The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

  So I knew the Cairngorms long before I knew The Living Mountain, which I first read only in 2003, when it was recommended to me by a former friend. He spoke of it as a book that had almost slipped through the cracks of the canon; a lost classic. I read it, and was changed. I had thought that I knew the Cairngorms well, but Shepherd showed me my complacency. Her writing re-made my vision of these familiar hills. It taught me to see them, rather than just to look at them.

  The Living Mountain is thick with the kinds of acute perception that come only from ‘staying up for a while’, from frequent crossings of a particular landscape. ‘Birch needs rain to release its odour,’ Shepherd notes. ‘It is a scent with body to it, fruity like old brandy, and on a wet warm day one can be as good as drunk with it.’ I had never before noticed the ‘odour’ of birches, but now cannot be in a stand of birch trees on a rainy summer’s day without smelling its Courvoisier whiff. Elsewhere Shepherd remarks and records ‘the coil over coil’ of a golden eagle’s ascent on a thermal, ‘the immature scarlet cups of the lichen’, the flight of the ‘white-winged ptarmigan’, a pool of ‘small frogs jumping like tiddly-winks’, a white hare crossing sunlit snow with its accompanying ‘odd ludicrous leggy shadow-skeleton’. She has an Andy Goldsworthy-ish eye for the inadvertent acts of land-art performed by the mountain: ‘Beech bud-sheaths, blown in tide-mark lines along the edge of the roads, give a glow of brightness to the dusty roads of May.’ She spends an October night in air that is ‘bland as silk’, and while half-asleep on the plutonic granite of the plateau feels herself become stone-like, ‘rooted far down into immobility’, metamorphosed by the igneous rock into a newly mineral self.

  Shepherd is a fierce see-er, then. And like many fierce see-ers, she is also a part-time mystic, for whom intense empiricism is the first step to immanence. ‘I knew when I had looked for a long time’, she writes, ‘that I had hardly begun to see.’ Her descriptions often move beyond – or, rather, through – the material. Up on the mountain, she writes, after hours of walking and watching:

  the eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. So the ear, the other senses. These moments come unpredictably, yet governed, it would seem, by a law whose working is dimly understood.

  Shepherd – like Neil Gunn and like the Scottish explorer–essayist W.H. Murray – was strongly influenced by her reading in Buddhism and the Tao. Shards of Zen philosophy glitter in the prose of all three writers, like mica flecks in granite. Reading their work now, with its fusion of Highland landscape and Buddhist metaphysics, remains astonishing: like encountering a Noh play performed in a kailyard, or chrysanthemums flourishing in a corrie.

  ‘A mountain’, says Shepherd Zennishly, ‘has an inside.’ This is what she calls her ‘first idea’, and it is a superbly counterintuitive proposition, for we tend to think of mountains in terms of their exteriors – peaks, shoulders, cliffs. But Shepherd is always looking into the Cairngorm landscape, and I now find myself doing the same when I am in the massif. Again and again her eyes pry through surfaces: into cracks in rocks, into the luminous interior of clear-watered lochs or rivers. She dips her hand into Loch Coire an Lochaine, she walks naked into the shallows of Loch Avon, she pokes fingers down mouse holes and into the snowpack. ‘Into’, in The Living Mountain, is a preposition that gains – by means of repeated use – the power of a verb. She goes to the mountain searching not for the great outdoors but for profound ‘interiors’, deep ‘recesses’. The hidden volumes of landscapes fascinate her: the ‘underground cavities’ of the Ardennes, the ‘hollows’ and ‘spectacular chasms’ of the Cairngorms. The clarity of the water of the Grampian ‘burns’ and ‘lochs’ is so absolute that they appear to her ‘like clear deeps of air, / Light massed upon itself’. Corries interest her for the ways in which they cup space and give ‘body’ and ‘substance’ to colour and to air. Writing of the eyes of creatures glimpsed in the ‘dark of woodland’ at dusk, she wonders if the green colour of their eyeballs – the ‘watergreen’ – is the ‘green of some strange void one sees . . . the glint of an outer light reflected or of an inner light unveiled’.

  This preoccupation with the ‘inside’ of the mountain is no conceit; rather, it figures the book’s attempts to achieve what she calls an ‘accession of interiority’. For Shepherd, there was a continual traffic between the outer landscapes of the world and the inner landscapes of the spirit. She knew that topography has long offered humans powerful allegories, keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping memories and giving form to thought. So it is that her book investigates the relationships that exist between the material and the metaphorical ‘mountain’. She knew – as John Muir had written forty years earlier – that ‘going out . . . was really going in’.

  Partway through writing this essay, late in March, I left my home in Cambridge and travelled north to the Cairngorms on the sleeper train from London. In the south of England, blackthorn was foaming in the hedges, tulips and hyacinths were popping in suburban flower-beds, and spring was reaching full riot. Arriving in the Cairngorms, I found I had travelled back into high winter. Avalanches were still rumbling the lee slopes, Loch Avon was frozen over and blizzards were cruising the plateau. Over three days, with four friends, I crossed the massif on foot and ski from Glenshee in the south-east to Loch Morlich in the north-west. Up on the wide summit plateau of Ben a’ Bhuird, I found myself in the purest ‘white-out’ conditions I have ever experienced. Those who have travelled in high mountains or to the poles are likely to be familiar with the white-out: the point at which snow, cloud and blizzard combine such that the world dissolves into a single pallor. Scale and distance become impossible to discern. There are no shadows or waymarks. Space is depthless. Even gravity’s hold feels loosened: slope and fall-lines can only be inferred by the tilt of blood in the skull. It felt, for that astonishing hour up on Ben a’ Bhuird, as if we were all flying in white space.

  The mountain world, like the desert world, is filled with mirages: tricks of light and perspective, parhelia, fogbows, Brocken spectres, white-outs – illusions brought on by snow, mist, cloud or distance. These optical special-effects fascinated Shepherd. In winter, she sees a ‘snow skeleton, attached to nothing’, which turns out to be the black rocks of a cliff high above, whose apparent levitation is due to the imperceptibility of the snow banks below it. At midsummer, she looks through lucid air for hundreds of miles and spies an imaginary peak, a Hy Brasil of the high hills: ‘I could have sworn I saw a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded. The chart was against me, my companions were against me, I never saw it again.’ She punningly calls such illusions ‘mis-spellings’: visual ‘errors’ that possess an accidental magic and offer unlooked-for revelation. And she delights in these moments, rather than holding them in suspicion or correcting for them. For what she calls ‘our gullible eyes’, their proneness to ‘deceptions’ by the mountain world, are in fact a means of reconfiguring our reading of the world:

  Such illusions, depending on how the eye is placed and used, drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again.

  This is brilliantly seen and said. Our vision is never correct but only ever provisional. ‘Illusions’ are themselves means of knowing (a reminder of James Joyce’s aside about errors being the portals of discovery). Importantly, these illusions cannot be summoned into being or ordered on request. They are unpredictable conspiracies of the material and the sensory; like the mountain as a whole, they are ‘impossible to coerce’. Shepherd doesn’t systematically traverse the mountain, or seek by some psychogeographic ruse to prise it open. She accepts that ‘unheralded moment[s] of revelation’ cannot be obtained ‘at will’. The mountain is graceful in the Augustinian sense; its gifts cannot be actively sought (though mind you, there’s more than a hin
t of good Deeside Presbyterianism in Shepherd’s preoccupation with ‘toil’: ‘On one toils, into the hill’ . . . one encounters with relish ‘a tough bit of going’ . . . one ‘toil[s] upward’).

  In one amazing passage about illusions, Shepherd describes looking from a distance at a stone barn on a humid day. The moist air acts as a lens, multiplying and redistributing her sightlines, so that she seems to view all sides of the barn simultaneously. Her own style possesses a similar dispersive quality. Reading The Living Mountain, your sight feels scattered – as though you’ve suddenly gained the compound eye of a dragonfly, seeing through a hundred different lenses at once. This multiplex effect is created by Shepherd’s refusal to privilege a single perspective. Her own consciousness is only one among an infinite number of focal points on and in the mountain. Her prose watches now from the point of view of the eagle, now from that of the walker, now from that of the creeping juniper. In this way we are brought – in her memorable phrase – to see the earth ‘as the earth must see itself’. This is a book which embodies ecological principles without being overtly ‘environmental’ (a word which would, I think, have meant little to Shepherd).

  The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else, and The Living Mountain is filled – woven – with images of weaving and interconnection. There are the pine roots that are ‘twisted and intertwined like a cage of snakes’; the tiny Scots pines high on the hill that are ‘splayed to the mountain and almost roseate in structure’; the duck and drake that, rising together, appear to form a single bird with ‘two enormous wings’; the many-stranded lichen known locally as ‘toadstails’, with its dozens of ‘separate trail[s] and side-branch[es]’; the loch currents which weave thousands of floating pine-needles into complex spheres, similar to wrens’ nests: structures so intricately bound that ‘they can be lifted out of the water and kept for years, a botanical puzzle to those who have not been told the secret of their formation’ (these pine-needle balls are also, of course, surreptitious emblems of Shepherd’s own tightly knit and tiny work, itself ‘kept for years’). Reading through the book, you realise that its twelve sections are bound laterally to each other by rhymes of colour, thought and image, so that they offer not a dozen different facets of the mountain but rather a transverse descriptive weave – the prose equivalent of a dwarf juniper forest. In this way, the book’s form acts out its central proposition, which is that the world will not fall into divisible realms, as an apple may be sliced, but is instead an unmappable mesh of interrelations.

  In one scene Shepherd describes a long winter dusk spent watching two rutting stags, whose antlers have become ‘interlaced’ during a joust, such that they cannot separate. She sees them ‘drag . . . each other backwards and forwards across the ringing frozen floor of a hollow’, and waits for answers: who will win, how will they disentangle? But darkness falls, -Shepherd is forced to return indoors, and even a return to the site of the battle the next morning yields neither corpses nor clues. The episode is yet another image of the mountain’s refusal to answer to questions which are explicitly asked of it. That which ‘interlocks’ is rarely opened here, even by the ‘keyed’ senses of the walker. Deer run in a way that resembles flight, and yet their motion is ‘fixed to the earth and cannot be detached from it’. A fawn lies in a ‘hidden hollow’, so camouflaged that its presence is given away only by the flick of its eyelid. The mountain ‘does not come to an end with its rock and its soil’, but has ‘its own air’. Long before Lovelock gave us Gaia, Shepherd was proposing a holistic vision of her small world as one and indivisible: ‘The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird – all are one.’ ‘So there I lie on the plateau,’ she writes:

  under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow – the total mountain.

  Shepherd’s ‘total’ is of course totally distinct from the ‘total’ of ‘totalising’ or ‘totalitarian’. Her mountain is ‘total’ insofar as it exceeds the possibility of our capacity ever to know it entirely.

  It’s for this reason that knowledge is never figured in The Living Mountain as finite: a goal to be reached or a state to be attained. The massif is not a crossword to be cracked, full of encrypted ups and downs. Man ‘patiently adds fact to fact’, but such epistemological bean-counting will only take you so far. No, knowledge is mystery’s accomplice rather than its antagonist. Greater understanding of the mountain’s interrelations serves only to finesse the real into a further marvellousness, and to reveal other realms of incomprehension: ‘The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect . . . the more the mystery deepens.’ Shepherd mentions her hydrological habit of following ‘burns to their sources’, but then remarks that the sources of the burns – the pools, the lochs, the lochans – hold further enigmas. The universe merely refers you onwards. Move along now. Keep on going. You’ll encounter only new versions of ‘that secret the mountain never quite gives away’.

  What Shepherd learns – and what her book showed me – is that the true mark of long acquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty: a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge. ‘One never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it,’ she writes. ‘Knowing another is endless . . . The thing to be known grows with the knowing.’ ‘Slowly I have found my way in,’ she says: slowly, but not fully, for ‘[i]f I had other senses, there are other things I should know’. This is not a book that relishes its own discoveries; it prefers to relish its own ignorances – all those ‘exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them’, or the water that is ‘too much’ for her, or the dark line of geese that melts ‘into the darkness of the cloud, and I could not tell where or when they resumed formation and direction’. Shepherd is compelled by the massif’s excesses, its unmappable surplus: ‘The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’

  I worry that I may be making The Living Mountain sound abstruse, cold, over-intellectual. It isn’t, of course. It is deeply wise and it is propositionally structured, but not abstruse. For it’s so full of life, death, body, gusto, touch and – subtly – sexuality. To Shepherd, being on the mountain is a profoundly physical experience. What joy she records! Up in the mountains, she lives off wild food, foraging for cranberries, cloudberries and blueberries, drinking deeply from the ‘strong white’ water of rivers. ‘I am like a dog – smells excite me. The earthy smell of moss . . . is best savoured by grubbing.’ She swims in lochs, and sleeps on hillsides to be woken by the sharp click of a robin’s foot upon her bare arm or the snuffle of a grazing deer. She records with brilliant exactness how frost ‘stiffens the muscles of the chin’ (a part of the body we don’t usually associate with muscularity, let alone thermometric sensitivity), or the pleasure of ‘running my hand after rain through juniper . . . for the joy of the wet drops trickling over the palm’. Heather pollen rises from the moor which feels ‘silky to the touch’. There is, unmistakably, an eroticism tingling through this book, samizdat and surreptitious, especially thrilling because Shepherd was a woman writing at a time and in a culture where candour about physical pleasure was widely regarded with suspicion. She relishes the touch of the world upon her thighs, calves, the soles of the feet, her hands. The body is made ‘limber’ by the rhythm of walking. ‘Naked’ recurs as a word – ‘naked birch trees’, ‘naked’ hands, ‘naked legs’.

  ‘That’s the way to see the world: in our own bodies,’ wrote the poet, Buddhist and forester Gary Snyder, and the phrase could stand as an epigraph to The Living Mountain. True, Shepherd knows well how rough mountains can be on the human body – sometimes f
atally so. She admits to the ‘roaring scourge’ of the plateau in summer, when the midges are out in their millions and the heat rises in jellied waves from the granite; and she deplores the ‘monstrous place’ the mountain becomes when rain pours for hours on end. She describes getting burned by snow-glare until her eyes are weeping: she feels sick, and her face for days afterwards is left scorched ‘as purple as a boozer’s’. She demonstrates – like many mountain-goers – a macabre fascination with the dead of the hills: the five Czech airmen whose plane crashes into Ben a’ Bhuird in low cloud; the five people dead by falling during the years Shepherd knows the hills; the four ‘boys’ who are caught and killed by storms, including the two who leave a ‘high-spirited and happy report’ in the waterproof log-book beneath the Shelter Stone at the west end of Loch Avon, but whose frozen bodies are later discovered on the hill, their knees and knuckles raw with abrasions from the granite boulders over which they had crawled, trying desperately to make their way in the blizzard wind.