Brocken Spectre only once, on the Isle of Skye. I was walking up the spine of a long, elegant ridge running north–south. The morning sun was shining on me from the east, and I suddenly noticed my shadow projected on to the damp mist below me, with a colourful nimbus. It looked like an attentive genie, scudding along on his magic carpet of mist, always preserving the same distance from me.

In the mountains, the early travellers discovered, nature was given another medium with which to sculpt: the snow. To read through the journals and letters of mountain-goers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is to watch the evolution of a new aesthetic towards snow and ice – a new responsiveness towards the precise beauties of winter. At first glance snow seems to simplify a landscape, to smooth out its complexities. Stones are turned to spheres, trees to spires, mountain-tops to cones. The landscape gains a simple Euclidean beauty, and a unity.

Cold also brings intricacy and variety with it. ‘Who would have thought that snow could meld itself so many ways?’ asked one astonished traveller in the 1820s. Snow is the disguise artist of the mountains. It can rock benignly down through the air in flakes as big and soft as duck down, or be fired from the clouds in shotgun-pellets of hail. It can lie in neat windrows, or in irregular waves. Spindrift is one of the most charismatic features of snowy mountains. Climbing a lee-slope in a big wind, you can look up to see sheets of spindrift flaring out over the ridge, or it can undulate over the surface of hard
snow like a supple second skin. As ice, it can coat objects in glistening shellac, or form a tracery of icicles which stretches out across a rock face. Once, ascending a glacier 15,000 feet up in the Himalaya, I glanced up from my plodding feet to see acres of frozen ice slopes stretching away from me on either side, as smooth, hard and bright as china.

Snow is not always white, either. Old snow looks thick and creamy, like sallow butter. A fresh fall of snow, frozen overnight, glitters a hard blue. Lumps of ice reflect light like a glitter-ball, shooting different coloured squares of light in every direction. Then there are
the odd algal blooms which tinge snowfields the colour of watermelon, or mint, or lemon. In certain areas of the Himalaya, northerly winds sweep up tons of mustard-coloured sand from the Punjab and dump them on snowfields, turning them gritty and yellow.

One of the most fragile and beautiful effects of cold is rime ice. Rime ice is formed when super-cooled air (air whose temperature is below 0°C) carrying liquid water-droplets is blown on to a surface suitable for the droplets to freeze on: a rock, for example, or more dangerously, the leading edge of an aircraft’s wing. Rime ice tends to form into delicate feather-like structures. What is curious about it is that it grows
into
the wind. As each new layer of rime ice is formed, it becomes the surface on which the next layer will crystallize. So by the alignment of rime ice on a rock you can tell which way the prevailing wind has been blowing: an example of how the land keeps its own meteorological archives. One winter I came across a pair of the granite tors which protrude from the summits of the Cairngorm mountains. It had been cold for several days, and the dark stone of the tors was invisible beneath a thick layer of rime ice. Reaching out with a gloved hand, I touched a feather of ice and was shocked when it crumbled away into powder, like a structure of ash left behind by a fire.

Many mountain travellers recorded their wonder at the variety of shapes and structures into which ice forms itself. Take, for instance, the testimony of Marc Bourrit from 1774, marvelling at the ‘ice-buildings’ he stumbled upon among the Savoy glaciers:

Bourrit’s unstable analogies – now it’s a temple, now a fortress, now a fairy dwelling – were a function of the ice’s own slipperiness; its resistance to firm description. Ice and snow have always been substances off which language slides and slithers, unable to get a good grip. But Bourrit, like many after him, found something attractive in this visual fickleness, because it meant that the ice’s beauties were bespoke. Each traveller saw what he chose to see in this visually biddable world: ‘We only have to change our situation to make it resemble whatever we please,’ he wrote. Ice could be sculpted by the sun and by the perceiving mind into almost any conceivable shape: a pagoda, an elephant, a fortress. The process could work in reverse as well – other things could resemble the ice. When Wordsworth was in the Chamonix valley one Sabbath in 1820, he watched a procession of white-robed votaries winding in slow motion between the dark and spiry pine trees, and they looked to him like a cortège of pale glacier columns, marching slowly down the valley towards the church. It is the unpredictability and inconsistency of the play of light off ice which has made it such a difficult subject for artists. The Victorian artist Silvanus Thomson declared that he was ‘never happier than when painting ice’, but spent his life being disappointed with his inability to render properly its subtle luminosities. Ice is a substance more lustrous than water and, for all its solidity, more capricious. Only photography –
literally light-writing – comes close to recreating the contingent brilliancies of ice, its millions of scintillas.