Mountains of the Mind Read Online Free Page B

memory, and that of our shared cultural memory. Although people have traditionally gone into wild places in some way to escape culture or convention, they have in fact perceived that wilderness, as just about everything is perceived, through a filter of associations. William Blake put his finger on this truth. ‘The tree,’ he wrote, ‘which moves some to tears of joy is, in the eyes of others, only a green thing which stands in the way.’ The same, historically, holds for mountains. For centuries they were regarded as useless obstructions – ‘considerable protuberances’, as Dr Johnson dismissively dubbed them. Now they are numberedamong the natural world’s most exquisite forms, and people are willing to die for love of them.
    What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans – a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountain has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves. Mountains are only contingencies of geology. They do not kill deliberately, nor do they deliberately please: any emotional properties which they possess are vested in them by human imaginations. Mountains – like deserts, polar tundra, deep oceans, jungles and all the other wild landscapes that we have romanticized into being – are simply there, and there they remain, their physical structures rearranged gradually over time by the forces of geology and weather, but continuing to exist over and beyond human perceptions of them. But they are also the products of human perception; they have been
imagined
into existence down the centuries. This book tries to plot how those ways of imagining mountains have altered over time.
    A disjunction between the imagined and the real is a characteristic of all human activities, but it finds one of its sharpest expressions in the mountains. Stone, rock and ice are significantly less amenable to the hand’s touch than to the mind’s eye, and the mountains of the earth have often turned out to be more resistant, more fatally real, than the mountains of the mind. As Herzog discovered on Annapurna, and I discovered on the Lagginhorn, the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountains one climbs. These are matters of hard, steep, sharp rock and freezing snow; of extreme cold; of a vertigo so physical it can cramp your stomach and loosen your bowels; of hypertension, nausea and frostbite; and of unspeakable beauty.

    There is a letter which George Mallory wrote to his wife Ruth during the 1921 reconnaissance expedition to Everest. The advance guard of the expedition was camped fifteen miles from the mountain, between a Tibetan monastery and the tongue of the glacier which swept down from the base of Everest, where ice broke, as Mallory described it, ‘like the huge waves of a brown angry sea’. It was an arduous place to be; cold, high and wind-blasted, the wind given body by particles of snow and dust so that it snaked between the rocks in grubby currents. Mallory had spent that day – 28 June – making the first approaches to the mountain on which he would die three years later. It had been an exhausting day: up at 3.15 a.m., and not back until after 8 p.m., covering many miles over glacial ice, moraine and rock. Twice he had fallen into pools of freezing water.
    After the day’s end Mallory lay, exhausted, in his cramped and sagging little tent, and wrote a letter home to Ruth by the granular light of a Tilley lamp. He knew that by the time his letter reached her in England a month later, his work on the mountain would probably have been completed for that year, one way or another. Much of the letter was taken up with an account of the day’s efforts, but in his concluding paragraphs Mallory tried to describe to Ruth how he felt about being in such a place, attempting such a feat. ‘Everest has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I