Mountains of the Mind (21 page)

Terrifying in their slow implacability, ripe with history and, at least to the properly primed imagination, thrillingly beset with hazards – it was unsurprising that glaciers attracted such a quantity of avid guests to them in the nineteenth century. Above all, glaciers offered somewhere that was utterly different. As Ruskin wrote admiringly of the Zmutt glacier, ‘the whole scene [is] so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely from the presence of men, but even of their thoughts’. When in 1828 John Murray and his wife trekked into the middle of the glacier of Talèfre, they sat down among the seventy-foot ice pyramids to slug from a flask of brandy, and reflected on the splendour of their situation:

Solitude, deathliness, sterility, barrenness, inhumanity – these were the qualities of a landscape which Romanticism had made so appealing. The polar wastes exemplified this landscape ideal, but in the nineteenth century, as now, the poles were unapproachable to all save the most determined and well-financed explorers. It was the glaciers of Europe, South America and Asia which provided the nearest and finest approximation to the poles. People came – as they still come, as I have come – to enjoy them in their tens of thousands, and to die by the dozen: drawn to the ice by feelings that had, like the glaciers themselves, accumulated over the centuries.

‘They sit there like Buddhas in the snow,’ Sasha told us. ‘I have myself seen more than a dozen of them.’ He meant bodies, the bodies of climbers, most of them Russian, who have died on the summit ridge of Pik Pobeda: Victory Peak, the highest point in the Tian Shan mountains. Sasha wasn’t trying to impress us. He knew he had no need of that. For three-quarters of the year he was a lecturer in mathematics at a Moscow institute, and every summer for three months – the weather window – he came to the Tian Shan to climb harder and harder routes. He spoke almost irreproachable English, had outsize, bottle-thick glasses, and always wore a scrawny down jacket and a pair of patched
salopettes
.

We looked up at the ridge, some five miles away. At high altitude the depressurized air acts as a lens, bringing distant objects closer. From where we were on the glacier we could see the hunched, bulky outline of Pobeda immaculately, each serac and snow-field on its
seven-mile-long summit ridge picked out. The evening light had sluiced the snow pink, so that it looked curiously benign, like strawberry ice-cream. We stood there, five of us, our breath pluming in the cold air, thinking about the bodies. I imagined them leaning casually against snow-banks, as though they were just sleeping, as though you might shake them awake. I imagined them sitting there along the summit ridge like cairns, marking the way to the top.

It was more likely, though, that their bodies had been contorted by the cold, their clothes had been pulverized by storms and sunlight and lay in tatters around them, and their skin had been bleached and beaten off their bones.

‘I remember hearing of one man,’ Sasha said, gesturing up at the ridge. ‘He reached the summit in bad conditions, thick snow, with two others. They could see another big storm coming from the east, so they turned round straight away and followed their own tracks back along the ridge. After five minutes’ walking, he went blind in one eye. Click! Just like that – blackness. Like turning off a light. His retina had gone. A couple more paces and click! – the other one went too. Both retinas ripped off by the pressure. They led him for a while, but he would never get down with no eyes. Finally he just sat down in the snow to die.’

Sasha shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s still up there. That is how it is at height.’

Sight is often all you have at high altitudes. The other senses are abolished. It is too cold to feel anything, too high to smell anything, your taste-buds are dulled, and there is no sound except for your own breathing. Sight is essential: you need your eyes to spot the few scarves of cirrus which might be the outriders of a storm, or to place
your feet methodically one in front of the other during a blizzard, or to look at the view – which is likely to be one of the reasons why you are up in such a dangerous, aerial world in the first place.

Like altitude, memory can lend a peculiar sharpness to certain images. When I was seven I clearly remember my grandfather showing me a black-and-white photograph, perhaps ten inches by five, of a snow ridge in the Alps which he had climbed – the Biancograt of the Piz Bernina. The ridge was so sharp that it appeared to cut the sunlight in two: one side of the ridge blazed whitely, the other was cast in shadow. In the background was only the sky, and at its summit the ridge tapered to a snow cone. From the tip of this cone unfurled a white flag of cloud. With his little finger, my grandfather pointed out the flag. He told me it was a stream of ice crystals being blown off the mountain by the wind. To me this peak, dipping its point up into the empty air and flying its flag of ice, seemed extraterrestrial. I could not believe my grandfather had climbed it.

Most summers when I was young we would drive up to visit my grandparents in the Scottish Highlands, and use their house as a base for days in the hills. My grandfather kept his climbing equipment in a garage that was always cold and smelt of engine oil. There were his skis, for a long time taller than me, and the seal-skins which he slipped over their bases. He explained to me how the nap of the skin meant the skins would slide over the snow only in one direction: when he wanted to ascend, they stopped him slipping backwards. His ski-poles were straight and wooden, with metal tips and wide, circular buckets of rattan. Two crampons always sat together near the skis, the grey metal oiled, articulated and fanged. They were like two little monsters. And there was his ice-axe, three feet long and heavy as an oar, its wooden shaft coated in varnish and the steel adze scarred with use.

My grandfather grew up in Montreux on the eastern shore of Lake Geneva, and on his way to and from school he passed a monument to
an Englishman and his son who had fallen to their deaths while descending the grassy lower slopes of a peak near Arolla. Each summer he would go up into the mountains in the company of Big Labby, a Dutch friend of the family whose nickname did little justice to his size. At the age of nine my grandfather climbed his first 3,000-metre peak in the Alps, the Haute Cime of the Dents du Midi. On its summit he met General Charles Bruce, the man who led the Everest expeditions in 1922 and 1924. The grand old general, shot about and scarred after sustained active service in the British army, had a few quiet words with Labby and my grandfather, and then romped off down the steep side of the mountain. My grandfather descended tentatively by the easy way, nursing the encounter to himself. He has always held that unexpected meeting to mark the start of his climbing life.

Over the years I discovered more about the scars in that ice-axe. My grandfather had climbed in the Himalaya, North America and all over Europe. There was a gully route named after him in the Ala Dag range in Turkey, which he explored during his wartime leave. Shortly after marrying my grandmother, who had herself climbed extensively in the British Isles, the Venezuelan Andes and the volcanoes of the West Indies, he took her on a climbing holiday to the Valais region of Switzerland. Early in the week a storm hustled in and kept them confined to the remote Turtmanntal hut for three days, with only a single large onion to eat between them. He advised me against planning ‘this sort of jaunt’ for my own honeymoon. For his seventieth birthday, he and my grandmother joined an expedition to the mountains of Bhutan. Unseasonally heavy snowfall blocked them into a valley at over 4,000 metres; finally the Indian army had to be persuaded to airlift them out using helicopters. I recall anxious afternoons back in England – us sipping tea aimlessly, not really speaking, waiting for the phone to ring.

My grandfather’s veneration of high places has never wavered. It is
not something he has seen fit to question, although friends of his have died and been appallingly injured in the mountains. One friend, who had been avalanched at 24,000 feet on the Himalayan peak of Masherbrum, and had been forced to spend a night in an ice-cave, lost sixteen fingers and toes to frostbite. He was twenty-two at the time. I met him once, fifty years after the event. Instinctively I put out my hand to shake his, and was shocked to feel the bulbous palm, the shiny nubs where the fingers had been.

I tried to talk to my grandfather about it once: about why he loved being at height, about why he had spent – and risked – his life struggling to reach so many summits. He didn’t really understand the question, or even that it was a question. To my grandfather the attraction of altitude was beyond explanation, or had none. How is it, though, that summits and views have gained such an attractive force over the imagination of so many? Or as Tennyson put it in a tone of mild incomprehension – for although mountains obtrude now and again into his poetry, he was not constitutionally a man for the heights, preferring to pass his holidays on the Isle of Wight – ‘What pleasure lies in height … in height and cold?’

We might answer Tennyson’s question simply by saying that the urge to explore space – to go higher – is innate to the human mind. The French philosopher of space and matter, Gaston Bachelard, considers the desire for altitude to be a universal instinct. ‘A human being,’ he writes, ‘in his youth, in his taking off, in his fecundity, wants to rise up from the earth. The leap is a basic form of joy.’ Certainly, the equation of height with goodness is embedded in our language and consequently in the way we think. Our verb ‘to excel’ comes from the Latin
excelsus,
meaning elevated or high. Our noun ‘superiority’ is from the Latin comparative
superior
, meaning higher in situation, place or station. ‘Sublime’ originally meant lofty, distinguished or raised above. And so on. Conversely, a clutch of pejorative words are associated with depth: ‘lowliness’, ‘inferiority’,
‘base’, dozens more. We construct our models of progress on a gradient. We move on up, or we sink back down. It is harder to do the former than the latter, but that makes it only more admirable. One does not, under any linguistic circumstances, progress down. Most religions operate on a vertical axis in which heaven or their analogue of that state is up, and its opposite is down. To ascend, therefore, is in some fundamental way to approach divinity.