Mountains of the Mind (28 page)

But a map can never replicate the ground itself. Often our mapping sessions would induce us to bite off more than we could chew. At home we would plot a route over terrain that would, in reality, turn out to be sucking bog, or knee-high heather, or a wide boulder-field thick with snow. Sometimes a landscape would caution us of the limits of our map’s power. I have had a map snatched from my hand by the wind and whirled over a cliff edge. I have had a map pulped into illegibility by rain. And I have stood in a white-out on a mountain-top and been able to put my finger on a map and say ‘I am here’, but still have had to take shelter in a snow-hole until the storm passed.

Maps do not take account of time, only of space. They do not acknowledge how a landscape is constantly on the move – is constantly revising itself. Watercourses are always transporting earth and stone. Gravity tugs rocks off hillsides and rolls them lower down. Grouse swallow quartz chips to use in their craw, and excrete them elsewhere. There is a continual trafficking of objects, of stones. Other changes occur. A sudden rain-shower can transform a tiny tributary stream into an uncrossable torrent. The meltwater outflow from the mouth of a glacier will sculpt silt into ceaselessly changing patterns of abstract beauty. These are the dimensions of a landscape which go unindicated by a map.

Patterns formed in glacial silt.

Francis Galton (1822–1911) is now best known as the man who fathered and christened eugenics, but like many Victorians he was many things. Explorer, climber, mystic, meteorologist, criminologist and advocate of fingerprinting, Galton was also an innovative cartographer. One of his most enduring coups was to combine symbols for weather systems with maps, thereby creating the prototype of the TV weather map. Galton believed that maps should convey more than just spatial information about terrain. He wanted to give travellers a phenomenal impression of the lands they visited. Maps, he felt, should somehow duplicate the smells, scents and sounds of a place:

Galton’s multi-media map was ill-conceived, for what he was proposing was nothing less than a facsimile of the world itself. But a map is an abbreviation: this is its definition, its strength and its limitation. To know a landscape properly, you must go into it in person. You need to see how in winter a tree gathers warmth to itself, and melts the snow it stands in. You need to hear the rifle-crack of a crow’s call snapping over icy ground. You need to feel the remoteness of a huge grey pre-dawn Alpine sky, with the lights of the nearest town blinking thousands of feet beneath you.

Most of the world’s mountainous areas were mapped in the nineteenth century, the imperial century. Mapping has always marched in the vanguard of the imperial project, for to map a country is to know it strategically as well as geographically, and therefore to gain logistical power over it. In the case of Britain, the intuitive desire of the British to purge the globe of its unknown spaces fitted the political ambitions of the imperium.

When, from the early 1800s onwards, the expanding British and Russian empires began to chafe against one another in Central Asia, detailed cartographic knowledge of the trans-Himalayan region became vital. In 1800 Robert Colebrooke, then Surveyor-General of Bengal, extended a mandate to all British infantry officers to enter and map any country they chose. At this point, the Andes were still thought to be the highest range in the world, and when these illicit surveyors began returning even greater heights for the Himalayan peaks – Lieutenant W. S. Webb, for example, observed Dhaulagiri from four survey stations in the plains, and calculated its height to be 26,862 feet – they were ridiculed by professional cartographers and accused of fumbling their figures (the currently accepted height for Dhaulagiri is
circa
26,800 feet).

The information these maverick map-makers gleaned often came at a price. Beyond the objective dangers of the terrain they moved through, the surveyors risked being attacked by bandits or punished
as spies. The Emirs of Afghanistan, in particular, did not take kindly to the officers of a nearby foreign power wandering round their country. After losing too many of their own men to accidents and assassination, the British – characteristically – decided to train up native Indian cartographers, disguise them as pilgrims, and send them in to reconnoitre and map the parts British officers couldn’t safely reach. The
pandits
, as they became known – giving us our word ‘pundit’ – taught themselves to count their own paces, to walk at 2,000 paces to the mile, and to mark off each one hundred paces by moving a bead on their rosaries. They carried their notes hidden in their prayer wheels, and in their staffs were stashed thermometers, so that they could measure altitude by boiling-point. The most famous of these early
pandits
were the Singh cousins, Nain and Kishen. So committed was Kishen to his job that he not only worked out his own pacings, but also those of a galloping horse; when a bandit attack forced him to escape on horseback, he was therefore able to continue mapping the terrain through which he fled.

Tree trunk in old snow.

Rock citadels at dawn.

In 1817 the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India had got under way on the baking plains of Southern India, under the superintendence of the soldier-surveyor William Lambdon. The aim of the GTS was to create a so-called ‘grid-iron system’ for the whole of British India: a pattern of interlocking cartographic triangles which would permit the estimation of the relative distances and heights of any two points on the subcontinent. The GTS caravan moved northwards up the country from Cape Comorin, creating their triangles and gathering demographic and topographic information as it went. By the early 1830s the vanguard of the GTS was within sight of the Himalaya. Twenty-yard-high towers of stone were built from which the survey’s theodolites could be trained on the pale distant summits of the Himalaya, peering deep even into forbidden Nepal and Tibet. Allowances were made for the illusory clarity of the air and for the lateral pull exerted on plumb lines by the gravity of the Himalayan
range, and seventy-nine of the Himalaya’s highest peaks were ‘fixed’. These were the key to the whole Himalayan puzzle: ‘The peaks,’ wrote one superintendent of the survey, ‘can be made the basis of subsequent surveys; the courses of the rivers and the positions of lakes can be laid down with regard to them; the trends and forms and magnitudes of the ranges can be inferred from the distribution of the peaks.’ Overseeing it all until his death in 1866 was George Everest, the surveyor who would – rather unwillingly – leave his name attached to the world’s most famous geological feature.
*

For with mapping came naming. The nineteenth century, more than any other, saw the wild places of the world being franked and hallmarked. As each blank on the map – down in the Antarctic, up in the Arctic and throughout the mountainous areas of the world – was first penetrated and then accounted for, it had imprinted on it the tiny, cursive names of its discoverers. Many mountains, of course, had been named long before – the Jungfrau and the Eiger were christened in the eleventh and twelfth centuries respectively, for instance – but it was during the 1800s that the micro-naming properly began. Niches, notches, shoulders, cols, ridges, glaciers, routes: all began to bear the names of climbers and explorers. Look at a large-scale map of the Alps now, and you will see the names still jostling for space, radiating out of geological features like small black spokes.

This obsessive naming was a form of commemoration. It was also, unmistakably, one of colonization: a thwarted expression of the Victorian drive to bring the Empire home. That acquisitive instinct – which reached its fullest expression in Britain with the Great Exhibition of 1851 – didn’t work as well with mountains as it did
with, say, flora and fauna. The Victorians transported their mountains symbolically, of course, in the form of rock samples. But properly to prove where they had been, they left their names behind. It was a form of imperial graffiti.

The Nojli Surveying Tower, North India. Photograph probably taken in the 1890s.

The Victorian explorers’ habit of place-naming was not only a function of their imperial instinct, however. It was also a more fundamental mechanism for making sense of landscapes that, by virtue of their extreme difference from home, might otherwise have been unknowable. The urge to mark places in a landscape with names – to attempt to fix a presence or an event within time and space – is a way of allowing stories to be told about that landscape. Here, at this place which I shall name
x
, we ate food, or we fell ill, or we saw an astonishing sight, and then we moved onwards to the place I have named
y
. For the explorers, names gave meaning and structure to a landscape which might otherwise have been repetitively meaningless. They shaped space, allowed points to be held in relation to one another. They provided a stability – the stability of language, of narrative, of
plot
– to the perpetually changing upper world of ice and storm and rock through which they moved. Naming was and remains a way to place space within a wider matrix of significance: a way, essentially, to make the unknown known.

Once in the desert in Egypt I climbed a little hillock, only a few hundred feet high, of golden rock and sand. It was noon, and the desert rang with a metallic white light. Near the top of the hill, but low down on an exposed pillar of sandstone, I caught sight of some lettering. I squatted down to look at it, and put a hand up to my forehead to shield my eyes from the glare:
Lt Carter 1828
. The sandstone around the letters was dark brown, deeply sun-tanned by hundreds of thousands of desert days. But the lettering was still pale and bright: only nearly 180 years old, it had not had time enough to darken.