Mountains of the Mind (6 page)

Given sufficient time, argued the Uniformitarians, the conventional ordnance of nature – rain, snow, frost, river, sea, volcano, earthquake – could produce the largest effects. So what the Catastrophists took for evidence of disaster was in fact the result of a slow and enduring ground war. The cornerstone of Uniformitarian theory was that ‘the present is the key to the past’: in other words, the history of the earth could be inferred from the careful observation of present processes at work on its surface. It was a version of the water-dripping-on-stone idea: allow a river or a glacier enough time and it will slice a mountain in half. Time, great time – this was what the Uniformitarians needed for their theories to work, and so they ratcheted the beginning of the earth far further backwards than anyone had previously contemplated.

The most celebrated of the early Uniformitarians, usually credited with paternity of what is now called the Old Geology, was the Scotsman James Hutton (1726–97). Hutton possessed an instinctive ability to reverse physical processes, to read landscapes backwards, as it were. Like all of the founding geologists, Hutton was a prodigious walker, and for decades he strode back and forth across the Scottish landscape, attempting by a blend of induction and imagination to intuit the processes which had brought it to its present state. Fingering the white quartz which seamed the grey granite boulders in a Scottish glen, Hutton understood the confrontation that had once occurred between the two types of rock; saw how under fantastic pressure the molten quartz had forced its way into the weaknesses in the mother granite. To be with Hutton was to inhabit a world with a past so deep as to be terrifying. One of his colleagues and admirers,
John Playfair, famously described visiting a geological site on the Berwick coast with him. As Hutton explained the implications of the rock configuration, wrote Playfair, ‘the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time’.

Between 1785 and 1799 Hutton’s three-volume magnum opus,
Theory of the Earth
, appeared: the distillation of decades of meditation on landscape formation. In it he proposed that the earth we presently inhabit is merely a snapshot in a series of an unknown number of cycles. The apparent permanence of mountains and coastlines is in fact an illusion born of our diminutive life-spans. Were we to live for aeons, we would witness not only the collapse of civilizations, but the utter rearrangement of the earth’s surface. We would watch mountains being worn down by erosion to become plains, and we would see new landmasses being formed beneath the sea. Rubble eroded from the continents and laid down in sedimentary layers on the sea-floor would be lithified – turned to stone – by the exothermic core of the earth and then, over millions of years, would be lifted up to create new continents and new mountain ranges. Thus it was, said Hutton, that the shells which could be found embedded in the rocks of mountain-tops had not been washed there by the Deluge, but had been elevated from sea-floor to mountain-top by the patient, implacable processes of the earth.

Hutton put no parentheses around the age of the earth: according to his vision, the earth’s history stretched backwards indefinitely into the past and unfurled indefinitely into the future. The final sentence of his book would toll through the centuries: ‘The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end.’ It was this inexpressible deepening of the earth’s history that was geology’s vital contribution to the common imagination.

How did this geological revolution affect the way mountains were imagined? Once the geologists had shown the earth to be millions of years old and subject to immense and ongoing change, mountains could never be looked at in the same way again. Suddenly, these effigies of permanence had acquired an exciting, baffling mutability. Mountains, which seemed so durable, so eternal, had in actuality been formed, deformed and reformed over countless millennia: their current appearance was merely a phase in the perpetual cycles of erosion and uplift which determined the configuration of the earth.

A new generation of mountain-goers was drawn to the hills by the ghostly landscapes which had suddenly opened up under the scrutiny of geology. ‘What I really saw as never before,’ wrote Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in the 1780s, ‘was the skeleton of all those great peaks whose connection and real structure I had so often wanted to comprehend.’ Geology provided a reason and an excuse – scientific inquiry – for travelling to the mountains. ‘A sentiment of curiosity, exceedingly natural, induces travellers from all parts of Europe to visit Mont Blanc, the highest point of the old world, and to examine the surrounding glaciers,’ observed an English journalist in 1801. ‘These places have recently acquired a new degree of interest – the geologue, the mineralogist, and mere amateur repair thither with avidity; and even women are amply indemnified for the fatigue of the journey by the pleasure arising from the view of objects entirely new to them.’ To look at mountains was now also to look
into
them: to imagine their past. The English scientist Humphry Davy put it well in 1805:

‘Strata Types’, frontispiece to Humphry Davy’s
Elements of Agricultural Chemistry
(1813), showing the different rock layers which geology had made visible.

Here then was another vertigo – the giddiness inspired by deep time – to add to the more familiar and immediate kind one might feel on a steep mountainside. The experience of going to the mountains had become, as Burnet had suggested a century earlier, one not only of moving upwards in space, but also backwards through time.

James Hutton might have fathered geology, but he was by no means its most stylish exponent. Aside from its resonant final lines, Hutton’s
Theory
was written in a prose as uniformly impenetrable as the Old Red Sandstone of which he was so fond. It would take thirty years and another legendary geologist to make truly popular geology’s rapid advances and staggering exposés, and to entice even more people into the mountains. Far more than Burnet or even Hutton, it
was the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell who was responsible for educating the nineteenth century in the language and the imagination of geology.

Charles Lyell was a lawyer before he was a geologist, and his forensic training had equipped him with a writing style of extreme clarity and elegance. Between 1830 and 1833 he published in three volumes
The Principles of Geology: an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation
, a work which carefully and beautifully laid out the arguments behind the Uniformitarian view that the study of the present was the key to the past.
Principles
quickly became required reading for the chattering classes of its day and was widely translated: eleven revised editions had been published by 1872.

Lyell’s brilliance lay primarily in his marshalling of detail. As Charles Darwin would do later in
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
(1859), Lyell won over his audience with a combination of irresistibly accumulating facts – in this respect his writing resembled the processes it was describing – and illuminating anecdotes. There was something appealing, too, in the democracy of the knowledge Lyell was outlining. You did not need special equipment or long training to decipher the earth’s history: only an acute pair of eyes, a basic knowledge of Uniformitarian principles, and curiosity and courage enough to peer over the edge of the ‘abyss of time’. Given these minimal qualifications anyone could attend the most exciting show on earth – its past.

To witness in action this new way of feeling about mountains, let us turn to the year 1835, and to the town of Valparaíso, ledged precariously on the Pacific coastline of Chile. The town’s name means Paradise Valley, and a less fitting name could not have been found for it. To begin with it does not occupy a valley, but rather the thin strip of approximately horizontal ground that runs between the Pacific combers and the range of red rock mountains which rise steeply up
behind the town. And it is positively not paradisal. The steady offshore breeze which scours the surface earth, the steepness of the ground and the salty soil mean that there is no vegetation to speak of. There is little other life to be found here save for the human inhabitants, who have made their homes in huddles of low white-washed houses with red-tiled roofs, which congregate in the stream-cuts and ravines. Near the shoreline, dories bob in rows, ready to service the big ships that come to anchor out in the deeper water – for Valparaíso, unlikely as it may seem, is Chile’s principal sea-port. Over the whole scene hangs the clear, dry air of the coastal summer.

It is from Valparaíso on 14 August 1835 that Charles Darwin sets out on horseback for a long excursion into the Andean hinterland. Out in the bay is moored his ship, the ten-gun brig HMS
Beagle
, on which he is serving as scientific observer. While studying at Cambridge, Darwin had become interested in geology, and before he sailed south from Devonport on a ferociously stormy evening in December 1831, he packed the first volume of Lyell’s
Principles
as reading for the long voyage out towards South America. He tested Lyell’s theories in the field during a stop at the Cape Verde Islands, and by the time the
Beagle
first sighted the flatlands of Patagonia, Darwin’s imagination was primed to interpret the landforms he encountered in Lyellian terms: to infer a deep past for their present appearance. ‘I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brains,’ he would later write to a friend, Leonard Horner, ‘for I have always thought that the great merit of the
Principles
, was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind & therefore that when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes.’

Leaving Valparaíso, Darwin first rides northwards along the coast for a day, in order to see the beds of fossilized shells which he has been told he must visit. They are astonishing – long banks of calcified molluscs which have been elevated, Darwin correctly deduces, by
gradual crustal movement to their present resting-place several metres above the level of the sea. Having seen the shells – and having watched a gang of locals with pick and shovel plunder barrowloads of them for lime-burning – Darwin turns his horse inland, and canters up through the wide and fertile valley of Quillota (‘whoever called Valparaíso Valley of Paradise must have been thinking of Quillota’, he would observe later to his journal). The valley is densely packed with olive groves, and with stands of orange, peach and fig trees which have been manicured into tiny square orchards by the valley’s inhabitants. On its higher slopes prolific fields of wheat flash in the sunlight, and above them rises the Bell of Quillota, a 1,900-metre peak from which there are reputed to be magnificent views. It is this mountain which Darwin has come to climb.