Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  I should also like to thank: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst for his double-agency as my doctoral supervisor – both looking over my work and overlooking its absence; the Department of Physics, Heriot-Watt University; Mark Bolland for sending me unbidden his thesis, ‘Nietzsche and Mountains’ (University of Durham, 1996); and Ralph O’Connor for letting me see his forthcoming book on literary spectacle and nineteenth-century geology.

  Santanu Das, Olie Hayes, Henry Hitchings, Julia Lovell, John and Rosamund Macfarlane, Ralph O’Connor, and Edward and Alison Peck all read the book in its draft stages. The perspicuity and respective expertises they brought to bear on it were invaluable.

  I gratefully acknowledge Christina Hardyment and the other executors of the Arthur Ransome estate for permission to use a line from Swallows and Amazons as the epigraph to Chapter 6; John Macfarlane for permission to reproduce the illustrations; Rosamund Macfarlane for permission to reproduce the photographs on the endpapers; the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the Mallory family for permission to read and reproduce sections from George Mallory’s letters; Sandra Noel for permission to reproduce the illustration; the Royal Geographical Society for permission to reproduce the illustrations; Audrey Salkeld for permission to reproduce the illustration; and the Spurrier family for permission to reproduce Steven Spurrier’s map. The illustrations are reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. All other illustrations are copyright the author. I would like especially to thank: my agent Jessica Woollard, who plucked Mountains of the Mind from a prodigious slush pile, and told me to put an ‘I’ into it, and who has been a marvellous critic and enthusiast ever since; my editors, Sara Holloway at Granta and Dan Frank at Pantheon, for their brilliance at seeing what was wrong with the book and how to right it, and what was right with the book and how to keep it; my mother, Rosamund Macfarlane, for allowing me to use her magnificent photographs, and also for her ceaseless encouragement, enthusiasm and technical expertise with the illustrations; Julia for everything.

  Above all I should like to thank my grandparents Edward and Alison Peck, for their enthusiasm, love and knowledge. Mountains of the Mind is dedicated to them.

  Selected List of Sources

  The literature on mountains is appropriately vast. The following is a selection of the books and articles which have contributed to Mountains of the Mind. Sources are arranged in alphabetical order per chapter. Each source is noted only once, in the first chapter in which it appeared. At the end is a list of the books which were of general use.

  Chapter 1 Possession

  Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar,1990)

  John Ball, ed., Peaks, Passes and Glaciers: a Series of Excursions by Members of the Alpine Club (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1859)

  James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (London: C. Dilly, 1785)

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (London: Penguin, 1922)

  Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion, 1999)

  G. R. De Beer, Early Travellers in the Alps (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930)

  G. R. De Beer, Alps and Men (London: Edward Arnold, 1932)

  Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1962, first published 1724–7)

  Claire Eliane Engel, A History of Mountaineering in the Alps (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1950)

  R. Fitzsimons, The Baron of Piccadilly: the Travels and Entertainments of Albert Smith 1816–1860 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967)

  Maurice Herzog, Annapurna, trans. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952)

  John Hunt, The Ascent of Everest (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953)

  U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1977)

  Arnold Lunn, The Matterhorn Centenary (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1965)

  John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983)

  Alfred Mummery, My Climbs in the Alps and the Caucasus (London: Fisher Unwin, 1898)

  John Murray, A Glance at Some of the Beauties and Sublimities of Switzerland: with Excursive Remarks on the Various Objects of Interest, Presented during a Tour through Its Picturesque Scenery (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1829)

  E. F. Norton et al., The Fight for Everest: 1924 (London: Edwin Arnold, 1925)

  John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols. (Volume IV, Of Mountain Beauty) (London: George Allen & Sons, 1910; first published 1843, 1846, 1856, 1860)

  Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Vo yages dans les Alpes, précédés d’un essai sur l’Histoire Naturelle des environs de Genève (Neuchâtel: Samuel Fauche, 1779–96)

  Ernest Shackleton, South (London: Heinemann, 1970, first published 1920)

  Albert Smith, The Story of Mont Blanc (London: Bogue, 1853)

  Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1871)

  Edward Whymper, Scrambles amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69 (London: John Murray, 1871)

  Frank Worsley, Endurance: an Epic of Polar Adventure (London: Philip Allan & Co., 1931)

  Francis Younghusband, The Epic of Mount Everest (London: Edward Arnold, 1926)

  Chapter 2 The Great Stone Book

  Robert Bakewell, An Introduction to Geology, illustrative of the general structure of the earth; comprising the elements of the science, and an outline of the geology and mineral geography of England (London: J. Harding, 1813)

  Georges Louis-Leclerc Buffon, Natural History: Containing a Theory of the Earth, trans. J. S. Barr, 10 vols. (London: J. S. Barr, 1797, first published 1749–88)

  Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, ed. Basil Willey (London: Centaur Press, 1965, first published in Latin in 1681, and in English in 1684)

  Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, trans. and ed. Robert Jameson, 5th edn (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1827, first published 1812)

  Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London: Dent; New York; Dutton, 1967, first published 1839)

  Isabella Duncan, Pre-Adamite Man; or, the Story of Our Old Planet & Its Inhabitants, Told by Scripture & Science (London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1860)

  Richard Fortey, The Hidden Landscape (London: Pimlico, 1994)

  Douglas Freshfield, The Life of Horace Bénédict de Saussure (London: Edward Arnold, 1920)

  Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959)

  James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (Weinheim: H. R. Engelman, 1959, first published 1785–99)

  Charles Lyell, The Principles of Geology: an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830–33)

  John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981)

  Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks or Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies Natural and Revealed (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1878, first published 1857)

  John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (London: Cadell and Davies, 1802)

  Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992)

  Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994)

  Antonio Snider-Pelligrini, Creation and Its Mysteries Revealed (Paris: 1858)

  Alfred Wegener, The Origins of Continents and Oceans (London: 1966, first published 1915)

  Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World (London: Viking, 2001)

  William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, 4th edn (London: Sam Tooke a
nd Benjamin Motte, 1725)

  John Woodward, The Natural History of the Earth, trans. Benjamin Holloway (London: Thomas Edlin, 1726)

  Chapter 3 The Pursuit of Fear

  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990, first published 1757)

  George Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973–81)

  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, first published 1859)

  Elaine Freedgood, Victorians Writing about Risk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

  Yi Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979)

  Frances Ridley Havergal, Poetical Works, 2 vols. (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1884)

  Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, first published 1775)

  John Ruskin, The Letters of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 2 vols. (London: G. Allen, 1909)

  Robert Service, Collected Poems of Robert Service (London: Benn, 1978)

  Samuel Smiles, Self-help (London: John Murray, 1958, first published 1859)

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (London: 1956–71)

  John Tyndall, Mountaineering in 1861 (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1862)

  Chapter 4 Glaciers and Ice: the Streams of Time

  Louis Agassiz, Études sur les glaciers (Neuchâtel: Solothurn, 1840)

  Henry Alford, ‘Inscription for a Block of Granite on the Surface of the Mer de Glace’, in The Poetical Works of Henry Alford, 4th edn (London: Strahan, 1865)

  Karl Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers to Switzerland and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy and the Tyrol, 4th edn (London: John Murray, 1869)

  Gillian Beer, Open Fields (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)

  Marc-Theodore Bourrit, A Relation of a Journey to the Glaciers in the Duchy of Savoy, trans. Charles and Frederick Davy (Norwich: Richard Beatniffe, 1779)

  Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Trübner, 1878)

  Frank Cunningham, James David Forbes, Pioneer Scottish Glaciologist (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990)

  James L. Dyson, The World of Ice (London: The Cresset Press, 1963)

  James David Forbes, Travels through the Alps of Savoy (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1843)

  Edward Peck, ‘The Search for Khan Tengri’, Alpine Journal, vol. 101, no. 345 (1996), 131–9 Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries, 2 vols. (London: J. & R. Knapton, 1743–5)

  Robert Ker Porter, Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylon, etc., 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1821–2)

  John Ruskin, The Collected Works, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: G. Allen, 1903–12)

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley: with Shelley’s Letters to Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith (London: H. Frowde, 1909)

  John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps (London: John Murray, 1860)

  Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901, first published 1880)

  William Windham, Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy (London: 1744)

  Chapter 5 Altitude: the Summit and the View

  Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1978)

  John Auldjo, Narrative of an Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc (London: Longmans, 1828)

  Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publication, 1988, first published 1943)

  Mick Conefrey and Tim Jordan, Mountain Men (London: Boxtree, 2001)

  Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Paris, 1988, London: Penguin, 1990)

  John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955)

  Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978)

  John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911)

  Jim Ring, How the English Made the Alps (London: John Murray, 2000)

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Poems of Shelley, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1989)

  Joe Simpson, The Beckoning Silence (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002)

  Andrew Wilson, The Abode of Snow, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1876)

  Geoffrey Winthrop Young, The Influence of Mountains upon the Development of Human Intelligence (London: Jackson, Son & Company, 1957)

  Chapter 6 Walking off the Map

  J. R. L. Anderson, The Ulysses Factor (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970)

  Colonel S. G. Burrard and H. H. Hayden, A Sketch of the Geography and Geology of the Himalaya Mountains and Tibet (Calcutta: Government of India, Geological Survey of India, 1907–8)

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1973, first published 1902 as a novella, 1899 as a serial)

  Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Edinburgh: Blackwoods, 1900)

  George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (London: Penguin, 1985, first published 1871–2)

  Douglas Freshfield, The Exploration of the Caucasus, 2 vols. (London: Edward Arnold, 1896)

  R. L. G. Irving, The Mountain Way (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1938)

  Richard Jefferies, Bevis, the Story of a Boy (London: Duckworth & Co., 1904)

  Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (London: Pan, 1999)

  Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986)

  Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1973)

  Colonel R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, 4 vols. (Dehra Dun: Survey of India, 1958)

  J. B. Priestley, Apes and Angels (London: Methuen & Co., 1928)

  Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930)

  Eric Shipton, Blank on the Map (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936)

  Susan Solnit, Wanderlust: a History of Walking (London: Penguin, 2000)

  Wilfred Thesiger, The Life of My Choice (London: Collins, 1987)

  Chapter 7 A New Heaven and a New Earth

  Abbé Pluche, Spectacle de la Nature … Being Discourses on Such PARTICULARS of Natural History as Were Thought Most Proper to Excite the Curiosity and Form the Minds of Youth, trans. Mr Humphreys, 3rd edn (London: L. Davis, 1736)

  Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. J. Holloway (London: Penguin Classics, 1985, first published 1855–7)

  Conrad Gesner, On the Admiration of Mountains, trans. W. Dock (San Francisco: The Grabhorn Press, 1937)

  C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a story for children (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950)

  Claude Reichler and Roland Ruffieux, Le Voyage en Suisse (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1998)

  Jacob Scheuchzer, Itinera per Helvetiae Alpinas Regiones (London: Vander, 1723)

  Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984)

  John Tyndall, Hours of Exercise in the Alps (London: Longmans, 1871)

  Chapter 8 Everest

  Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973)

  Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (The Athlone Press: London, 1989)

  Robert Bridges, ed., The Spirit of Man (London: Longmans & Co., 1916)

  C. G. Bruce, Twenty Years in the Himalaya (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1910)

  C. G. Bruce, The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922 (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1923)

  John Buchan, The Last Secrets (London: Thomas Nelson, 1923)

  Patrick French, Younghusband (London: HarperCollins, 1994)

 
; Peter and Leni Gillman, The Wildest Dream: Mallory, His Life and Conflicting Passions (London: Headline, 2000). I publicly misjudged this fine biography when it appeared, a misjudgement for which I have apologized, but apologize again.

  Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (London: Vintage, 1995)

  C. K. Howard-Bury and George Mallory, Mount Everest: the Reconnaissance, 1921 (London: Edward Arnold & Co, 1922)

  S. C. Joshi, ed., Nepal Himalaya; Geo-ecological Perspectives (Naini Tal: Himalayan Research Group, 1986)

  John Keay, When Men and Mountains Meet: the Explorers of the Western Himalaya (London: John Murray, 1977)

  Kenneth Mason, Abode of Snow (London: Diadem Books, 1987)

  John Noel, Through Tibet to Everest (London: Edward Arnold, 1927)

  David Pye, George Leigh Mallory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927)

  Cecil Godfrey Rawling, The Great Plateau, Being an Account of Exploration in Central Tibet, 1903, and of the Gartok Expedition 1904–1905 (London: Edward Arnold, 1905)

  David Robertson, George Mallory (London: Faber, 1969)

  Royal Geographical Society and Mount Everest Foundation, The Mountains of Central Asia (London: Macmillan, 1987)

  Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel, The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine (London: Pimlico, 1999)

  J. R. Smith, Everest: the Man and the Mountain (London: Whittles, 1999)

  Walt Unsworth, Everest, 3rd edn (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 2000)

  C. J. Wessels, Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia 1603–1721 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1924)

  Geoffrey Winthrop Young, On High Hills (London: Methuen, 1933)

  Francis Younghusband, Everest: the Challenge (London: Nelson, 1936)

  Chapter 9 The Snow Hare

  James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926, first published 1914)