Mountains of the Mind (31 page)

Given his emaciation, and lack of climbing experience, Wilson got remarkably high on the mountain. The Sherpas he had hired abandoned him – wisely, though not without reluctance – at 21,000 feet, in the upper basin of the Rongbuk glacier. Wilson climbed on up into the teeth of desperate weather and impassable obstacles (bergschrunds, yawning crevasses) and died of malnutrition and exposure. A British reconnaissance party ascending by the same route a year later discovered his corpse lying on a small beach of shale. They interred him in a crevasse, and sat down under a rock overhang to read his diary: a small book bound in green leather, with coarse pages. Wilson’s firm handwriting became more spidery towards the end, his syntax less assured. But the final entry, for 31 May, was written clearly: ‘Off again, gorgeous day.’

What deflected the imaginative perception of the upper world away from gods and monsters, and towards the feast of natural phenomena which Gesner found so delighting, was natural theology – an influential doctrine which spread across Europe between the 1690s and the 1730s.

The founding premise of natural theology was that the world in all its aspects was an image given by God to man. It was, in the words of Thomas Browne, a ‘universal and public manuscript’ in which
could be read God’s grandeur. To scrutinize nature, to discern its patterns and its idiosyncrasies, was thus a form of worship. The mountains were among the finest of God’s texts; the best seats in what Gesner had called ‘the great theatre of the world’. ‘Providence,’ declared the Abbé Pluche, one of the principal theorists of natural theology, ‘has made the air invisible in order to allow us to witness the spectacle of nature.’

Therefore, to visit the upper world and contemplate its marvels was to be elevated spiritually as well as physically. If you looked hard enough, and if you bore God firmly enough in mind, it was possible to overmaster the automatic sensations of fear and horror which the mountainous environment was still felt by many to inspire. The natural theology movement was crucial in revoking the reputation of mountains as aesthetically displeasing, for it forced intellectual Europeans into a more specific experiencing of the physical world. A new way of looking at wild landscape established itself, which combined sweeping experiences with a close attention to the micro-phenomena – the tiny special effects – of the mountains.

It was under the pressure of natural theology, as well as science’s new inquisitiveness concerning the physical matter of the universe, that towards the end of the eighteenth century the idea of the ‘upper world’ of the mountains became common imaginative currency. Wherever we look in landscape writing of that period, the same image is being used. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure called the mountains ‘a sort of terrestrial paradise’. The French explorer Jean de Luc, who in September 1777 discovered the Glacier du Buet, described how he felt himself levitated into ‘the pure upper atmosphere’. Marc Bourrit wrote in his
Journey to the Glaciers of the Duchy of Savoy
(1774) of how in the ‘other world’ of the mountains the traveller finds his ‘mind voluptuously employed in the contemplation of so many wonders’. The most influential of these accounts of the upper world was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Nouvelle Héloïse
(1761), the book
which is now widely credited with having created secular mountain-worship. ‘It seems as if, being lifted above all human society,’ Rousseau wrote of the Alps:

Here was a manifesto – couched in Rousseau’s winningly ebullient prose – for the ‘aethereal regions’ of the mountains as a new and enchanting world which teemed with astonishing sights.

As the cult of the upper world spread, and more people were attracted to the mountains, so too the casualties began to occur. In 1800 a young Frenchman fell into a crevasse on the Glacier du Buet. When his maimed body was retrieved – ‘the unfortunate young man’, wrote a witness, ‘had experienced the most sudden and violent compression’ – his rescuers turned out his pockets in an effort to identify him. They found seventy-eight
livres
in money, a notebook, and a well-thumbed edition of the third volume of de Saussure’s
Vo yages dans les Alpes
. Tucked between the pages of his notebook for safe-keeping, they also found an uncompleted letter written to his father. It began, heartbreakingly: ‘You see, my dear father, that I have undertaken a journey: you see also that this journey is one of the most interesting and beautiful that can be wished …’ The death of
the young man was a stern reminder as the nineteenth century chimed in that the mountains and their environs could be fatally punitive, as well as wondrous.

During the 1800s John Ruskin in England, and the intellectual dynasty of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir in North America, penned rapturous essays in praise of the mountains, which paid especial attention to the exquisite minutiae of the high hills – the glaciers ‘like moving pavements of marble’, or the miraculously unique architecture of each snowflake. Ruskin wrote of how he had watched inky storm clouds breaking like ‘troublous seas against the crags’, and concluded that of such spectacles ‘there can be as little imagination or understanding in an inhabitant of the plains as of the scenery of another planet than his own’. When the first volume of
Peaks, Passes and Glaciers
was published in London in 1859, it was littered with impassioned references to ‘the upper ice-world’. From the middle of the century, too, the new-born medium of photography enhanced the status of the mountains. ‘It must be set down to the credit of photography,’ wrote one Himalayan photographer modestly of his own plates, ‘that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these, and renders it more susceptible of their sweet and elevating impressions.’

A community of wilderness connoisseurs specializing in the precise observation of nature and the controlled play of the imagination emerged during the nineteenth century. Ways of calibrating the attractiveness of different mountains were proposed and argued over: this one had a ridge whose curve imitated the contours of the sail of an Egyptian felucca, that one evolved a delicate lattice-work of ice in the winter months. The appreciation of mountain beauty
no longer took the form of generalized awe, but was a much more specific responsiveness to the phenomena of the hills. Accounts of mountain-goers from the 1800s tend to be exuberant with detail, written by travellers whose eyes have become newly sensitive to the particular beauties of the mountains. Particularly striking is a love of stone and rock. Again and again in travel journals, attention is drawn to curious geological outcrops: arches, caves, stalactites and pinnacles, or rocks that resembled lions, bishops, ‘Moors’ Heads’, cannon, camels … Explorers returned from the Atlas mountains in Morocco, the Mountains of the Moon, the Rik range of South Africa, and the Mei-Ling Ridge in China, bringing back with them stories of the gigantic beauties of these mountains – the ‘rugged precipices’, the ‘innumerable rocks’, the ‘immensely high cliffs’ – but also of their minute lithic splendours: mica chasms a few inches wide, or boulders plugged with crystals of smoky quartz or clothed with emerald moss.

A complementary fascination emerged for the transient beauties of the mountains: those fugitive effects – winds, blizzards, storms, snow-devils, technicoloured parahelia, Brocken Spectres, coronae, fog-bows – which hovered on the verge of the intangible and the invisible. This fascination was fostered in part by the Sublime, and in part by the fondness for the Rococo style which characterized art and architecture of the later 1700s. The Rococo aesthetic cherished immateriality, evanescence and fragility, qualities supplied in abundance by the filmy effects of light or cloud, by the fleeting blue and green tints of ice, by mist, clouds, snow, spume, spindrift, and by all the other phantasmagoria on display in the high mountains. Painters squared up to the challenge of how to paint sunsets, cloud formations, fog and the other miasmic aerial effects of mountains. Writers lavished long descriptions on how clouds formed around the summit of peaks like white Elizabethan ruffs, or on top of them like floury wigs. Goethe, during his winter trip to the Savoy Alps, wrote a
detailed analysis of the behaviour of freezing fog, and also tried to puzzle out how altitude affected the blueness of the sky. A few years later Shelley lounged on sun-warmed boulders on the lower slopes of the Alps and let his imagination model the passing clouds into animals and scenes from the Bible. There was an exciting sense of volatility to the upper world, which contrasted so pleasingly with the solidity of its rocky substructure.

Reading about these natural historical miracles away from the cold, thousands of people were drawn to seek out the splendours of the upper world. A tyro mountaineer writing in 1859 spoke for
many when he declared that he had been lured to the Alps by the rumours of its beauties and its solitude. ‘The praises I had always heard bestowed upon the great beauty and grandeur of the scenery,’ he said, ‘had long excited my curiosity and given me a strong desire to explore this wild and unfrequented region … these trackless wastes of ice and snow.’ Climbing upwards came to represent – as it still does – the search for an entirely new way of being. Experience was unpredictable, more immediate and more authentic in the mountains. The upper world was an environment which affected both the mind and the body in ways the cities or the plains never did – in the mountains, you were a different you.