Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Back in England, Shipton and Tilman’s Everest companion Frank Smythe had waged a vociferous newspaper campaign against the Yeti, which according to Perrin annoyed Tilman by its sanctimoniousness. Now Tilman pretends to take the side of the believers.

  I have no explanation to offer, and, if I had, respect for ancient tradition would keep me silent. They were not the tracks of one of the many species of bears which seem to haunt the Himalaya, either Isabillinus, Pruinosis or “Bruinosus”. . . . A one-legged, carnivorous bird, weighing perhaps a ton, might make similar tracks, but it seems unnecessary to search for a new species when we have a perfectly satisfactory one at hand in the form of the Abominable Snowman. . . . [W]hen the dust had settled, the Abominable Snowman remained to continue his evasive, mysterious, terrifying existence, unruffled as the snows he treads, unmoved as the mountains amongst which he dwells, uncaught, unspecified, and not unhonoured.

  Tilman delighted in the role of debunker. Among his cardinal achievements during that August romp through the western reaches of the Karakoram was to settle a geographical controversy that was a quarter-century old. From a distant ridge in 1912, another pair of exploratory pioneers, Fanny Bullock Workman and William Hunter Workman, had reported that the Cornice Glacier, nestled between sharp ridges in one of the most obscure corners of the range, had no outlet. If this were true, it would be the only known case in the world of such an anomaly.

  A lifelong bachelor, Tilman was something of a misogynist, and Fanny Bullock Workman had built a reputation for overhyping her exploits in the Himalaya as well as lacing her written accounts with the kind of strident feminism that a skeptic such as Tilman could not abide. In “Legends,” however, Tilman slyly camouflages his motives by pretending that throughout the 1937 expedition, the team had argued about the Cornice Glacier, with Shipton and Spender pooh-poohing the Workmans’ claim while Auden and he defended it.

  On August 22, after solving several technical puzzles, Tilman’s small party reached the Cornice Glacier, then followed it downhill until they discovered the gushing stream that drained it toward the lowlands. Writes Tilman, “In a drab world it would be refreshing to report the discovery of a glacier flowing uphill or even of one that did not flow at all. It gives me no pleasure, therefore, to have to affirm that this glacier behaved as others do. . . . I can honestly say that to tramp down the Cornice glacier, hoping every moment to reach an impasse and finding none, was as sorry a business as any that has fallen to my lot.”

  Meanwhile, Shipton and Spender spent the rest of August pushing far into the northwest corner of the greater Karakoram. As they did so, they traveled the length of the Braldu Glacier, the last of all the great ice streams in the Karakoram to be explored. Pushing beyond the glacier into the lowlands, on September 3 the men stumbled into a startling encounter.

  Coming round the corner of a willow thicket, we saw a horseman riding away from our camp. The idea crossed my mind that the camp had been raided, but when the man saw us he dismounted, came over to us, and shook us cordially by the hand. He was the first human being outside our party whom we had seen for nearly three and a half months. It was at once evident that we had no common language. Angtharkay tried Tibetan and Nepali, which were as useless as my Hindustani and English.

  Despite his friendly greeting, the horseman had been freaked out by the meeting and tried to flee, but the Sherpa Lhakpa convinced him that the explorers “had no evil designs.”

  Below the snout of the Braldu Glacier lived the little-known natives of Shimshal. There followed several days of awkward but eager interchange, conducted in sign language and pantomime, enlivened by shared feasts in which each party was astonished by the other’s cuisine.

  With his canny instinct for mountain topography Shipton worked out the arduous route from Shimshal back to Askole, fording rivers and winding through gloomy canyons much of the way. There still remained the long trek all the way back to Srinagar. By now the men’s boots were falling apart and they were exhausted by their four months of toil, but Shipton treats the three-week march to Srinagar as a lark.

  Only when they reached that outpost of British colonial sway did the men learn what had gone on in the world during their absence. The news was dark: the Spanish Civil War showed no signs of terminating, the Sino-Japanese War “was a new horror,” and storm clouds gathering over Europe portended World War II. Writes Shipton, “The world seemed an even blacker and madder place than when we had left it.”

  The great Karakoram reconnaissance ended as a colossal success. No small band of explorers had ever covered more unknown and difficult terrain in a single season. Better yet, for all their close calls, the team had lost not a single porter.

  True to form, Shipton’s envoi—the last line of Blank on the Map—hews to his penchant for modesty and understatement: “Distance has no need to lend enchantment, although it seems to lessen the difficulties and soften the hardships; for the supreme value of the expedition centered in an experience of real freedom rounded off with the peace and content of an arduous job of work completed and enjoyed.”

  In his autobiography, That Untravelled World, published in 1969, Shipton only slightly amplifies his claim for what, in retrospect, must have seemed as charmed a campaign as he had ever waged in the mountains.

  Never before had I seen anything like the wild grandeur of those desert mountains, their stark simplicity and their boundless range. Every phase, every step of the way, whether in known or unknown country, had opened another door upon a new aspect and fuller understanding of that fantastic world; yet such was its scope that the more familiar it became, the more powerful was its impact upon the imagination. To have captured so much of it in a single season, and yet to feel we had won but a bare acquaintance, was at once tantalising and deeply satisfying.

  In the summer of 1966, I got a job in Anchorage, teaching college-level English courses to GIs on Elmendorf Air Force Base from 6:30 to 10:30 PM four nights a week. The pay was good, and I counted on the nest egg I saved to fund another climbing expedition in September, my fourth in Alaska. With new friends from the local mountaineering club, I took off on weekends to bag peaks in the Chugach Range just east of the city.

  One day the club got the electrifying news that Eric Shipton was coming through town. On his first trip to Alaska, Shipton was joining Adams Carter and Bob Bates—veterans two generations my senior whom I knew through the Harvard Mountaineering Club—to attempt a new route on 11,670-foot Mount Russell in the Alaska Range.

  We arranged to meet Shipton at the airport and throw a makeshift reception for him (beer and pretzels, as I recall). Shipton and Tilman were already heroes of mine, not so much through their writings as for their legendary championing of the fast-and-light alpine style that we tried to bring to our own expeditions.

  In That Untravelled World, Shipton recalls flying nonstop from Copenhagen to Anchorage, only to be whisked from the airport to a reception by us club members: “the programme included a talk by me. Already a little punch-drunk, I gave a performance of slapstick buffoonery, quite out of character, which brought down the house.” That summer Shipton was fifty-eight, while I was twenty-three. (Bates was fifty-five, Carter fifty-two. Carter had been with Tilman on the first ascent of Nanda Devi in 1936, Bates on two American K2 expeditions in 1938 and 1953.) We were all struck by Shipton’s aquiline good looks and his dignified bearing, and I remember noticing especially the tufts of white hair that sprouted from his ears. I don’t recall in detail the impromptu talk Shipton gave—I think we were all too awed simply by his presence. But it was obvious that the poor man was jet-lagged to the very edge of exhaustion.

  In our awkward way, we wished the three famous mountaineers the best of luck on Russell. I knew I’d see Carter and Bates again at Harvard, but I was sure that those few hours had amounted to the only encounter I would ever be granted with a man who had been on five Everest expeditions and had unlocked the mystery of the greater Karakoram.

  But Shipton arranged t
o meet with the club members the next morning, before his team took off for Talkeetna and the flight in to Russell. In the interim, somehow he had done his homework. Now he singled us out, congratulating Art Davidson for his first ascent of Mount Seattle, Dave Johnston for his traverse of Denali, me for the west face of Mount Huntington. We were thunderstruck.

  A two-week storm that destroyed the team’s tents thwarted our elders’ attempt on Russell. The men were lucky to escape with their lives. But Shipton continued to explore remote places all over the globe, and in 1973, at the age of sixty-five, made the first ascent of Monte Burney in Chilean Patagonia. He died in 1977.

  In the last line of the penultimate chapter of That Untravelled World, Shipton wrote, “My visit to Alaska left me with a vivid impression of its vast mountaineering potential, and of a dynamic group of young climbers revelling in their splendid heritage and eager to share it with a stranger.” Fifty years after our meeting, I cherish Shipton’s gallant gesture in acknowledging our youthful ascents. And for decades after 1966, whenever I set off on a wilderness journey of my own, I felt him looking over my shoulder, silently teaching me how exploration should be done.

  THREE

  PREHISTORIC 5.10

  The idea that wilderness is beautiful, and that exploits performed there—climbing mountains, running rivers, backpacking long distances—are rewarding, even inspirational, is so entrenched in our culture that casual students of history are shocked to learn that throughout most of the span of Western civilization quite the opposite view prevailed. The linkage of wildness with the sublime has actually held sway only during the last 250 years, since the end of the eighteenth century. Far more characteristic in Western history is the complaint of an early traveler who braved the forests to reach the castle of Fontainebleau, the swanky royal hunting lodge southeast of Paris, built in 1137. “We had to go four leagues with nothing to eat or drink,” the man averred, “and to console us we had nothing before our eyes but frightening and horrible mountains full of gross rocks, piled one on top of another.” Those gross rocks are the sandstone boulders on which France’s best rock climbers now cavort.

  When I taught at Hampshire College in the 1970s, I liked to expose my students to such passages, just to rub their noses in their cultural parochialism. My iconoclastic nudges failed: the hippies and nature lovers who filled my classrooms remained incredulous that those benighted travelers could get the wilderness so wrong.

  The radical shift in Western attitudes toward nature launched by the Enlightenment and the Romantic revolution has been analyzed by many cultural historians, none more perceptive than Marjorie Hope Nicolson, whose Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959) fixes the long legacy of regarding raw nature as ugly and monstrous in the Judeo-Christian tradition of viewing the material world as sinful and corrupt.

  Nicolson bases her exegesis on a principle that I had tried to impress upon my students: “What men see in Nature is a result of what they have been taught to see—lessons they have learned in school, doctrines they have heard in church, books they have read.” She traces the tradition of fear and abhorrence in the face of wilderness back to the Greeks and especially the Romans, but sees it solidified in the New Testament. Mountains, in particular, inspired distaste and horror. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory serves, among other uses, as a rich anthology of passages in English literature that equate the peaks of the Alps and even the hills of Britain to “Earth’s Dugs, Risings, Tumors, Blisters, Warts.” The connection between these “monstrous excrescences” and Original Sin became explicit in such poems as Henry Vaughan’s “Corruption,” in which Adam, exiled from Eden, “drew the Curse upon the world, / And Crackt the whole frame with his fall.”

  All this changed dramatically after the middle of the eighteenth century. In western Europe, a new interest in climbing mountains was awakened by the competition to make the first ascent of Mont Blanc. Attempts beginning in 1762 culminated in the triumph of Jacques Balmat and Michel Paccard on August 8, 1786. The birth of modern mountaineering is conventionally attributed to the race to reach the highest summit in the Alps.

  Before the second half of the eighteenth century, ascents of mountains anywhere in Europe or North America were few and far between. Yet a single exception stands out, a cultural and historical anomaly that is still wreathed in mystery more than five hundred years later.

  Mont Aiguille is a limestone peak in the massif of the Vercors in southeastern France. At 6,841 feet above sea level, it is not even the highest point in the range, whose Grand Veymont towers 800 feet higher. The Vercors itself is dwarfed by the Chamonix Alps 80 miles farther east. Yet Mont Aiguille stands in striking isolation, like a western satellite of the north–south chain of the Vercors, its mesa-like summit surrounded by steep cliffs that rise a thousand feet on all sides.

  In 1489 Charles VIII, king of France, on a pilgrimage to the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame d’Embrun, was forcefully struck by the silhouette of the peak (then known as Mont Inaccessible). His curiosity was further whetted by local rumors that angels had been seen floating around the summit. A year later, Charles incorporated the peak in his royal seal, with the motto Supereminet Invius (“It stands, inaccessible”). And in 1492, he ordered his chamberlain, Antoine de Ville, to climb it.

  A chamberlain’s duties were to manage the household of the royal personage who hired him. Why the king thought de Ville was the man for the job is one of the lost details of this unprecedented campaign. In any event, de Ville put together a team, of which the indispensable member was Reynaud Jubié, official ladderman to the king. Rounding out the party were a professor of theology, an almoner (a cleric charged with dispensing alms to unfortunates in hospitals), a carpenter, and four others.

  Only four concise, legalistic documents survive as primary sources for the extraordinary siege of Mont Aiguille that de Ville’s team undertook. Most vexing for the modern observer is that the climbers left only the sketchiest account of how they tackled the peak. A curt phrase in de Ville’s procès-verbal (a kind of legal deposition) alludes to the “subtilz engins” the team deployed, and a single sentence in the quaint French of the day evokes the terror of the climb, which was “le plus horrible et expovantable passage que je viz james” (“the most horrible and appalling passage that I have ever seen”). It’s clear that Jubié brought his special craft to the game, as an official letter penned by the almoner states that “One has to climb for half a league by means of ladders, and for a league by a path which is terrible to look at, and is still more terrible to descend than to ascend.”

  The climb took the team three days. At last the men reached the summit plateau. To their astonishment, after battling precipitous limestone, they discovered a lush meadow “which it would take forty men or more to mow.” The meadow was “a quarter of a league in length, and a bow shot, or cross-bow shot, in width.” (In the fifteenth century, the French lieue, or league, was about two and a half miles. Incredulity played its trick on the men’s judgment, as their measurements considerably exceed the reality of Mont Aiguille.) The team also found crows and sparrows of kinds they had never seen before, and “a great quantity of flowers of various colors and various fragrant scents, and, more particularly, lilies.”

  If the men detected the presence of angels near the top, they kept the news to themselves. But there was other evidence of the divine, for installed in the meadow was “a beautiful herd of chamois, which will never be able to get away.” On the spot, de Ville changed the peak’s name from Mont Inaccessible to Mont Aiguille (aiguille means “needle”).

  Having expended such an effort to climb the mountain, the team was reluctant to close up shop and go home. Using the route they had established as a thoroughfare, they hauled enough material to the summit to build a small hut. De Ville also directed the clerics in the team to erect three crosses on the highest points of the meadow, in honor of the Trinity, as well as to celebrate a mass and sing the “Te Deum” and “Salve Regina.”

  At t
he time, about a thousand miles to the southwest, in the harbor of Palos de la Frontera in Spain, a little-known mariner named Cristóbal Colón was loading his three ships with cargo in preparation for a voyage across the Atlantic into the unknown.

  De Ville and company were all too aware that their bold ascent might later be regarded as suspect, so they sent messengers to the Parliament of Dauphiné in Grenoble announcing their deed. The letters indeed prompted an investigation, as the parliament sent its usher to check out the story. That fellow got to the base of Mont Aiguille, saw the ladders propped up against the lower cliffs, and promptly lost his nerve. “He was unwilling to expose himself,” the subsequent report explained, “by reason of the danger that there was of perishing there . . . [and] for fear lest he should seem to tempt the Lord, since at the mere sight of this mountain everyone was terrified.” The witness did manage to spot de Ville and several others frolicking on the summit, as well as the three crosses, whose location had been chosen for visibility from the surrounding plains. As de Ville had hoped, the usher confirmed to his bosses that the protagonists of the adventure “ate, drank, and slept on the said mountain.”

  In 1984, with my longtime friend Matt Hale, I climbed Mont Aiguille by what, as far as we could tell, was de Ville’s route. There was a small horde of other aspirants tackling what had become the most popular line in the Vercors, all of them roped up, placing protection, and belaying carefully. Matt and I chose to solo the route, on which we found no moves harder than 5.2 (on the decimal scale ranging from 5.0 to 5.15), but we had to be on constant guard against stones knocked loose by climbers flailing away above us. During our ascent, we politely asked one team after another, “Est-ce que nous pouvons passer?” By the time we topped out, we had overtaken some thirty fellow travelers. All the way up, I tried to imagine the plunge into the unknown that de Ville and his comrades had braved 492 years before us, subtilz engins or no.