Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  Eventually, and terribly, Mallory’s yearning for mountains would prove stronger than his love for his wife and family. Three centuries earlier he would have been cast into Bedlam for his obsession with Everest. In 1924 his death on the mountain cast a nation into mourning, and Mallory into myth.

  The world’s tallest mountain was once a sea-floor. One hundred and eighty million years ago, the outline of the earth’s landmasses looked very different. Imagine, to begin with, the triangle of what is now India, separated from the main body of Asia by an ocean which no longer exists: the Tethys Sea. This India was moving northwards on its plate towards Asia at high speed (six inches a year or so), propelled by the same geological action – the convection currents of liquid rock pulsing away in the mantle – which had cut it so neatly out of the supercontinent of Pangaea 20 million years previously.

  Where the leading edge of the Indian Plate met the immovable Tibetan Plate, a subduction zone formed. The landmass of India was still at this point separated from Eurasia and Tibet by the Tethys Sea. Thick layers of marine sediment accumulated on the floor of the Tethys Sea, formed from sand, coral debris and the innumerable corpses of aquatic creatures. Much of this sediment was laid down in the deep trench of the subduction zone.

  Over the course of millions of years, the northern edge of the Indian landmass moved towards the southern edge of the Tibetan landmass. As the two edges closed together, the mass of sediment which had been laid down was squeezed together. Heat and pressure combined to petrify it. Some of this rock was forced downwards between the plates, and pushed into the mantle of the earth where it was melted to magma. But most of it – billions and billions of tons of it – was forced upwards.

  In this way the Himalaya were created. India hurtled into Tibet, and the marine sedimentary material packed between the landmasses was coerced upwards to form the four curvilinear ridges of the Himalaya, the high point of which was Mount Everest. The shapes of these original mountains were far more smoothed and curved than the complex forms which we now see: their latter-day complexity has been brought about by the subsequent erosive power of earthquakes, monsoons and glaciers.

  So what is now the highest point on the earth’s surface was composed in one of the earth’s deepest places. In the yellow rock-band which stripes Everest just below its summit, there are the fossilized bodies of creatures which lived in the Tethys Sea hundreds of millions of years ago. The rock up which so many people aspire to climb has itself climbed tens of thousands of metres vertically upwards, from the darkness of the Tethys trench to the sunlight of the Himalayan skies.

  It was the collision of India with Tibet which created the Himalaya geologically. And it was the collision in the nineteenth century of the northward-expanding British Empire with the eastward-expanding Russian Empire which created the Himalaya in the Western imagination.

  Before that point, almost nothing had been known in the West about the uplands of the trans-Himalayan region. Until the 1600s, indeed, most Europeans were unaware that the Himalaya existed. Herodotus described India but made no mention of mountains to its north. Ptolemy compressed the Himalaya and the Karakorum into a single range, and elided the Central Asian plateau entirely. In the mid-sixteenth century, cartographers had succeeded in fitting together the perimeters of the countries, but the interiors of continents other than Europe remained mysterious.

  At the beginning of the 1800s, however, the incipient threat of Russian expansion made it imperative for the British to gain information about the trans-Himalayan region. Among the seventy-nine high Himalayan peaks fixed by the GTS in the 1840s and 1850s was a Peak H, soon renamed Peak X V. It was sighted by a surveyor called John Nicholson, in observations carried out from viewing-stations on the plains of Bihar, 176 miles away from the mountain itself. The information culled by the GTS in the field was passed for computation and double-checking to the regional survey headquarters. It took seven years to verify the calculations for Peak XV, and to factor in the variables of temperature, pressure, refraction, and the gravitational pull of the Himalayan chain itself.* Finally, in 1856, the surveyor general Andrew Waugh confirmed the altitude of Peak XV. It was, he felt confident to declare, at 29,002 feet ‘higher than any [peak] hitherto measured in India, and most probably the highest in the world’. So the mountain which we now call Everest, but had for centuries been known to the indigenes of the high Himalaya, was ‘discovered’ by the West.

  Discovered, but not approached, because Peak XV stood on the frontier between the forbidden kingdoms of Nepal and Tibet. It was visible to the long-sighted telescopes of the Grand Trigonometrical Survey, but for reasons both political and geographical it was practically unapproachable on foot. The British had long agreed to respect the sovereignty of the kingdom of Nepal, and that had put the southern reaches of the mountain out of bounds to surveyors or explorers. And Tibet was, after the Poles, the great unknown of the later nineteenth century. The novelist H. Rider Haggard spoke for many when he described it yearningly as ‘the untrodden land’. So few Westerners had penetrated into Tibet that it remained largely a tabula rasa, undefiled by fact or reportage – a blank sheet stretched tight over the highest plateau on earth, upon which the Western imagination could doodle its fantasies of the Orient.

  ‘Thebet Mountains’, in William Orme’s Twenty-Four Views in Hindostan (1805). The implausibly jagged and spirey mountains resemble a barrier, both to human passage and to the imagination.

  Chief among these fantasies was that of Tibet’s spiritual purity. To many in the West the country seemed like an icy Eden: an elevated sanctum in the heart of Asia. There the Tibetans led undisturbed lives, in harmony with the rhythms of the dramatic landscape around them, and morally purified by the beauty and the thin air. There what Ruskin called ‘the storm cloud of the nineteenth century’ – the three-fold miasma of industry, atheism and rationalism – had not gathered. A British traveller to Tibet in 1903 likened one of its mountains to ‘a vast cathedral’, and when at about the same time a French explorer finally reached the Tibetan uplands he described feeling as though he had ascended ‘through layers of cloud, from hell to heaven, leaving behind and below me this scientifically technical world which has done so much to increase man’s misery’. What Switzerland had been to the eighteenth century, Tibet was to the nineteenth: an upland Arcadia, enchantingly antipodean to the grimy cityscapes of Europe, Britain and America.

  Clamped between Tibet and the forbidden kingdom of Nepal was Everest: the Third Pole, as Edward Whymper dubbed it in 1894. For seventy years – between the measuring of Everest, and the arrival of the reconnaissance expedition at its foot in 1921 – no Westerner got within forty miles of the mountain. There was a vacuum of information about Everest, and into this vacuum rushed hopes, fears and speculations. Undoubtedly, Everest’s inaccessibility helped to enhance its imaginative allure. In 1899 Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, gazed up at the white ramparts of the Himalaya from the windows of his cool and shadowed palace at Simla. Everest enchanted him. ‘As I sat daily in my room,’ he wrote, ‘and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky, that huge palisade shutting off India from the rest of the world, I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summit.’

  Five years after Curzon wrote those words, the mystery of Tibet was exploded for ever when Francis Younghusband led a British force into Tibet from India. The casus belli was allegedly territorial incursion – Tibetan ‘troops’ were reported to have crossed the frontier and carried off Nepali yaks – but in fact Curzon was worried about Russian influence in Tibet, and wanted to solidify British influence in the country. Younghusband, ever keen for action, recommended in the language of the day that ‘the power of the monks should be so far broken as to prevent them any longer selfishly obstructing the prosperity both of Tibet and of the neighbouring British districts’.

  The Tibetans did not let Younghusband and his army just walk in. The first stand-off came near the village of G
yantse. Two thousand Tibetans armed with matchlock guns, swords and spears faced a smaller British force carrying cannon and Maxim guns. The British fired, according to a Tibetan survivor, ‘for the length of time it would take six successive cups of hot tea to cool’. When the guns stopped chattering, twelve British had been wounded, and 628 Tibetans killed. By the time Younghusband reached Lhasa, a further 2,000 Tibetans had died, compared to forty British soldiers.

  The bloody fall of Lhasa meant that yet another unknown had been penetrated. John Buchan, commenting on the invasion of the city in his book The Last Secrets, wrote that ‘it was impossible for the least sentimental to avoid a certain regret for the drawing back of the curtain which had meant so much to the imagination of mankind … With the unveiling of Lhasa fell the last stronghold of the older romance.’

  The older romance may have fallen, but a new and perhaps more potent magic had been revealed within Tibet: that of Everest itself. And it had been revealed to a mountaineer, explorer, mystic, Romantic and patriot, a man perhaps more receptive than any other to the idea of surmounting that peerless mountain. From the barbed wire and sandbags of one of the British encampments, Francis Younghusband had seen Everest ‘poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world’, and he had been entranced. That distant vision of Everest would take seed in Younghusband’s imagination, and would flourish over time from a vision into an ambition.

  It had time to flourish, because the 1904 Tibetan invasion led indirectly to the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 – a concord in which both sides agreed to prohibit further expeditions into Tibet. With Nepal still out of bounds, the 1907 agreement effectively made Everest unreachable. But in 1913 John Noel, a young British army officer, made an illicit sortie into Tibet disguised as an ‘Indian Mohammedan’ and got to within forty miles of Everest. He reported it as ‘a glittering spire of rock fluted with snow’.*

  Noel’s account piqued the interest of many in Britain, not least the members of the Royal Geographical Society. Plans were made for an attempt on the mountain, but then the First World War intervened. Almost immediately after the Armistice, however, mechanisms were set in motion. And on 10 January 1921 the Royal Geographical Society – newly under the presidency of one Francis Younghusband – made public its plans to send an expedition to the mountain. In his book Everest: the Challenge, Younghusband recalled his determination ‘to make this Everest venture the main feature of my three years’ Presidency’. He had settled upon his Grail. All he needed was a knight-errant to lead his quest.

  ‘Galahad’ was what Geoffrey Winthrop Young used to call George Mallory. On 9 February 1921 Younghusband took Mallory out to lunch and asked him if he would join the first reconnaissance expedition to Everest, due to depart that April. Although he had already been separated from his wife and three children for long periods, and although he had a job and a house to keep up, Mallory accepted quietly and quickly – ‘without visible emotion’, remembered Younghusband – over the snowy linen of the lunch table.

  It was a career move of sorts. Had Mallory, then thirty-five years old, summitted Everest and returned successfully, the cachet of the achievement would certainly have made him financially secure for his lifetime. But there were other career paths open to him, less dangerous ones. He had a steady job as a schoolmaster at Charterhouse, he wanted to pursue his writing ambitions – journalism, fiction – and his left-wing interest in international politics. Above all, Mallory wanted to be with Ruth and his three young children, Clare (aged six), Beridge (aged four) and John (aged six months). After marrying in 1914, Mallory had been separated from Ruth for sixteen months during the second half of the war, fighting as an artillery officer on the Western Front. The separation was difficult for them both and when the Armistice came they both felt that their married life could now properly begin. Shortly before he returned to England from France, Mallory wrote ecstatically to Ruth of the ‘wonderful life we will have together’, and urged them both to realize ‘what a lovely thing we must make of such a gift’.

  It was not to be. Some force, some set of forces, deeply embedded in Mallory, meant that when he was given the chance to go to Everest, he accepted. And when twice he returned safely from the mountain, he twice chose to return again. To read Mallory’s letters and journals from the three Everest expeditions, as I have done, is to eavesdrop on a burgeoning love affair – a love affair with a mountain. It was a deeply selfish love affair, which Mallory could and should have broken off, but which instead destroyed the lives of his wife and his children – as well as his own. We do not have Ruth’s letters to Mallory during the Everest expeditions. Although she wrote regularly to him, only one of her letters has survived. So we cannot properly know how she felt about her husband’s actions. Her voice in this three-way relationship – this love triangle – is practically inaudible. What we do know is that Mallory fell in love with Everest, and it eventually proved the death of him. What is hard to understand, and what this book has tried in part to explain, is how he could fall in love with a lump of rock and ice, when his own flesh and blood wife loved him so very much.

  George and Ruth Mallory in 1914. © Audrey Salkeld.

  Concluding his public account of the first expedition, the 1921 reconnaissance trip, Mallory wrote that ‘The highest of mountains is capable of severity, a severity so awful and so fatal that the wiser sort of men do well to think and tremble even on the threshold of their high endeavour.’ It reads now like a warning to himself, which he failed to heed.

  8 April 1921 – Mallory boards the SS Sardinia alone at Tilbury. The other members of the expedition have gone ahead, and he is to meet them at Darjeeling. The boat is small, his fellow passengers numbingly dull, and his cabin is claustrophobic, and noisy as a foundry. As soon as they have steamed far enough south for the air temperature to permit it, Mallory spends most mornings sitting in the bows, near where the ship’s anchors are lashed by their chains. Only the dark figure of the watchman on the upper bow-lookout, seated behind a canvas windscreen, is visible. Otherwise the bows are devoid of humanity, and this suits Mallory well, because he cannot abide humanity as it is to be found on board the Sardinia. He likes, too, the feel of the wind in his face, and to watch the wide sea and the passing land.

  They take the ordinary route, steaming straight down to Cape St Vincent, and then turning east from there through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the warmer waters of the Mediterranean. Even at sea, Mallory’s mind is with the mountains. Waking early one morning he sees the Rock of Gibraltar slipping by his porthole and rushes up on to deck. They glide past it, a grey mass in the blue light, and Mallory instinctively looks for the best climbing line up its sheerness. On 13 April, five days after leaving England, he looks through his field-glasses deep into Spain. He can see a range of clean and radiant mountains snow-covered to the waist: the Sierra Nevada. ‘Blessings on them!’ he writes to his diary. He gazes southwards, too, into Africa: its houses, churches and fortifications, its small cliffs and creeks, and the white sprawl of Algiers. It all passes him by smoothly to port and starboard, like a gorgeously slow news-reel, as the ship slides onwards over the guarded water of the Mediterranean, towards Port Said and the Suez Canal.

  Mallory’s mind often drifts homewards, to the family he has left behind, to the way the sunlight streams through the loggia at the front of his house, and the white lilacs which will be in bloom on the bank behind the cedar tree in the garden, spangling the lawn with their petals.

  The Canal is far less impressive than he imagines it, and its twin coasts are depressingly strewn with the debris of war – disembowelled trucks and stripped tanks, and rust bleeding into the sand around them. Where the sides of the Canal are low, Mallory imagines that it must seem to watchers from the desert as though their vessel is passing through solid sand, ploughing a path through the dunes like an ice-breaker; a ship of the desert.

  After the Canal, the Red Sea, and after the Red Sea the Indian Ocean. No coastlines to watch here, only
the curve of the horizon, and the odd distant ship steaming past beneath a feather of smoke. The skies of this ocean are vaster than anything Mallory has ever seen before, far greater in acreage even than the fenland skies he has come from. Here the clouds do not scud along like a fleet of airships, keeping their formation, but pile up into thunderheads, made from the tangled wreckage of nimbus and cirrus: more a geological than a meteorological creation. Mallory wonders what it would be like to climb the clouds, to force a route up through their bosses, knolls and slopes, up to the rounded top of the topmost cloud. Then he realizes that the topmost cloud he can see is thousands of feet lower than the top of Everest. It reminds him of the audacity of what he is trying to do.

  The sky elates him, but the sea puts him into an ominous mood. ‘It is curious,’ he writes, ‘how much I have a sense of the nearness of disaster and danger … the sea is as deeply evil as it is attractive.’ Briefly, on the bows of the ship, he yearns to shrug his coat off on to the deck and leap clear of the vessel and into the gun-metal water.

  Then Ceylon appears, a smear of red and yellow surmounted by a luminous green stripe – which resolves itself, as they steam nearer, into clumps of painted houses set against the jungle. There is a welcome stop here for a day or two, and then the final sultry leg of the journey begins. Mallory sweats as he does his exercises on the fore-deck, as he lies in his cabin, and as he writes in the smoking-room. The air is rank with water – it is an amphibious substance, half-gas half-liquid. Sitting in the bows, willing Calcutta to appear on the horizon, it feels to Mallory as though his body is being pushed forward through something gelatinous. The Malayan for water, Mallory remembers, is air, and here in the tropics that apparent mix-up seems to make perfect sense.