The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (32 page)

‘Well, they’d only reached the lower walls of the lower ridge when the group was hit by a massive avalanche. The damage done to them by the snow was terrible. Kim broke his back in several places. Rick broke several ribs. Yvon escaped significant injury. But Jonathan Wright suffered a broken neck. Rick managed to crawl over to him, and Jonathan died in Rick’s arms, high up on the wall there.

‘Somehow, they got Jonathan’s body down. And they buried him in a crevasse on the glacier, lowering his body deep into the ice, the burial point within eyeshot of the summit. They marked the site with a cairn. Then, of course, they abandoned the expedition. Kim managed to walk out with a multiply broken back, and eventually made a total recovery.

‘In 1999, Rick contacted me, and I helped him to set up an expedition back into Konka. But this time ascent wasn’t the aim. It was a pilgrimage of a very different kind. Rick was accompanying Jonathan Wright’s daughter, Asia – who had been a baby at the time of her father’s death – back to the place where he had died. She wanted to understand why her father had risked his life and eventually died for these mountains, and Rick wanted to help her with that, so she came here on foot.

‘They had a hell of a time even getting close to the mountain. The weather conditions were terrible – blizzard, lightning, thunder – but at last they reached the monastery, and from there Rick and Asia made it up onto the glacier. And eventually Rick guided Asia to the point where he remembered burying her father.

‘To their horror and fascination, Rick found the cairn but he also discovered a flap of Gore-tex showing beneath the stones. He understood straight away what had happened. The glacier had shifted, and the cairn had shifted with it, but – in the surprisingly tender way of glaciers – Jonathan’s frozen body had been pushed to the surface.’

Jon paused. ‘Rick told Asia to wait at a distance, and he made her confirm that she wanted to see her father. She did, and so she approached, and there her father was, not returned from the grave but returned by it. She was able to see him in the flesh, preserved almost as well as the day he died. She could touch his face, and she did so. She cut a lock of his hair. Shortly afterwards, they reburied Jonathan, twenty years on from his death.’

That afternoon Erik and I walked on up onto the westerly moraine of Minya Konka, towards the grave of Jonathan Wright. It was pathless terrain, a maze of boulders and melt-streams, its topography constantly shifted by the movements of ice beneath it. We rock-hopped between lumps of white rock as large as desks, and crossed the bigger streams by wading, or improvising bridges from tree trunks. We saw the pug marks left in grey silt by what looked like a large feline. I watched five musk deer crest the main Konka moraine, pick their way over its lip, then move down at a graceful diagonal over the steep rubble slope.

We followed the route of the biggest river, up past boulders covered with ivory-coloured ice, dripped like the wax from church candles. A flock of finches gusted up from the river-shore with shrill cries.

At the highest point we reached, we could see more closely the hazardous beauty of the north-west ridge: the brittle flutings, the ice bulge, hundreds of yards across, on which Wright had been killed. I felt no desire at all to climb the mountain, glad only to have seen it in such weather and such light. I made a pair of cairns: each of stones of diminishing size, balanced on top of one another, to mark that sighting of the peak.

Days later, we left the Minya Konka region by another pass. Toiling upwards, we startled a big flock of snow pigeons, which rose with snapping wings. As they turned, the sun flashed from their ice-coloured bellies. Three hard hours’ climb to reach the pass. Jagged rows of rock and snow peaks ranked away to the south. The snow there had drifted, melted, then frozen again, so that it was hard and shiny as white vinyl. An arrow-shower of choughs, bright-beaked and solid-bodied, chattered overhead, leading my eye back down the valley. The snow pigeon flock could still be seen, rising and wheeling in front of Minya Konka like thrown quartz chips. Jatso muttered mantras to himself,
om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum
, as we crossed the pass and began the descent back to earth.

Coming up the snowfield on the far side was a long trail of footprints, left by a single walker. These footprints were not pressed down into the snow, though, but raised above it: a series of low snow pedestals, each perhaps three or four inches high. They weren’t footprints but footplinths, and they were the print-trail of an unknown earlier walker, entering the sacred space of the Minya Konka massif.

A foot falls in the snow – human or animal – and the downwards pressure of the foot compacts the snow beneath it into the form of the print. The sun melts the looser-lying snow surrounding the print, or the wind scours that snow away, and gradually the snow level erodes down to the print, and then below it, so that the compressed snow of the footprint stands out in relief. Such footprints are counter-intuitive, for the downwards pressure of a footfall appears to have
grown
a structure upwards from the ground, rebuking gravity. They are palindromic in form: that which was depressed becomes elevated, and impression is reversed into expression.

A few times, coming down a winter mountain on the same path by which I ascended it, I have met my own earlier footprints, raised up as footplinths. The uncanniness of such moments has its source in the encounter with the altered traces of an earlier self. The world has been slightly but importantly shifted between your first passage and your return, and this feeling accords with the more familiar experience of having been changed by the upper world of the mountains, and by the hours and miles that intervene between ascent and descent. Sometimes these protruding prints have appeared to me like the footmarks of an unseen walker, and the surface of the earth nothing more than a flexible film through which the walker’s ghostly feet are pressing, leaving these raised marks on our side of the world: an inverted spectral presence striding through the solid earth as easily as we stride through solid air.

After I returned from Minya Konka, I went with David and three other friends to Scotland, to a range east of Ben Nevis called the Grey Corries, to spend three days following an old drove road into the mountains, and walking the peaks and ridges of the range. The conditions were astonishing: a heavy fresh snowfall, bright winter sunlight, and a howling wind that shook the snow alive. We passed through a white-out so pure and even that it abolished all directions except those proved by gravity. We saw plumes of spindrift sixty yards long streaming northwards from the sharp summit of a mountain called Stob Coire Easain, like the blessing-scarf of ice crystals that had furled out from the summit of Minya Konka. In an eastern corrie, where the wind was given a spin by the form of the land, it whipped up small snow cyclones, fifty feet or more high, that roamed and roved across the mountainside. Once or twice the path of one of these cyclones crossed ours: there was the rising hum of its approach, the fierce hiss of snow grains in the nose and eyes, the silence after it had gone. It felt as if we had been passed through by a ghost.

On the last day, coming off the last shoulder of the final mountain, I found and followed a trail of footprints, and I now wish I hadn’t, for they led us into grave trouble. These prints began in the centre of an open snowfield, as if their maker had stepped down from air onto land, and they weren’t dinted into the snow but raised above it.

I shouldn’t have followed the footplinth trail down off that shoulder, onto steepening ground, but of course I did, because when you are unsure of a route it is natural to put your trust in precedent. So I followed the prints and the others followed me.

Beneath the snow there was heather, whose wiry pale stems gave no grip, and there was slick, sheeny moor grass. Soon the incline was at forty degrees to the horizontal, then fifty, then sixty. The rocks that jagged from it were iced, and shucked off our hands and feet. Everything sloped away beneath us, and yet the footprints proceeded, calmly, across the hillside, the stride-length unvarying, leading us out and down and on.

I shouldn’t have continued to follow them, but I did, and on they still led, now along a narrow terrace in the heather that might have been a deer track. That track led to the top of a ten-foot chute of hard ice, which stopped abruptly on another narrow terrace above a seventy-foot drop to rocks. Down the ice chute led the prints.

I shouldn’t have gone down the chute, but I did. Skid, thump, a dig of the heels to stop rocking over the lip and down the drop. The others came down in turn, and we shuffled further out along the terrace. I kept on moving, facing inwards now, though the terrace was thinning to little more than a ledge. The wind tore and ripped across the slope. Veers of the brain; needles of sun on snow. Boulders pushing at us. The suck and draw of the drop beneath; blood-thump in the ears.

Then the ledge narrowed to no ledge at all; just heather and rock, perhaps twenty degrees off the vertical. By now we had stopped speaking, concentrating on each handhold and foothold. Below us was the fall, behind us an almost irreversible route, and ahead of us apparently untraversable ground – across which the footprints padded; the same regular spacing, the same enticing trail. I stopped. The others stopped in turn behind me. I felt sick. The slop and douse of adrenalin, panic spliced with moments of hovering calm, pinpricks of fright in my temples. In the valley below us I could see normal life continuing: the flash of sun from a car’s windscreen as it moved along the road, a walker on the loch-side path, a gull banking over birch trees.

We clung to that terrace for perhaps three minutes of stalled horrible time, not wanting to go on or retreat. I remembered what real fear in the hills felt like, and how little I liked it. Then at last I decided that death looked more likely ahead than it did behind and so, step by step, we climbed our way back out of trouble, chipping hands into holes in the ice chute, following our own footprints back up that steep ground to the summit of the ridge where it had all begun. When we reached safe ground again, I lay flat on the snow for a while. We laughed and shook hands, and David started singing a Blondie song, and we followed another set of prints away to the west. I still can’t work out how those footplinths had been made, floating their way down that impassable terrain.

PART IV

Homing (England)

13

Snow

Prehistoric land art — Sacred architecture — Landscape theatre & the drama of perception — Black horses, white horse — Wiltshire as Antarctica — Illusions of flying — Eric Ravilious — Out-of-kilterness — Engraving as track-making — Flattening light, beckoning path — A bleak glitter of sun — An airborne island — Northwards — Life at frost point — Narwhal horn — Turbulence, disappearance — The tobogganers — A pair of glowing eyes.

Not long after we had followed the ghostly footprints in Scotland, snow fell across southern England, and David and I set out to traverse that arc of the Ridgeway which curves over the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire, from the White Horse at Uffington past mysterious Silbury Hill and Avebury. The Ridgeway is the name usually given to the hundreds of miles of chalk-down trackway of Neolithic origin, of which – depending on your version of prehistory – the Icknield Way is either a constituent section or a later extension.

The Wiltshire section of the Ridgeway passes through arguably the most sacralized terrain in England. Between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, vast devotional interventions were made in the landscape here. Megaliths and henges were raised, sarsens were organized in avenues, earthworks were dug, and the cryptically simple edifice of Silbury Hill – a huge truncated cone of tamped chalk – was somehow constructed. At Avebury and Silbury, as at Minya Konka, an ease of relation is expressed between topography and belief. And paths, tracks and
cursuses
were intricately involved with this Neolithic landscape theatre. The archaeologist Christopher Tilley, in his pioneering work
The Phenomenology of Landscape
, argues that to understand many of the sacred landscapes of Neolithic Britain we need first to understand the importance of the ancient paths that both link and bypass them. Walking, both as approach and traverse, was crucial to the dramas of perception: what Tilley calls ‘
the strong paths
’ of this region were used to ‘pattern’ the relationship ‘between sites and their settings’.

David and I decided to follow the Ridgeway that winter day not on foot, but by the decidedly unprehistoric means of cross-country skiing. Cross-country skiing shares nothing with downhill skiing save a basic principle of motion. There are no lifts, no chalets, no snow machines and no trust funds. Cross-country skiing involves moving through landscapes that haven’t been prepared for that purpose save by snowfall. On cross-country skis you can ski up and over hills as well as down them. They bestow an exhilarating freedom and mobility.