Mountains of the Mind (17 page)

When I was twenty-two, I was part of a mountaineering expedition to the Tian Shan, the high and remote range which sweeps westwards out of China and into the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. We were flown into the mountains by helicopter, a rusting, clattery old bird that touched down briefly to drop us, before pulling up and away into the mist.

China lay to our east behind an elegant ridge of mountains, Kazakhstan to the north, hidden by a bulkier, more monstrous range. Slowly we made our way towards base camp – a herd of tents and lean-tos huddled on the black moraine of the Inylchek glacier.

The Inylchek is the world’s third most voluminous glacier – a deep river of ice which pushes through the Tian Shan for some fifty miles. It is Y-shaped, and its two upper arms are fed by dozens of tributary glaciers that flow in slow-motion into it, and by minor ice-falls down which blocks of ice as big as cars descend at a stately rate. I
lived on the Inylchek moraine for a few weeks, and at night, from inside the tent, I could hear the glacier running through its repertoire of sound effects: the slither as blades of slate slipped over one another, dislodged by an adjustment of the glacier’s massive machinery; the groan, from deep inside the glacier, of ice separating from ice. It reminded me of James Forbes’s lovely description of the Mont Blanc glacier in 1843: ‘All is on the eve of motion.’

In comparison with the glacier’s rhythms our movements around the camp – a pair of quick hands dealing out a pack of cards on an upturned rock, feet being stamped to keep them warm when the sun had dropped behind the mountains – seemed almost frivolously fast. Occasionally, though, would come a cataclysm, the mountains showing their own sleight of hand: the high scream of a block tearing away from an ice-fall, or the crack and rush of an avalanche.

Once, during the daytime, there was a soft crump and a big bass roar from far away to the east. We looked up. At that distance everything happened at a languorous, decelerated velocity. For what felt like minutes, the avalanche descended the face of Pik Pobeda. It was a big one, the biggest I had ever seen. Tens of thousands of tons of snow and rock falling in silence. It struck the glacier at the bottom of the face and, like a white carpet unrolling, the powder and debris from the avalanche billowed out horizontally for almost half a mile. Twenty minutes later the pall of white was still hanging in the air over the glacier. We muttered a few words of hope for the Spanish team that we knew were on the north face of Pobeda, and turned back to our game of cards.

At first glance glaciers appear destitute of life or interest; attractive only for their qualities of desolation and emptiness. They seem static, frozen like a photograph by the cold and the thin, transparent air. Eighteenth-century travellers regularly compared them to deserts. But like deserts, glaciers open themselves up to you when you look closely at them. You can never step into the same river twice, said
Heraclitus. Had he travelled a few latitudes further north, he would have said the same for glaciers. The ice is in that old paradox – a permanent state of flux.

On the Inylchek glacier, every time I stepped off the moraine and on to the ice, something would have changed. The glacier had a different character for each part of the day. In the cold mornings it was crisply white. At noon the sun carved the surface of the ice into groves of tiny, perishable ice trees, each one only a few inches high: a miniature silver and blue forest which stretched away for miles up and down the glacier. The late afternoon light – a rich, liquid light – turned the big dun rocks on the ice into tawny beasts, and made the pools of meltwater which gathered in the glacier’s hollows glint like black lacquer. One night I was out on the glacier when it began to snow in big, heavy, wind-blown flakes. In the beam of my head-torch it looked as though I was moving at warp-speed through deep space.

Dusk was my favourite time on the glacier. The sun always fell fast, dropping suddenly behind a row of peaks, so it was a brief affair – forty minutes or so when shadows quickly densened beneath rocks, and the air temperature plunged. Down at the glacier’s side, you could sense it battening down for the night. If you put a hand an inch or two above the ice, you could feel the cold pulsing off it, like marble. Out on the wide meltwater pools, the ice formed in zigzags just beneath the surface of the water, then thickened into heavy boiler-plates, locking in the deeper water. I once bent down to examine a shallow pool of water which had gathered in a dip, and watched for a few minutes as ice crept jaggedly inwards from its edges and knitted in the middle, like a fontanel closing, or a tiny ice age.

Glacier-going was not just a nineteenth-century fad. It was back in the 1660s that reports first began to filter back to London of an outlandish phenomenon to be found in the very heart of Europe: the ‘Icy and Chrystallin Mountains of
Helvetia
’. One of the first of these reports was a letter by a Mr Muraltus, published on 9 February 1673 in the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society, London’s foremost intellectual institution. It was accompanied by a rough illustrative plate of the Lower Grindelwald glacier which showed an army of icy pinnacles marching down a steep-sided valley. ‘The Icy Mountain,’ began Muraltus confidently, ‘deserves to be view’d.’ He continued:

What must they have made of it in London, this moving mountain which by fits and starts overwhelmed the terrain about it and advertised its intent with ‘great noise’, which split the sunlight into its constituent colours and itself burst into shards without warning? The Londoners knew of ice, to be sure – the Thames froze most winters, often so thickly that carriages could be driven from Lambeth to Blackfriars. But that was manageable ice, convenient ice. Tents were pitched on its margins; out in the centre skaters could cut figures of eight on it, the ice crystals fizzing from their boots. London ice was a very different beast from this frozen, belligerent mountain that ‘expands itself into … great Chinks, and that with a terrible Noise … frightens the whole Neighbourhood’.

By the start of the eighteenth century, glaciers had gained a reputation in Britain, and on 12 October 1708 William Burnet, son of the Bishop of Salisbury (and no relation to Thomas), took matters in hand. ‘I resolved to go my self and see the Mountains of Ice in
Switzerland
,’ he wrote to Dr Hans Sloane, eminent natural historian and then Secretary of the Royal Society, who published his letter in the Society’s
Proceedings
that same year. ‘Accordingly I went to the Grindelwald, a Mountain two Days Journey from Bern. There I saw, between two Mountains, like a River of Ice, which divides it self in two Branches, and in its way from the top of the Mountains to the bottom swells in vast Heaps, some bigger than
St Paul’s
Church.’

Burnet, like John Dennis before him, was confronted with the difficulty of describing something that his readers – the scientific cognoscenti of London – had never seen. He picked his metaphors according to his audience, and could not have chosen a more suggestive, accessible image of size for the metropolitans of the Royal Society than ‘
St Paul’s
Church’. Wren’s cathedral was only two years away from completion in 1708, having already been thirty-three years in the building – every Londoner had seen its grey, graceful cupola lending curves and altitude to the city’s low-slung skyline; every Londoner had marvelled at its proportions. Burnet’s audience were thus furnished with a vivid vision of what the Grindelwald glacier resembled – ‘a River of Ice’ – and its size – bigger even than Wren’s cathedral. This image of the glacier as frozen river would become for a few decades the staple simile for the ice mountains: apposite as it was, it passed straight into the common imagination.

For all his suggestiveness, however, Burnet had done nothing more than look. It did not occur to him to go near the ice, to touch it. It was not until thirty years later, in an act of swaggering braggadocio and self-promotion, that an Englishman would actually set foot upon the glacial ice, and write home about it.

One evening in the summer of 1741, out on the meadows of Sallanches – a small town between Geneva and Chamonix – a little laager of white tents was pitched near to the fields of wheat and rye which the June sun was just beginning to burnish. A pair of sumpter horses was tethered to a stake outside, their panniers bulbous with provisions, and three men with guns stood guard by them, peering into the accumulating gloom in an effort to keep sight of the locals,
who were increasing in number with every half-hour. Occasionally, the young man whom the locals had come to see would push back the heavy canvas flap of one of the tents and take a turn about the campsite. He was swathed in the tight turban and voluminous robes of a Levantine potentate, and at his waist hung a dagger whose curve rhymed with that of his exorbitant slippers. His friend walked with him and they laughed together to see the astonished faces of their witnesses. The guards, who were already used to their employers’ quirks, said nothing, and concentrated on making sure that no prying hands slipped inside the saddle-bags of the horses.

The pseudo-sultan was Richard Pococke, a compulsive traveller and an aspirant churchman. His companion was William Windham, the eldest and most fractious son of William Windham, the present paterfamilias of a Norfolk dynasty of William Windhams which stretched back to the fifteenth century. Windham the younger had been dispatched to Geneva by his exasperated father, where it was hoped he would pick up the manners and mores befitting a young gentleman from a politically inclined family, but where instead he did nothing but pick up whores, get into fights and keep an ear out for possible entertainments.

It had been Windham who had been keen to see the glaciers of Chamonix – according to the second-hand rumours in London they were simply astonishing. Despite their proximity, only a few Genevans had visited the glaciers; most of the staunch Calvinists of that city believed that God had seen fit to punish the rustically godless inhabitants of Chamonix by visiting the ice-rivers upon them in a torpid and enduring plague. No one was prepared to accompany Windham to the glaciers, until he met Richard Pococke: a gentleman, as Windham described him in his published account of their excursion, ‘recently arrived at Geneva from his voyages into the Levant and Egypt, which countries he had visited with great Exactness’.

Well armed, well laden and backed up by a trio of Genevan henchmen, the two set off for Chamonix in a little cavalcade of horses on 7 June 1741. From Geneva they rode the four leagues to Bonneville, and thence proceeded along the River Arve, where they were ‘entertained with an agreeable Variety of fine Landskips’. That first night, they camped on the fields at Sallanches, and it was there, to the wonder of the locals, that Pococke dressed himself up as a panjandrum (he had brought the clothes with him from Egypt, along with a wooden coffin containing a mummy from Saqqara and a stone statue of Isis).