The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

  The first time I really looked at this shaping process was in the Slugain valley on a January day. The temperature in Braemar village had fallen the previous night to -2°F. We had climbed Morrone in the afternoon, and seen sunset and the rise of a full moon together over a world that was completely white except for some clumps of firwood that looked completely black. (In Glen Quoich next day the ancient fir trees far up the valley had the same dead black look—no green in them at all.) The intense frost, the cloudless sky, the white world, the setting sun and the rising moon, as we gazed on them from the slope of Morrone, melted into a prismatic radiation of blue, helio, mauve, and rose. The full moon floated up into green light; and as the rose and violet hues spread over snow and sky, the colour seemed to live its own life, to have body and resilience, as though we were not looking at it, but were inside its substance.

  Next day a brilliant sun spangled the snow and the precipices of Ben a’ Bhuird hung bright rose-red above us. How crisp, how bright a world! but, except for the crunch of our own boots on the snow, how silent. Once some grouse fled noiselessly away and we lifted our heads quickly to look for a hunting eagle. And down valley he came, sailing so low above our heads that we could see the separate feathers of the pinions against the sky, and the lovely lift of the wings when he steadied them to soar. Near the top of the glen there were coal-tits in a tree, and once a dipper plunged outright into the icy stream. But it was not an empty world. For everywhere in the snow were the tracks of birds and animals.

  The animals had fared as we did: sometimes we stepped buoyantly over the surface of drifts, sometimes sank in well above the knees. Sometimes the tracks were deep holes in the snow, impossible to read except by the pattern in which they were placed; sometimes the mark of the pad was clear, just sunk into the snow surface, and at other times only four, or five, spaced pricks showed where the claws had pierced.

  These tracks give to winter hill walking a distinctive pleasure. One is companioned, though not in time. A hare bounding, a hare trotting, a fox dragging his brush, grouse thick-footed, plover thin, red deer and roes have passed this way. In paw depressions may be a delicate tracery of frost. Or a hare’s tracks may stand up in ice-relief above the softer snow that has been blown from around them. In soft dry snow the pad of a hare makes a leaflike pattern. A tiny track, like twin beads on a slender thread, appears suddenly in the middle of virgin snow. An exploring finger finds a tunnel in the snow, from which the small mouse must have emerged.

  But while birds and tracks (we saw nothing four-footed that morning) amused us as we went up the Slugain, our most exquisite entertainment came from the water. Since then I have watched many burns in the process of freezing, but I do not know if description can describe these delicate manifestations. Each is an interplay between two movements in simultaneous action, the freezing of frost and the running of water. Sometimes a third force, the blowing of wind, complicates the forms still further. The ice may be crystal clear, but more probably is translucent; crimpled, crackled or bubbled; green throughout or at the edges. Where the water comes wreathing over stones the ice is opaque, in broken circular structure. Where the water runs thinly over a line of stones right across the bed and freezes in crinkled green cascades of ice, then a dam forms further up of half frozen slush, green, though colourless if lifted out, solid at its margins, foliated, with the edges all separate, like untrimmed hand-made paper, and each edge a vivid green. Where water drips steadily from an overhang, undeflected by wind, almost perfect spheres of clear transparent ice result. They look unreal, in this world of wayward undulations, too regular, as though man had made them. Spray splashing off a stone cuts into the slowly freezing snow on the bank and flutes it with crystal, or drenches a sprig of heather that hardens to a tree of purest glass, like an ingenious toy. Water running over a rock face freezes in ropes, with the ply visible. Where the water fell clear of the rock icicles hang, thick as a thigh, many feet in length, and sometimes when the wind blows the falling water askew as it freezes, the icicles are squint. I have seen icicles like a scimitar blade in shape, firm and solid in their place. For once, even the wind has been fixed. Sometimes a smooth portion of stream is covered with a thin coat of ice that, not quite meeting in the middle, shows the level of the water several inches below; since the freezing began, the water upstream has frozen and less water is flowing. When a level surface has frozen hard from bank to bank, one may hear at times a loud knocking, as the stream, rushing below the ice, flings a stone up against its roof. In boggy parts by the burnside one treads on what seems solid frozen snow, to find only a thin crisp crust that gives way to reveal massed thousands of needle crystals of ice, fluted columns four or five inches deep. And if one can look below the covering ice on a frozen burn, a lovely pattern of fluted indentations is found, arched and chiselled, the obverse of the water’s surface, with the subtle shift of emphasis and superimposed design that occurs between a painting and the landscape it represents. In short, there is no end to the lovely things that frost and the running of water can create between them.

  When the ice-paws crisped round the stones in the burns, and the ice-carrots that hang from the ledges, are loosened, and the freed ice floats down the river, it looks like masses of floating water lilies, or bunching cauliflower heads. Sunset plays through this greenish-white mass in iridescent gleams. At one point (I have heard of it nowhere else) near the exit of a loch, the peculiar motion of the current among ice-floes has woven the thousands of floating pine-needles into compacted balls, so intricately intertwined that their symmetrical shape is permanently retained. 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.

  Snow too can be played with by frost and wind. Loose snow blown in the sun looks like the ripples running through corn. Small snow on a furious gale freezes on the sheltered side of stones on a hilltop in long crystals; I have seen these converge slightly as the wind blows round both sides of the stones. Another fixation of the wind. Or the wind lifts the surface of loose snow but before it has detached it from the rest of the snow, frost has petrified the delicate shavings in flounces of transparent muslin. ‘Prince of Wales Feathers’, one of my friends has called a similar materialisation of wind and frost. Snow can blow past in a cloud, visible as it approaches, but formed of minute ice particles, so fine that the eye cannot distinguish them individually as they pass. Set the hand against them and it is covered by infinitesimal droplets of water whose impact has hardly been felt, though if the face is turned towards them, the spicules sting the eyeball. Such snow lies in a ghostly thin powdering on the hillside, like the ‘glaister o’ sifted snaw’ that fell on the head of the old Scots minister in his ill-roofed kirk.

  The coming of snow is often from a sky of glittering blue, with serried battalions of solid white cumuli low on the horizon. One of them bellies out from the ranks, and from its edge thin shreds of snow, so fine one is hardly aware of their presence, eddy lightly in the blue sky. And in a few minutes the air is thick with flakes. Once the snow has fallen, and the gullies are choked and ice is in the burns, green is the most characteristic colour in sky and water. Burns and river alike have a green glint when seen between snowy banks, and the smoke from a woodman’s fire looks greenish against the snow. The shadows on snow are of course blue, but where snow is blown into ripples, the shadowed undercut portion can look quite green. A snowy sky is often pure green, not only at sunrise or sunset, but all day; and a snow-green sky looks greener in reflection, either in water or from windows, than it seems in reality. Against such a sky, a snow-covered hill may look purplish, as though washed in blaeberry. On the other hand, before a fresh snowfall, whole lengths of snowy hill may appear a golden green. One small hill stands out from this greenness: it is veiled by a wide-spaced fringe of fir trees, and behind them the whole snowy surface of the hill is burning with a vivid electric blue.

  The appearance of the whole group, seen from without, wh
ile snow is taking possession, changes with every air. A thin covering of snow, through which the rock structure breaks, can look more insubstantial than the most diaphanous blue—a phantom created from reality. When the snow is melting, and the plateau is still white but the lower slopes are streaked and patched, against a grey-white sky only the dark portions show; the plateau isn’t there, the ridges that run up to the corries stand out like pinnacles and aiguilles. Later, at evening, the sky has turned a deep slate blue, identical with the blue that now washes the bare lower stretches of the mountains, and the long high level summit of snow, with its downward-reaching tentacles, hangs unsupported.

  When the mountains are at last completely covered in with snow (and it doesn’t happen every winter, so unpredictable is this Cairngorm weather—the skiers may wait far into the spring in vain for the right depth and surface of snow), then on a sunny day the scintillation is bright but does not wound. The winter light has not the strength to harm. I have never myself found it distressing to the eyes, though sometimes I have walked all day through millions of sparkling sun spangles on the frosty snow. The only time I have suffered from snow-blindness was at the very end of April, by which time, five or six weeks after the equinox, this northern light has become strong. I have heard of a strange delusion that the sun does not shine up here. It does; and because of the clarity of the air its light has power: it has more power, I suppose, in light than in heat. On that late April day, after some halcyon weather, a sudden snow storm blew up. It snowed all night—thick heavy snow that lay even under the next day’s sunshine. We were going to the Dubh Loch of Ben a’ Bhuird, with no intention of a summit, and I had taken no precautions against exposure; I had expected neither frosty wind nor hot sun to play havoc with my skin, nor had I had till then any experience of strong light upon snow. After a while I found the glare intolerable; I saw scarlet patches on the snow; I felt sick and weak. My companion refused to leave me sitting in the snow and I refused to defeat the object of his walk, which was to photograph the loch in its still wintry condition; so I struggled on, with his dark handkerchief veiling my eyes—a miserable blinkered imprisonment—and in time we were shadowed by the dark sides of the corrie. I was badly burned that day too; for some days my face was as purple as a boozer’s; all of which discomfort I might have avoided had I remembered that snow can blow out of a warm sky.

  It is not, however, such freak storms that are of moment, but the January blizzards, thick, close and wild—the blin’ drift that shuts a man into deadly isolation. To go into such conditions on the mountain is folly; the gamekeeper’s dictum is: if you can’t see your own footsteps behind you in the snow, don’t go on. But a blizzard may blow up so rapidly that one is caught. The great storms, when the snow beats down thick and solid for days on end, piling into the bowls of the corries, pressing itself down by its own weight, may be seen gathering over the mountains before they spread and cover the rest of the earth. I watched the preparation of the storm that was called, when it broke upon the country, the worst for over fifty years. I watched, from the shoulder of Morrone, the Cairngorm mass eddy and sink and rise (as it seemed) like a tossed wreck on a yellow sea. Sky and the wrack of precipice and overhang were confounded together. Now a spar, now a mast, just recognisable as buttress or cornice, tossed for a moment in the boiling sea of cloud. Then the sea closed on it, to open again with another glimpse of mounting spars—a shape drove its way for a moment through the smother, and was drawn under by the vicious swirl. Ashen and yellow, the sky kicked convulsively.

  All this while the earth around me was bare. Throughout December the ground had been continuously white, but in the first week of the year there came a day like April, the snow sunned itself away and the land basked mildly in the soft airs. But now the commotion among the mountains lashed out in whips of wind that reached me where I stood watching. Soon I could hardly stand erect against their force. And on the wind sailed minute thistledowns of snow, mere gossamers. Their fragility, insubstantial almost as air, presaged a weight and solidity of snow that was to lie on the land for many weeks.

  In the corries the tight-packed snow stands for many months. Indeed, until a succession of unusually hot summers from 1932 to 1934, even in July there were solid walls of snow, many feet thick and as high as the corrie precipices, leaning outwards from the rock and following its contours. There was snow worth seeing in those old summers. I used to believe it was eternal snow, and touched it with a feeling of awe. But by August 1934, there was no snow left at all in the Cairngorms except a small patch in the innermost recess of the Garbh Choire of Braeriach. Antiquity has gone from our snow.

  It was in the storm whose beginnings I have described, during a blizzard, that a plane containing five Czech airmen crashed into Ben a’ Bhuird. That its impact was made in deep snow was clear from the condition of the engines, which were only a little damaged.

  Blizzard is the most deadly condition of these hills. It is wind that is to be feared, even more than snow itself. Of the lives that have been lost in the Cairngorms while I have been frequenting them (there have been about a dozen, excepting those who have perished in plane crashes) four were lost in blizzard. Three fell from the rock—one of these a girl. One was betrayed by the ice-hard condition of a patch of snow in May, and slipped. All these were young. Two older men have gone out, and disappeared. The body of one of these was discovered two years later.

  Of the four who were caught in blizzard, two died on 2 January 1928, and two on the same date in 1933. The former two spent their last night in the then disused cottage where I have since passed some of the happiest times of my life. Old Sandy Mackenzie the stalker, still alive then, in the other small house on the croft, warned the boys against the blizzard. As I sit with Mrs Mackenzie, now, by the open fireplace, with a gale howling in the chimney and rattling the iron roof (‘this tin-can of a place’, she calls it), and watch her wrinkled hands build the fir-roots for a blaze, she tells me of the wind that was in it. I listen to the smashing of this later gale, which has blown all night. ‘If you had been getting up and going away the house would have been following you,’ she says, knowing my habit of sleeping by the door and prowling at all sorts of hours. And remembering how I crept down into my bag last night, I picture those two boys lying on the floor in the empty house, with the roof rattling and the icy wind finding every chink. Not that they had cared. They asked for nothing but a roof. ‘And salt—they asked for salt.’ Strange symbolic need of a couple of boys who were to find no hospitality again on earth. Her old bleared eyes look into the distance. She says, ‘the snow would be freezing before it would be on your cheek.’ John, the son, found the second body in March, in a snow drift that he and his West Highland terrier had passed many times. ‘But that morning,’ he told me, ‘she was scraping.’ ‘You will not be finding a thing but in the place where it will be’, says the old woman. She had fetched the bellows and blown the logs into a flame. ‘Sandy used to say, The fire is the finest flower of them all, when he would be coming in from the hill.’ She makes the tea. But she has brought the storm in to our fireside, and it stays there through the night.

  The other two boys went over Cairn Gorm in the kind of miraculous midwinter weather that sometimes occurs, and slept the night at the Shelter Stone beside Loch Avon. They were local boys. In the July of that year, on a very fine Sunday when we had gone out at dawn and had an empty hill all morning to ourselves, we saw with amazement a stream of people come up the hill the easy way from Glenmore and pass over and down to the Shelter Stone. We counted a hundred persons on the hill. They had come to see the place where the two boys slept and to read their high-spirited and happy report in the book that lies in its waterproof cover beneath the huge balanced boulder that has sheltered so many sleepers. That they would not reach home when they set out that morning after writing it, they could not dream. One of them was an experienced hill walker. But they reckoned without the wind. The schoolmistress of the tiny school at Dorback, which lies un
der Cairn Gorm on the Abernethy side, told me, of that wind, that her crippled sister, crossing the open space of the playground, was blown from her feet. And five miles from Glenmore and safety, crawling down Coire Cas on hands and knees, the boys could fight the wind no further. It was days later till they found them; and one of the men who was at the finding described to me their abraded knees and knuckles. The elder of the two was still crawling, on hands and knees, when they found him fast in the drift. So quick bright things come to confusion. They committed, I suppose, an error of judgment, but I cannot judge them. For it is the risk we must all take when we accept individual responsibility for ourselves on the mountain, and until we have done that, we do not begin to know it.

  SIX

  Air and Light

  In the rarefied air of the plateau, and indeed anywhere in the mountain, for the air is clear everywhere, shadows are sharp and intense. Watch the shadow of a plane glide along the plateau like a solid thing, and then slither deformed over the edge. Or pluck a feathery grass, brownish-pink and inconspicuous; hold a sheet of white paper behind it and see how the shadow stands out like an etching, distinct and black, a miracle of exact detail. Even the delicate fringe inside the small cup of the field gentian throws its shadow on the petals and enhances their beauty.

  The air is part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and its soil. It has its own air; and it is to the quality of its air that is due the endless diversity of its colourings. Brown for the most part in themselves, as soon as we see them clothed in air the hills become blue. Every shade of blue, from opalescent milky-white to indigo, is there. They are most opulently blue when rain is in the air. Then the gullies are violet. Gentian and delphinium hues, with fire in them, lurk in the folds.

  These sultry blues have more emotional effect than a dry air can produce. One is not moved by china blue. But the violet range of colours can trouble the mind like music. Moisture in the air is also the cause of those shifts in the apparent size, remoteness, and height in the sky of familiar hills. This is part of the horror of walking in mist on the plateau, for suddenly through a gap one sees solid ground that seems three steps away, but lies in sober fact beyond a 2000 foot chasm. I stood once on a hill staring at an opposite hill that had thrust its face into mine. I stared until, dropping my eyes, I saw with astonishment between me and it a loch that I knew perfectly well was there. But it couldn’t be. There wasn’t room. I looked up again at that out-thrust brow—it was so near I could have touched it. And when I looked down, the loch was still there. And once in the Monadhliaths, on a soft spring day when the distances were hazed, valley, hills and sky all being a faintly luminous grey-blue, with no detail, I was suddenly aware of a pattern of definite white lines high above me in the sky. The pattern defined itself more clearly; it was familiar; I realised it was the pattern of the plateau edge and corries of the Cairngorms, where the unmelted snow still lay. There it hung, a snow skeleton, attached to nothing, much higher than I should have expected it to be. Perhaps the lack of detail in the intervening valley had something to do with this effect.