Mountains of the Mind (11 page)

I looked upwards. A tall, steep face of rock, striped vertically with snow gullies, angled up into the lightening sky. That was our route. My eye followed the face down. Without relenting in angle, it dropped some 600 feet to a small glacier which arced off the bottom of the face. The convex surface of the glacier looked hard, silvered and pitted like old metal, and it was pocked with stones which had fallen from the cliffs above. Further down, the glacier tumbled over a hundred-foot drop. There its surface turned a curdled grey, and the smoothness of the upper ice became ruptured into crevasses and blocks. I could see glimmers of blue ice far down inside the body of the glacier. That was where we would end up if we fell.

We had left the hut too late that morning. When we stepped outside, the sky beyond the mountains to our east was already livid with colour. It meant the day would be a hot one; another good
reason to have avoided a late start, for the warmth would loosen rocks that were gripped by ice, and cause crevasses to yawn in the glaciers. Pushing for time and unroped, we half-jogged up over two steepening miles of glacier, trusting the lingering cold to keep the snow-bridges rigid. A final toil up a long snow ramp – tacking back and forth to make the slope less severe – brought us to the shoulder of our mountain, and the beginning of the route.

The main problem was scree, the debris of small stones and rock chips which collects on mountain sides. Scree is despised by mountaineers for two reasons. First, because it can easily be pushed off on to you by people climbing above. And second, because it makes every step you take insecure. Put a foot down on a shoal of scree, and it’ll skid off as the scree scrapes over the rock beneath.

For about thirty minutes we moved steadily up the face. The rock was in poor condition, shattered horizontally and mazed with cracks. When I tried to haul myself up on a block of it, it would pull out towards me, like a drawer opening. Some of the rock ledges were covered with a moist sill of snow. My hands became progressively wetter and colder. The climbing hardware we had festooned about us clanked and tinkled on the rock. This, our breathing and the rasp of rock on rock were the only noises.

Then came a shout. ‘
Cailloux! Cailloux!
’ I heard yelled from above, in a female voice. The words echoed down towards us. I looked up to see where they had come from.

Time doesn’t stop or slow down when you are in danger. Everything happens as fast. It’s just that – providing we survive them – we subject these periods of time to such intense retrospective scrutiny that we come to know them more fully, more exactly. We see them in freeze-frame. From this moment I remember a rivulet of water running darkly down the rock-rib in front of my eyes, the minute cross-hatchings on the fabric of my waterproof jacket and a little yellow Alpine flower tucked into a pocket of rock. And a
sound – the crunching of the scree beneath my feet as I braced myself for impact.

There were just two rocks at first, leaping and bounding down the face towards us, once cannoning off each other in mid-air. And then the air above suddenly seemed alive with falling rocks, humming through the air and filling it with noise.
Crack
, went each one as it leapt off the rock face, then
hum-hum-hum
as it moved through the air, then
crack
again. The pause between the cracks lengthened each time, as the rocks gained momentum and jumped further and further.

Up above us, two French climbers glanced beneath their legs. They watched as the single rock which they had nudged off a ledge dislodged several other rocks, and those some others, and suddenly a gang of rocks of different sizes was leaping noisily off down the face. They couldn’t see properly whether there was anyone below them: a protruding hood of rock prevented them getting a full view of the face. But it seemed unlikely that anyone would be coming up beneath them. They were the first down the mountain, having been turned back by a difficult pitch at the top. There had been no one coming across the glacier from where they had reached their high point. And no one would have been stupid enough to come any later than that. But they shouted anyway, out of decorum; like calling ‘fore’ on an empty golf course.

I continued to gaze up at the rocks as they fell and skipped towards me. A boy who had been a few years above me at school had taught me never to look up during a rockfall. ‘Why? Because a rock in your face is far less pleasant than a rock on your helmet,’ he told us. ‘Face in, always face in.’ He had led us all day on a horseshoe walk in Wales, and then when we returned, exhausted, to the car park and the minibus, he had marched back off into the hills in the sludgy dusk light with a rope over his shoulder, to climb until he could no longer see. A year later he and a friend were killed by rockfall in the Alps.

I heard Toby, my partner on the mountain that day, shouting at me. I looked across. He was safe beneath an overhanging canopy of rock. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then I felt a thump, and was tugged backwards and round, as though somebody had clamped a heavy hand on my shoulder and turned me to face them. No pain, but the blow had almost jerked me off my stance. The rock, which had hit the lid of my rucksack, bounced off towards the blue crevasses far below.

Rocks were spinning past now, maybe a dozen of them. I looked up again. A rock was heading down straight towards me. Instinctively, I leant backwards and arched my back out from the rock to try to protect my chest. What about my fingers, though, I thought: they’ll be crushed flat if it hits them, and I’ll never get down. Then I heard a
crack
directly in front of me, and a tug at my trousers, and a yell from Toby.

‘Are you all right? That went straight through you.’

The rock had pitched in front of me, and passed through the hoop of my body, between my legs, missing me but snatching at my clothing as it went.

I looked up again, and watched as the last, and biggest, of the boulders fell towards me. I was directly in its line again. About forty feet above me it took a big hop off a rock, and spun out into the air. As I watched it come it grew larger, and darker, until it was the size of my head. With a sharp report it struck the rock face once more, then took a lateral leap to my left, and whirred away past me.

I realized I was gripping the rock in front of me so hard that my fingers were white at their tips. My limbs were shivering and seemed barely able to support my weight. My heart pistoned. But it was over. I promised myself yet again that I would never come back to the high mountains. ‘Let’s get off this hill,’ I shouted across to Toby.

Trekking cautiously back across the glacier, unnerved, my body still trembling from the adrenaline, testing the soft snow for crevasses, we heard the characteristic
whop-whop-whop
of a helicopter give the valley a rhythm. I began to sing aloud the chopper song from
Full Metal Jacket
: ‘Surfin’ Bird’ – the Trashmen cover. Then I stopped. Get a grip, I told myself. You’re not in Vietnam, you’re in the Alps, just a guy who’s gone up into the mountains to scare himself, and succeeded. The helicopter’s not for you.

It wasn’t, either. It beat a path of sound over the glacier and thumped its way off east, towards the pinnacle of the Zinalrothorn, where somebody else had died.

Late that night, back in the valley and unable to sleep, I got out of our tent and walked about the campsite, stepping carefully over the guy-ropes. Torches were on inside some of the other tents and they looked like little orange igloos against the blackness of the cold meadow. The sky was clear, and the tilted snowfields on the upper slopes of the mountains flashed the moonlight down into the valley like signalling mirrors.

As I walked, I thought back over the day. Toby and I had spent the evening in a bar, drinking pints of lager in celebration of our near-miss. The room was full of smoke and other climbers, clunking from table to bar and back again in heavy plastic boots, shouting out their tales over the music. We had sat and talked through the events of the morning: what if the big final stone hadn’t leapt sideways, what if I’d been knocked off, would you have held me, would I have pulled you off? A more experienced mountaineer would probably have thought nothing of it, filed it away in the bulging folder of near-misses, and carried on regardless.
I knew I would not forget it. We had talked, too, about how much pleasure the fear had brought afterwards. And we had talked, as mountaineers always do, about how strange it is to risk yourself for a mountain, but how central to the experience is that risk and the fear it brings with it.

In his
Voyages dans les Alpes
, de Saussure wrote briefly about the chamois hunters of the Alps, men who pursued a notoriously perilous profession. The hunters were menaced by crevasses on the glaciers over which they chased their quarry, they faced death by falling from the steep slopes the chamois preferred, and death by exposure from the Alpine storms which could gather so quickly. And yet, de Saussure had written:

When I read this passage, it made absolute sense to me, despite the intervening centuries. As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a ‘continual agitation alive’ in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear – this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.

Of course the significant difference between de Saussure’s chamois hunter and me was that for the hunter, risk wasn’t optional – it came with the job. I sought risk out, however. I courted it. In fact, I paid for it. This is the great shift which has taken place in the history of risk. Risk has always been taken, but for a long time it was taken with
some ulterior purpose in mind: scientific advancement, personal glory, financial gain. About two and a half centuries ago, however, fear started to become fashionable for its own sake. Risk, it was realized, brought its own reward: the sense of physical exhilaration and elation which we would now attribute to the effects of adrenaline. And so risk-taking – the deliberate inducement of fear – became desirable: became a commodity.

It is the summer of 1688, a momentous season in Europe. In Rotterdam, William of Orange is assembling a formidable invasion fleet to sail to England and prosecute what will become known as the Glorious Revolution. John Locke, too, is in Holland that summer, in exile, considering what to do with his anti-tyrannical tract,
Two Treatises of Government
. The Venetians are fighting the Ottomans up and down the Adriatic coast. And in North Italy, a young Englishman named John Dennis – who will find future fame as a playwright and aesthetician, and as the butt of Alexander Pope’s jokes – is sitting before a snapping fire in a hostelry in Italy, having just crossed the Alps, and scribbling a letter to a friend in England who has never been near any mountains.

For a man who will make his living and his name from his pen, Dennis is finding it remarkably difficult to put words to what has happened to him. ‘’Tis an easy thing to describe Rome or Naples to you,’ he writes, ‘because you have seen something yourself that holds at least some resemblance with them; but impossible to set a Mountain before your Eyes, that is inaccessible almost to the sight, and wearies the very Eye to climb it.’ Dennis faces the enduring problem of the travel-writer: how to say what something is like, when it is like nothing that your reader has ever seen? He
concentrates at first on producing a physical description of the mountains, and runs through the conventional complaints of his age against their hostility, drawing his friend’s attention to the ‘impending Rocks’, the ‘dreadful Depth of the Precipices’, and the ‘roaring Torrents’.