The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

  The second knowledge I have retained from my first ascent is of the inside of a cloud. For, from a few yards above Loch Etchachan to the summit, we walked in a cloud so thick that when the man who was leading went ahead by so much as an arm’s length, he vanished, except for his whistle. His wife and I followed the whistle, and now and then when we were too slow (for he was an impatient lad), he materialised again out of the cloud and spoke to us. And alone in that whiteness, while our revenant came and went, we climbed an endless way. Nothing altered. Once, our ghostly mentor held us each firmly by an arm and said, ‘That’s Loch Etchachan down there.’ Nothing. The whiteness was perhaps thicker. It was horrible to stand and stare into that pot of whiteness. The path went on. And now to the side of us there was a ghastlier white, spreading and swallowing even the grey-brown earth our minds had stood on. We had come to the snow. A white as of non-life.

  That cloud, like others inside which I have walked, was wet but not wetting. It did not wet us till, almost at the summit, it broke in hard rain, and we could at last see the corries, scarfed in mist. Some clouds savage the wayfarer on the heights—clouds from below, up here they are rain, or sleet—some nuzzle him gently but with such persistence that he might as well walk through a loch. Or the wet may be more delicate, condensing in droplets on eyebrows and hair and woollen clothing, as has happened by morning with the dew after a night outside. Or the cloud may be hardly more than a sensation on the skin, clammy, or merely chill. Once I was inside a cloud that gave no sensation whatever. From within it, it was neither tangible nor visible, though as it approached it had looked thick and threatening. We were on the flank between Sgoran Dubh and Sgor Gaoith, on a cloudless day of sun; and suddenly there was the cloud, making steadily toward us, with a straight under-edge about the 3000 feet level. We thought: we’re in for it! But nothing more happened than that the sunshine went out, as though a switch had clicked; and in some twenty minutes the sun clicked on again, and we saw the level under-edge of cloud pass away across the Einich valley. Inside the cloud had been just dry-dull.

  To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation. Once, on Lochnagar, we had watched the dawn light strike the Cairngorms, like the blue bloom on plums. Each scarp and gully was translucent, no smallest detail blurred. A pure clear sun poured into each recess. But looking south, we caught our breath. For the world had vanished. There was nothing there but an immense stretch of hummocked snow. Or was it sea? It gleamed, and washed the high hills as the sea washes rock. And came to an end, as most seas do somewhere, with the Glen Lyon Mountains, Ben Lawers and Schiehallion, standing up out of it like one of the long twin-peaked islands of the west. A sea of mist invading the heart of the land, but sucked up by the sun as the hot day went on.

  Seeing the Cairngorms from other mountains, Lochnagar or the Glen Lyon heights, emphasises them as a group. From the latter their great lift can be clearly seen, their mass and squareness. They tower up in a blunt pyramid. The height of high hills can, of course, be appreciated only from others of equal or at least approximate height, but this is not merely a matter of relative stature. There is something in their lift, their proportions and bearing, that can only be seen when one is somewhere near their own size. From below, oddly enough, they are not so majestic. This can be best seen with the Cairngorm group from Geal Charn in the Monadhliaths, which, though not even a three-thousander, stands erectly over against them across the Spey valley. Coming steeply down its front, one watches the high panorama opposite settle into itself as one descends. It enchants me like a juggler’s trick. Every time I come down I want promptly to go back and see it all over again. A simple diagram explains the ‘trick’, but no diagram can explain the serene sublimity these high panoramas convey to the human mind. It is worth ascending unexciting heights if for nothing else than to see the big ones from nearer their own level.

  From the hills of lower Deeside, the plateau nature of the group is most clearly seen, for only the long table of Ben Avon and Ben a’ Bhuird is in view. As one follows up the Dee valley, Cairntoul appears, dominant. By Lochnagar, the whole façade is clear, sculptured in block and cleft and cornice, with which the light makes play. It is best at morning, when the cliffs are rose-red. The phenomenon lasts about an hour, precipice after precipice glowing to rose and fading again, though in some conditions of the air the glow lasts longer, and I have seen, in intense still summer heat, not only the corries but the whole plateau burning with a hot violet incandescence until noon. Sunset also lights the corries, but this must be seen on the other side of the group. From the Lochnagar side summer sunsets are behind the Cairngorms, but winter sunsets touch them obliquely. From Lochnagar, too, can be seen what is not often seen except by going to it or to those parts of the plateau just above it, one of the most secret places of the range, the inner recess of the great Garbh Choire of Braeriach.

  On the hills still further west, from Glas Maol on the borders of Angus, the Cairngorm group seems to grow gently out of the surrounding hills, its outlines melting into harmony with theirs. Its origins may be different, but like them it has been subdued by the grinding of the ice-age, and here more than anywhere else the common experience shows. From Ben Ouran at the head of Glen Ey, one looks straight into the Lairig Pass, and sees the plateau split in two by the cleft that runs right through it. But from the mouth of the Ey valley, on the hillside a mile or so from where this stream joins the Dee, one is surprised by a new vision of the familiar range. Here one realises: these are mountains, not a shattered plateau; for they are seen as peaks piled on peaks, a majestic culmination. This effect is most marked when the long flat top of Braeriach is veiled, as it is so often, in mist, while Ben MacDhui towers up like the giant he is, flanked by the peaked cone of Cairntoul and reinforced by the lesser and nearer peaks of the Devil’s Point and Cairngorm of Derry. These peaks seem to hang splendidly aloft above the eye, giving a new sense of the grandeur of these mountains. But moving further round, south-west and west, one finds only a lump-mass, rounded and unshapely, with no dignity except bulk. This is the back of the mountain, like the back of a monster’s head: at the other side are the open jaws, the teeth, the terrible fangs.

  The north-east view, from the Braes of Abernethy, directly opposite to this lumpish back, has the gaping jaw and the fangs. It is a place of swift and soaring lines. This is Cairn Gorm, from which, though it is only the fourth summit in height, the whole group takes its name. These plunging precipices frame Loch Avon. Here is Stac Iolaire, the Eagle’s Crag. Cairn Gorm has the finest complement of lochs—Loch Avon, the small and lovely Loch an Uaine, whose waters have the green gleam of old copper roofs, and Loch Morlich, the perfect mirror of the three great corries on the Speyside face. The edge of cliffs hangs 3000 feet above the smooth water, which is broad and long enough to hold the whole majestic front, corries, ridges and foothills, that jut like a high relief from the block of the plateau. On a still day it has a dream-like loveliness.

  This whole north-west face, the three Cairn Gorm corries and the three on Braeriach, rises steeply from moor, so that walking along the plateau lip, one has the sense of being lifted, as on a mighty shelf, above the world.

  FOUR

  Water

  So I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place. I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while. I have left at dawn, and up here it is still morning. The midsummer sun has drawn up the moisture from the earth, so that for part of the way I walked in cloud, but now the last tendril has dissolved into the air and there is nothing in all the sky but light. I can see to the ends of the earth and far up into the sky.

  As I stand there in the silence, I become aware that the silence is not complete. Water is speaking. I go towards it, and almost at once the vie
w is lost: for the plateau has its own hollows, and this one slopes widely down to one of the great inward fissures, the Garbh Coire. It lies like a broad leaf veined with watercourses, that converge on the lip of the precipice to drop down in a cataract for 500 feet. This is the River Dee. Astonishingly, up here at 4000 feet, it is already a considerable stream. The immense leaf that it drains is bare, surfaced with stones, gravel, sometimes sand, and in places moss and grass grow on it. Here and there in the moss a few white stones have been piled together. I go to them, and water is welling up, strong and copious, pure cold water that flows away in rivulets and drops over the rock. These are the Wells of Dee. This is the river. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.

  The Dee, however, into which through its tributary streams all this south-eastern side of the Cairngorms is to drain, takes its headwaters not from one only but from both halves of the central plateau. The gash that divides the two halves (the Cairntoul and Braeriach from the Cairn Gorm-Ben MacDhui side), the Lairig Ghru, is so sheer and narrow that when mists roll among the precipices, lifting and settling again, it is sometimes hard to tell whether a glimpse of rock wall belongs to the mountain on which one is standing or to another across the cleft. High on the Ben MacDhui side, though 300 feet lower than the wells on Braeriach, two waters begin a mere step from one another. One runs east, falls over the precipice into Loch Avon and turns north to the Spey; the other, starting westwards, slips over the edge as the March Burn and falls into the Lairig Ghru. Eventually, turning south and east, and having joined the water that flows out of the Garbh Choire, it becomes the Dee. But where it falls into the narrow defile of the Lairig, its life seems already over. It disappears. A little further down a tiny pool is seen, and still further down two others, sizable pools, crystal clear and deep. They have no visible means of support, no stream is seen to enter them, none to leave; but their suppressed sparkle tells that they are living water. These are the Pools of Dee. The March Burn feeds them, the young Dee, a short way beyond the lowest of the pools, is plainly their exit. I can conceive of no good reason for trudging through the oppressive Lairig Ghru, except to see them.

  Through most of its length the Lairig Ghru hides its watercourses. On the other side of the watershed, towards the Spey, this havoc of boulders seems quite dry. One is surprised when suddenly a piece of running stream appears in the bottom, but it is soon swallowed again. Finally, where the precipitous sides of the gash widen out, and the storms of centuries no longer have rained successions of broken boulders on to the stream beds, the burn at last gushes into the open, a full strong stream of crystal water.

  It is not only in this narrow defile that the fallen and scattered boulders cover the watercourses. I have sat among boulders on an outer face of the hill, with two low sounds in my ears, and failed to locate either. One was the churr of ptarmigan, the other the running of water. After a long time, I saw the ptarmigan when he rose with a movement of white wings from among the grey stones he so closely resembles, but the water I never saw. In other places a bottle-neck gurgle catches my ear and where I thought there were only stones, I can see below them the glint of water.

  The Cairngorm water is all clear. Flowing from granite, with no peat to darken it, it has never the golden amber, the ‘horse-back brown’ so often praised in Highland burns. When it has any colour at all, it is green, as in the Quoich near its linn. It is a green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water. Sometimes the Quoich waterfalls have violet playing through the green, and the pouring water spouts and bubbles in a violet froth. The pools beneath these waterfalls are clear and deep. I have played myself often by pitching into them the tiniest white stones I can find, and watching through the appreciable time they take to sway downwards to the bottom.

  Some of the lochs also are green. Four of them bear this quality in their names—Loch an Uaine. They are all small lochs, set high in corries, except for the Ryvoan Loch, the lowest and most decorative. Perhaps I should say, decorated. It lies within the tree level, which none of the others do, and has a lovely frieze of pine trees, an eagle’s eyrie in one of them, and ancient fallen trunks visible at its bottom through the clear water. The greenness of the water varies according to the light, now aquamarine, now verdigris, but it is always pure green, metallic rather than vegetable. That one which hangs between a precipice and sloping slabs of naked rock on the face of the great curve of cliffs between Braeriach and Cairntoul, has the sharpest beauty of the four—a stark splendour of line etched and impeccable. Ben MacDhui and Cairngorm of Deny have the other two, less picturesque than the first, less exquisite than the other. The Spey slope of these mountains has the best of it with lochs, but the Dee slope has the lovelier burns—they fall more steeply, with deep still pools below the falls.

  Two of the lochs are black by name—the Dubh Loch of Ben a’ Bhuird, and the Dubh Loch that lies in the second cleft that cuts the plateau, the Little Lairig; but they are black by place and not by nature, shadowed heavily by rock. That the water has no darkness in it is plain when one remembers that the clear green Quoich runs out of the one loch and the Avon is fed by the other. In winter the ice that covers them has green glints in it, and in April dark streaks run through the glinting ice, showing where the springs are already running strong beneath. In summer I have stood on the high buttress of Ben a’ Bhuird above the Dubh Loch, with the sun striking straight downward into its water, and seen from that height through the water the stones upon its floor.

  This water from the granite is cold. To drink it at the source makes the throat tingle. A sting of life is in its touch. Yet there are midsummer days when even on the plateau the streams are warm enough to bathe in. In other years on the same date the same streams surge out from caves of snow, and snow bridges span not only the Dee on its high plateau but the Etchachan in its low hung corrie; and fording the Allt Druie, which is too swollen to cross dryshod, I have been aware of no sensation at all, not even of the pressure of the current against my legs, but cold.

  The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower. One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes—the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once.

  When the snows melt, when a cloud bursts, or rain teems out of the sky for days on end without intermission, then the burns come down in spate. The narrow channels cannot contain the water, which streams down the hillsides, tears deep grooves in the soil, rolls the boulders about, brawls, obliterates paths, floods burrows, swamps nests, uproots trees, and finally reaching the more level ground, becomes a moving sea. Roads that were mended after the last spate are stripped to their bones, bridges are washed away. My path comes to a place where I had forgotten there was a bridge—it is a mere plank over a ditch. The plank hasn’t been moved, but now it lies deep under a roaring race of water twenty feet wide. I try to ford it, and almost at once the water is mid-way between knee and thigh, and my body is tensed with the effort to stand erect against its sweep. I step cautiously forward not lifting my feet, sliding them along the bottom as an old gamekeeper has taught me, but before I reach the middle I am afraid. I retreat. There is another way round.

  But sometimes there may not be another way round. Standing there with the racing water against my thigh, I understand why, in days when there were few bridges and the ill-made (or un-made) roads went by the fordable places, so many Scottish streams had a sinister reputation. Avon had an ill name for drownings, like Till of the old rhyme. Even within my lifetime, both Spey and De
e have had many victims.

  For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and unremitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. We make it all so easy, any child in school can understand it—water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can’t live without it. But I don’t understand it. I cannot fathom its power. When I was a child, I loved to hold my fingers over the tap at full cock and press with all my puny strength until the water defeated me and spurted over my newly-laundered frock. Sometimes I have had an insane impulse to hold back with my fingers a mountain spring. Absurd and futile gesture! The water is too much for me. I only know that man can’t live without it. He must see it and hear it, touch and taste it, and, no, not smell it, if he is to be in health.

  FIVE

  Frost and Snow

  The freezing of running water is another mystery. The strong white stuff, whose power I have felt in swollen streams, which I have watched pour over ledges in endless ease, is itself held and punished. But the struggle between frost and the force in running water is not quickly over. The battle fluctuates, and at the point of fluctuation between the motion in water and the immobility of frost, strange and beautiful forms are evolved. Until I spent a whole midwinter day wandering from one burn to another watching them, I had no idea how many fantastic shapes the freezing of running water took. In each whorl and spike one catches the moment of equilibrium between two elemental forces.