Mountains of the Mind (18 page)

Word had got about in the valley of their intentions to set foot upon the glaciers, and as they approached Chamonix, riding into the long afternoon shadow of Mont Blanc, a prior came to meet them and to convince them of their folly. But although their first sighting of the glaciers had hardly inspired them – the ends of them ‘appear’d only like white Rocks’, noted Windham disappointedly, ‘or rather like Immense Icicles, made by Water running down the Mountain’ – the two men were not to be deflected from their course. As Windham told it afterwards, ‘relying on our Strength and Resolution, we determined to attempt the Mountain’.

Having bottled up a wine-and-water mix to fortify themselves at altitude, and leaving the Genevans to guard the camp, Windham and Pococke began to ascend the margin of the glacier, passing ‘several Pieces of Ice, which we took at first for Rocks, being as big as a House’, and hurrying in silence across the ravaged channels of avalanches, where boulders of ice and shattered tree trunks told of the violence which had passed through. It took them five hours of laborious and occasionally dangerous climbing to reach a high promontory. There they stood, pulled the cork from their bottle of watered-down wine, drank a toast and gazed over the cavorting ocean of ice before them.

Windham’s account of his expedition was published in the
Proceedings
of the Royal Society, as well as in several other learned
journals in Britain and the continent, and news of his venture spread through the country. Richard Pococke seemed less inclined to make much of his part in it all, not even mentioning the expedition in his second volume of travel reminiscences. He died of apoplexy in Ireland in 1765, but would be remembered for far longer than his life-span, both because of the slow-moving boulder on the Mer de Glace which bore his name (engraved there with hammer and chisel by the enchanted locals in memory of their favourite pasha), and because of the Lebanon cedars which he planted as seeds in Ardbraccan in Ireland, where their progeny still stand today – dark and unexpected verticals in a boggy and treeless territory.

‘I am extremely at a loss how to give a right Idea of it,’ wrote Windham of the glacier itself, ‘as I know no one thing which I have ever seen that has the least Resemblance to it.’ Like Burnet thirty years before him, Windham had to ‘give an idea’ of something which was like nothing else at all – a sight which all but confounded metaphor. He managed it by descriptive indirection, by going through another image: ‘The Description which Travellers give of the Seas of
Greenland
seems to come the nearest to it,’ he wrote. ‘You must imagine your lake put in Agitation by a strong Wind, and frozen all at once.’ It was a brilliant choice of comparison, for it drew upon the travelogues of those few travellers who had sailed west out of Plymouth and then north, towards the unknown upper reaches of the world, and had returned with stories of seas stiff with cold and air so frigid that one’s breath froze and tinkled to the deck.

Windham’s image of an agitated, frozen body of water would become the standard description for the Mer de Glace, and indeed for glaciers around the world. Windham was the first to contemplate the glacier as a suspended force, and his flamboyantly written account contributed to the growing sense in Europe of the high mountains as a world apart, an environment where the elements
transmigrated one into the other: where water became ice and ice became water, and where the snows lay eternally in defiance of the Alpine sun. When Pierre Martel, a French engineer, made a similar trip to the glaciers three years after Windham, he tried to describe what he saw, but could ‘think of nothing more proper’ than Windham’s image. Windham’s metaphor, as metaphors will, controlled Martel’s reading of the world.

In 1760 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure identified the Alps as a new world – a sort of ‘earthly paradise’ – and began his systematic exploration of them. De Saussure had certainly read Windham’s letter, and had paid a visit to Pococke’s rock on the Mer de Glace, and when he sought to characterize the appearance of the glacier he made use, in a finessed form, of Windham’s image. The glacier looks, wrote de Saussure, like ‘a sea which has become suddenly frozen, not in the moment of a tempest, but at the instant when the wind has subsided, and the waves, although very high, have become blunted and rounded.’ It was this passage which Karl Baedeker quoted in every edition of his guidebook to Switzerland, and that therefore fixed and froze it in the minds of the thousands of Victorians who came to observe the wonders of the glacier: they could conceive of it in no other way. Windham had, from a distance of over a hundred years, whipped up the imaginations of the glacier-goers, and then frozen them with a single metaphor.

Although ‘glacier’ did not appear as a word in Dr Johnson’s capacious
Dictionary
of 1755 – it had yet to push its way officially into the English language from the French – the idea of these fashionably disorderly seas of ice was by that year beginning to grip the imaginations of many Britons, for whom the appearance and the actions of glaciers seemed to answer some powerful cultural need. Once Windham and Pococke had blazed the trail, scores and scores of other tourists made their ecstatic pilgrimages to the glaciers and to Mont Blanc, the White Mountain: certainly the highest peak in the
Old World and thought to be lower only than the fabulous summits of the Andes.

In 1765 the
curé
’s house was the sole lodging for visitors in Chamonix: by 1785 there were three sizeable inns catering for the 1,500 tourists who came every summer to see the glaciers. Chamonix was a boom-town, and the locals cashed in. The honey they made, a golden, clarified liquid, was carried off by visitors and gained a reputation among gourmands as far away as Paris. The villagers would lay out the other natural wealth of the area on blankets in front of their houses: mostly fossils and crystals – pillars of smoky quartz and clear quartz, mocha stones, chunky onyx necklaces, geodes, tiny blocks of tourmaline – but also chamois horns, and the ribbed ram’s horns of the mountain goat which spiralled up and out of its skull like ammonites.

Although visitors from across Europe came to behold the glaciers, it was undoubtedly the British who arrived in the largest numbers, and who were the most fervent in their adoration. Touring Switzerland in the winter of 1779, Goethe made his way to Chamonix with the intention of ‘walking on the ice itself, and considering these immense masses close at hand’. He took ‘nearly a hundred steps round about on the wave-like crystal cliffs’ before retreating back to
terra firma
(‘the more firmer, the less terror’, one late-Victorian tourist would pun nervously in a hotel album a century later, clearly shaken by his trip on the ice) and clambering up to the Montanvert, the rocky outcrop which provided the best view of the Mer de Glace. There he met an Englishman who gave his name simply as Blaire, and who had ‘erected a convenient hut upon the spot, from the window of which he and his guests could survey the sea of ice’. ‘What a devotion to the spectacle of the ice!’ noted Goethe in his journal.

The Mer de Glace
, engraving in G. S. Gruner’s
Die Eisegebirge des Schweizerlandes
(1760). Note the sightseers in the bottom right-hand corner.

Perhaps a few hundred people have ever crossed the southern fork of the Inylchek glacier on foot. It is an awkward undertaking. There are no rocky hand-rails or balustrades on the ice-dunes which arise in their hundreds in the middle of the glacier – only smooth, convex surfaces of hard ice. Rivers of green meltwater roar and bluster around the base of the dunes, then disappear abruptly into the wide black sink-holes they have bored into the glacier. The individual dunes are joined by fine ridges of blue ice, rounded like the tiles on the apex of a roof. We crossed these ridges like tight-rope walkers,
arms outstretched for balance and placing foot precisely in front of foot. When there was no other choice, we abseiled down into the gullies, leapt the rivers, and with axes and crampons climbed back up and out on to the summit of the next dune. The glacier was only two miles or so in width, but it took us seven hours to traverse it. We pitched a tent in the dark on sharp rocks at the foot of a mountain, beneath a moon as flat as a white plate. I slept fitfully, disturbed by the thin air and thoughts of falling, and woke to find that the frost had scribbled across the inside of our tent.

The following day the sky was blue, and the cold air was invisibly afire with sunlight. It was dangerous weather – after only half-an-hour exposed skin would redden, and then bubble overnight into blisters. We tugged our gloves on, swathed our heads in yards of fine white muslin gauze, strapped glacier-goggles over our eyes, and walked down the northern flank of the glacier for miles, in silence. In the mid-afternoon we reached a big glacial lake several acres in area, and we pitched camp on its shores, driving our tent pegs into the blue ice which surrounded it, and weighting down the flysheet with slabs of moraine rock. A fleet of jagged little icebergs navigated slowly about the surface of the lake, mimicking the peaks around them.

After we had pitched our tents, we lay about on the warm rocks by the brink of the lake, and built little towers out of shale. The others went to sleep. The air was still and hot at that time in the afternoon. I could see heat pulsing off the rocks in thick, gelatinous waves. The icebergs had stopped moving. The surface of the water was the colour of an anvil and as calm as steel. It seemed as though if I tried to dive into the lake, I would bounce and skitter across its surface, like a stone thrown on to ice. Only the ingots of sunlight lying on the clear floor of the lake expressed its depth; allowed the eye to get purchase on its dimensions. I sat up, hugged my knees to my chest, and stared into the water for what felt like hours. As I sat there, time seemed to pause. The sunlight seemed to petrify the landscape and the lake.
Only the clouds chimerically forming and reforming miles above me kept up any sort of movement or rhythm by which time could be calibrated. Otherwise, I might have belonged to any aeon. Nothing, it seemed to me then, could be more permanent, nothing more fixed than this tableau of dazzling ice and dark rock – a scene which had lasted for perpetuity and could only continue to do so. The landscape existed above and beyond me; I only happened to be there, a bystander genuinely of no consequence. Nothing more.

Then, unexpectedly, it began to rain: plump raindrops which splashed upon the pale grey of the rocks we were sitting on. The rain partitioned the air, bruised the stone, and plucked the lake up into a field of fleurs-de-lys.

There was a set of verses in the Apocrypha which sent a shiver down the spine of every God-fearing Briton who read it. It articulated a vision of divine punishment being visited upon a sinful earth in the form of icy death: a ‘nitre of the north’ which gripped the world and froze it. ‘When the cold north wind bloweth,’ the verses began, implacable and furious: