Mountains of the Mind Read Online Free

which it spoke of agricultural fecundity. Meadows, orchards, grazing fields, the rich sillion of crop lands – these were the ideal components of a landscape. Tamed landscapes, in other words, were attractive: landscapes which had had a human order imposed upon them by the plough, the hedgerow and the ditch. As late as 1791 William Gilpin noted that ‘the generality of people’ found wilderness dislikeable. ‘There are few,’ he continued, ‘who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature’s rough productions.’ Mountains, nature’s roughest productions, were not onlyagriculturally intractable, they were also aesthetically repellent: it was felt that their irregular and gargantuan outlines upset the natural spirit-level of the mind. The politer inhabitants of the seventeenth century referred to mountains disapprovingly as ‘deserts’; they were also castigated as ‘boils’ on the earth’s complexion, ‘warts’, ‘wens’, ‘excrescences’ and even, with their labial ridges and vaginal valleys, ‘Nature’s
pudenda
’.
    Moreover, mountains were dangerous places to be. It was believed that avalanches could be triggered by stimuli as light as a cough, the foot of a beetle, or the brush of a bird’s wing as it swooped low across a loaded snow-slope. You might fall between the blue jaws of a crevasse, to be regurgitated years later by the glacier, pulped and rigid. Or you might encounter a god, demi-god or monster angry at having their territory trespassed upon – for mountains were conventionally the habitat of the supernatural and the hostile. In his famous
Travels
, John Mandeville described the tribe of Assassins who lived high among the peaks of the Elbruz range, presided over by the mysterious ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. In Thomas More’s
Utopia
the Zapoletes – a ‘hideous, savage and fierce’ race – are reputed to dwell ‘in the high mountains’. True, mountains had in the past provided refuge for beleaguered peoples – it was to the mountains that Lot and his daughters fled when they were driven out of Zoar, for instance – but for the most part they were a form of landscape to be avoided. Go around mountains by all means, it was thought, along their flanks or between them if absolutely necessary – as many merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries had to – but certainly not up them.
    During the second half of the 1700s, however, people started for the first time to travel to mountains out of a spirit other than necessity, and a coherent sense began to develop of the splendour of mountainous landscape. The summit of Mont Blanc was reached in 1786, and mountaineering proper came into existence in the middleof the 1800s, induced by a commitment to science (in the sport’s adolescence, no respectable mountaineer would scale a peak without at the very least boiling a thermometer on the summit) but very definitely born of beauty. The complex aesthetics of ice, sunlight, rock, height, angles and air – what John Ruskin called the ‘endless perspicuity of space; the unfatigued veracity of eternal light’ – were to the later nineteenth-century mind unquestionably marvellous. Mountains began to exert a considerable and often fatal power of attraction on the human mind. ‘The effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great,’ Ruskin could claim proudly of his favourite mountain in 1862, ‘that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it.’ Three years later the Matterhorn was climbed for the first time; four of the successful summitteers fell to their deaths during the descent.
    By the end of the century the Alpine peaks had all been climbed – mostly by the British – and almost all the Alpine passes mapped. The so-called Golden Age of mountaineering had come to an end. Europe was considered by many to be
passé
, and mountaineers began to turn their attention to the Greater Ranges, where they exposed themselves to