Mountains of the Mind (40 page)

In May of 1999, seventy-five years after he had disappeared, Mallory’s body was found by a search party. He was at an altitude of
nearly 27,000 feet, face down on the steep shelves of talus on Everest’s north face, his arms flung up and out as though he had halted himself as he slid by digging his nails into the rock.

Mallory’s clothes had been torn from his corpse by decades of wind and frost, and lay in rags. But the extreme cold had preserved his body. His back still undulated with muscle beneath skin that was bleached bright white. Up there, his body had not putrefied, it had petrified – his flesh looked like nothing so much as stone. When pictures of Mallory’s corpse were released to the world’s media, many commentators likened it to a white marble statue. In death as in life, for Mallory had been a man of unusual physical beauty whose appearance provoked ecstatic comparisons with classical sculpture from the men and women who fluttered around him. ‘
Mon Dieu
! George Mallory!’ exclaimed Lytton Strachey famously after first seeing him in 1909. ‘My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words … he’s six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face – oh incredible.’ Strachey’s twittery comparison of Mallory with a Praxitelean sculpture in white marble would harden, ninety years later, into a macabre reality.

Mallory didn’t know why he kept going back to Everest. Time and again, when he was asked, he rhetorically threw up his hands. To a questioner in a lecture in the United States in 1923: ‘I suppose we go back to Everest … because in a word we can’t help it.’ In a letter to his friend Rupert Thompson: ‘Perhaps you will be able to tell me why I embarked on an adventure such as this?’ And, immortally, to a New York reporter in 1922 who asked about his reasons for returning to the mountain: ‘Because it’s there.’ But then explorers, as Francis Spufford has observed, are notoriously bad at saying why.

In a way it doesn’t matter why. Mallory went to Everest, and didn’t come back, and that’s that. We don’t have a satisfactory or comprehensive explanation for his behaviour, but that doesn’t make the Mallory myth any less powerful. That’s the way of myth. It acts, as
Roland Barthes put it, ‘economically’ – it ‘abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences … it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves’.

In an important sense, however, it
is
possible to say why Mallory did what he did – and it is possibly we who are better placed than he was to answer the question he was asked so often, and failed to answer. We are better able than Mallory to notice the emotional traditions which he inherited and cultivated, and which made him so susceptible to possession by Everest. And that is in part what this book has tried to do – to understand why, historically, Mallory found so much more to cherish in the mountains than on the plains.

Since his death, Mallory has become a new and potent element of the mountain worship which cost him his life. He stands in history as a diffuser, dispersing and proliferating the spell of the mountains, casting it even wider. The fact that he, like so many before and after him, died out of love for high mountains has not weakened their strange attractive gravity; it has fortified it. Posthumously, Mallory has perpetuated the very feelings which killed him – he has made even more glorious the mountains of the mind.

George Mallory was an extreme case, of course. He was someone who risked, and eventually lost, everything he held dear in his passion for a single mountain. Millions of people before and after Mallory, myself included, have found much to desire in such a hostile, unpredictable, elemental form of landscape as mountains. But for most of these millions of people, myself included, the attraction of mountains has had more to do with beauty and strangeness than with risk and loss.

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial,
and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

Mountains also reshape our understandings of ourselves, of our own interior landscapes. The remoteness of the mountain world – its harshnesses and its beauties – can provide us with a valuable perspective down on to the most familiar and best charted regions of our lives. It can subtly reorient us and readjust the points from which we take our bearings. In their vastness and in their intricacy, mountains stretch out the individual mind and compress it simultaneously: they make it aware of its own immeasurable acreage and reach and, at the same time, of its own smallness.

Ultimately and most importantly, mountains quicken our sense of wonder. The true blessing of mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels – whether it is the dark swirls which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one’s outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. To put a hand down and feel the ridges and scores in a rock where a glacier has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid – none of these is
a trivial experience. Mountains return to us the priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.

Late one January, three friends and I climbed Beinn a’Chaorainn, the Hill of the Rowan, near Loch Laggan in Scotland. The day began magnificently. Galleons of cloud were at full sail in the sky, racing slowly over the blueness. The sunshine was hard and bright, the snow tuning the light to its own white frequency. Despite the coldness of the air, or perhaps because of it, as the four of us walked into the mountain I could feel the blood pulsing warmly in my toes and fingers, and the sun burning on the edges of my cheeks.

From the roadside the Hill of the Rowan rises to three distinct tops. On its east flank, visible and forbidding, are two glacier-carved cirques which were gouged out of the mountain during the Pleistocene. That day the steep cliffs of the cirques were dense with ice, which flashed and glittered in the sunlight as we approached them. We passed first through a copse of pine trees, and then emerged on to open ground, where we crossed several wide swathes of sphagnum moss. In summer these would have been tremulous and brimming with rainfall, as wobbly as water-beds. But winter had hammered them into stasis and glazed them with ice. Looking down into the clear ice as I walked over it, I could see the moss, dense and colourful as a carpet, yellow-green stars of butterwort dotted here and there.

We began to ascend one of the east-facing ridges of the mountain, which separated the two icy cirques. As we climbed, the weather
changed its mood. The clouds thickened and slowed in the sky. The light became unstable, flicking from silver to dirty grey. After an hour of climbing it began to snow heavily.

Approaching the top of the mountain, we were in near white-out conditions, and it was hard to separate the air and the land. It had become much colder. My gloves had frozen into rigid shells, which clunked hollowly when I knocked them together, and a thick scab of white ice had built up on my balaclava where my breath came through it, like a clumsy clown’s mouth.

A few hundred yards from the summit the ridge flattened out, and we were able to unrope safely. The others stopped for something to eat, but I moved on ahead, wanting to enjoy the solitude of the white-out. The wind was blowing along the ridge towards me, and under its invisible pressure everything was on the move. Millions of particles of snow dust streamed just above the ground in a continuous flow. Rounded chunks of old hard snow were being blown reluctantly along, skidding over the surface of the ridge. And the big soft flakes which were falling from the sky were being driven into me by the wind. They walloped almost soundlessly against my clothing, and I built up a thin fur of snow on my windward side. It seemed as though I were wading upcurrent in a loose white river. I could see no more than five yards in any direction, and I felt utterly and excitingly alone. The world beyond the whirled snow became unimportant, almost unimaginable. I could have been the last person on the planet.

After several minutes’ walking I reached the small summit plateau of the mountain and stopped. A few paces away, sitting and contemplating me, hunkered back on its huge hind legs, its tall ears twitching, was a snow hare. It seemed curious at this apparition on its mountain-top, but unalarmed. The hare was a clean white all over, except for its black tail, a small patch of grey on its chest and the two black rims of its ears. It moved on a few paces in its odd gait, its rear
legs shunting its hindquarters slowly forward and up, almost over its head. Then it stopped again. For half a minute we stood there in the blowing snow, in the strange silence of the snowstorm. Me with my clown’s mouth of ice, the hare with its lush white coat and polished black eyes.

And then my friends emerged like spectres from the white-out, their climbers’ hardware clanking. Immediately the hare kicked away with a spurt of snow, swerving and zigzagging off into the blizzard, delicately but urgently, its black tail bobbing long after its body had disappeared.

I stayed on the top of the mountain for a while and let the others walk on ahead to begin the descent. I thought about the snow hare; about how for an animal like this to cross one’s path was to be reminded that it had a path too – that I had crossed the snow hare’s path as much as it had crossed mine. Then my mind moved away from the mountain-top. The solitude I had experienced in the white-out on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of the distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. I thought east, to where the snow would be falling over the 1,000 million-year-old granite backs of the Cairngorm mountains. I thought north, to where snow would silently be covering the empty wilderness of the Monadhliaths, the Grey Hills. I thought west, to where snow would be falling on the great peaks of the Rough Bounds of Knoydart – Ladhar Bheinn, the Hill of the Claw; Meall Buidhe, the Yellow Hill; and Luinne Bheinn, the Hill of Anger. I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.