Imaginary peaks, p.4
Imaginary Peaks, page 4
Scholars debate which real mountain was the biblical summit, but Egeria likely climbed a 7,497-foot peak now known as Jebel Musa in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. In photos, the steep red granite shimmers rose-gold through dusk-lit haze. Although many climbers today may not have heard her story, a seventh-century Spanish monk named Valerius once extolled Egeria in terms that could describe a prototypical mountaineering hero: “Nothing could hold her back, whether it was the labor of travelling the whole world, the perils of seas and rivers, the dread crags and fearsome mountains.” He attributed Egeria’s achievements to “God’s help,” but also to “her own unconquerable bravery” and “iron strength.” Twenty-first–century historians Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés describe the motivation behind Egeria’s pilgrimages as an archetypical one that lingers in modern literature: the yearning for a geographic quest that might generate a sense of physical connection with the divine, a “purely mythic and always unachievable paradigm located in our historical memory, by contrast with which all human travelling—whatever its achievements and successes—can never transcend the abysm of futility.”
In some religions, the holy nature of a mountain made its summit off-limits to early human mountaineers. Throughout much of the Himalaya, traders and pilgrims crossed glaciated passes. Visionaries searched for hidden doorways in mountain walls to enter secret paradises, known as beyul. But they left the apexes of most big, snowy peaks untouched. The holy summit of Mount Kailash, a bright half-moon shape above the pale turquoise of Lake Manasarovar, remains forbidden. Although pilgrims for centuries have circumambulated the rocky slopes of its base, the only tale of an ascent took place in 1093 when a ray of light lifted the Buddhist teacher Milarepa to the top.
Across other parts of the world, however, traces of ascents date back thousands of years. Many summits in the American West contain stone rings and enclosures built by Indigenous people who often climbed for religious reasons. Japanese monks, known as yamabushi, have scrambled up steep, craggy peaks as part of their spiritual practices since the sixth century. Among them, Banryū, who lived from 1786 to 1840, described a vision of the Buddha of Infinite Life and Light emerging from a rainbow of mist above the silvery, gnarled stone of Mount Yarigatake. In the ninth century, the Chinese poet Bai Juyi depicted his ascent of Incense Burner Peak as a means to encounter “the limits of sight and hearing” and to “know the vastness of the universe.”
AROUND 1165, COPIES OF A MYSTERIOUS LETTER ADDRESSED TO THE Byzantine emperor began disseminating across Europe. Its author claimed to be “Prester John,” a Nestorian Christian priest-king who ruled over a vast eastern empire that included the summit of Eden and other miraculous peaks. Near the Earthly Paradise, a spring gushed forth from “Mount Olympy” that prevented the onset of illness and old age. Earthquakes split hillsides to reveal an underground river of precious stones. The ground shook with the thunder of centaurs’ hooves and giants’ feet. Phoenixes burst into flame.
To make the letter even more appealing, Prester John suggested he could help Crusaders fight Muslim nations for the Holy Land. Over the following centuries, popes and European kings sent emissaries in search of this powerful sovereign. When they failed to find Prester John anywhere in Asia, cartographers moved his imaginary kingdom to other regions of the world, where he continued to rule for hundreds of years, serene and unperturbed, as if impervious to particularities of place or the passage of time. In 1573, the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius published a map that transported Prester John’s country to Ethiopia. Near its center rises Mount Amara, sometimes associated with a real summit, Amba Geshen. The Mountains of the Moon crenellate the lower end.
The dream of finding Prester John’s empire didn’t fade out until the seventeenth century. Fragments of its peaks endure in fantasies. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the mountain of “Amara” is compared to Eden, which appears as “a Rock / Of Alabaster, pil’d up to the Clouds, / Conspicuous farr, winding with one ascent / Accessible from Earth, one entrance high; / The rest was craggie cliff, that overhung / Still as it rose, impossible to climbe.” Within the walled, fragrant garden of Xanadu, in Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (inspired partly by Marco Polo’s Travels), an Abyssinian maid sings of Mount Abora, another incarnation of Mount Amara.
There was an insidious side to the way such myths shaped history, one that would haunt the Western history of imaginary peaks for centuries to come. As the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco argued, the allure of this “Force of Falsity” encouraged Europeans to explore and then to colonize distant lands. Somewhere, an unknown scribe, with a lavish imagination and a talent for forgery, had designed the seemingly irresistible realm of Prester John to sway the actions of real monarchs or to indulge in mischief making. “The problem is not so much its origin,” Eco wrote in Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, “as its reception. The geographical fantasy gradually generated a political project . . . an alibi for the expansion of the Christian world toward Africa and Asia.”
EUROPEANS, OF COURSE, WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES WHO DREAMED OF venturing to faraway ranges in search of wealth or wonders. From countries around the world, explorers, missionaries, traders, pilgrims, and emissaries traveled extraordinary distances over land and water. Fourteenth-century Moroccan writer and Muslim pilgrim Ibn Battuta journeyed more than 75,000 miles in his lifetime, seeking to expand his knowledge and follow his faith. As he crossed the high mountains of the Hindu Kush, he and his companions laid felt cloth on snow slopes so their camels could climb without sinking into drifts. Sailing over the China Seas, Ibn Battuta saw what looked like a flying mountain, only to learn from the crew that it was a rukh, a gigantic mythical bird of prey. What they glimpsed might have been a kind of mirage, now often called a fata morgana, which occurs when light refracts through a thermal inversion to create eerie projections of distant hilly shores that seem to float in the air. Similar illusions caused cartographers to include imaginary peaks, unintentionally, on maps well into the twentieth century.
By comparison with Battuta, Venetian traveler Marco Polo’s estimated 15,000 miles of travel seems almost paltry, though his Book of Marvels of the World, which first appeared around 1300, cast a spell over Western audiences that persists today. In the province of Karazhan (now Yunnan), under the rule of Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan, Polo claimed that mountains were strewn with golden talus and teeming with giant serpents that could devour men in a single gulp. If you were clever enough to trap one of the creatures, their gallbladders could cure rabies.
Travel literature flourished from the rich seedbed of such memoirs, an often-indeterminate blend of direct experience, collected hearsay, local and foreign traditions, and vivid imaginations. Real and phantasmal places appeared next to one another in the same cartographies. Sea monsters wriggled in pale-blue waters inked across the Atlantic. Noah’s Ark teetered atop a giant mountain in Armenia (“where snow is so constant that none can ascend,” Polo affirmed).
None of these stories offered verifiable firsthand explorations of the mountain of Eden. Even Sir John Mandeville in his popular (and likely fabricated) fourteenth-century Travels—which reported tales of a waterfall so big its rapids deafened listeners and a summit so high it nearly scraped the moon—admitted he hadn’t actually been there: “It is far beyond. . . . And also I was not worthy.” Geographers began shifting the location of the Earthly Paradise to parts of continents that seekers hadn’t yet visited, atop the mythic Mountains of the Moon or along high peaks of the unseen Terra Australis Incognita.
In 1498, as Christopher Columbus sailed into the Gulf of Paria during his third voyage of exploration, the pole star appeared to rotate unexpectedly in the sky. He thought his ship was rising toward an elevation point so great that the planet itself must be shaped like a pear. This must be the summit of Eden, he insisted, though he could never reach it (and no one else could, he warned, “save by the will of God”). But as the pace of Western exploration quickened, the belief that the Earthly Paradise still existed in a hidden terrestrial place transformed into the idea that it had disappeared into lost time. Some theologians argued that the original peak had been destroyed in the Flood; all that could be found on Earth, if anything, was the place where it had vanished. Others imagined it as an inner state that disappeared with the loss of innocence.
Sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner extolled the pleasures of wandering and climbing in the real Alps, instead, where the marvelous “spectacles” of a metaphorical Eden might be found: multitudes of unusual flowers, ramparts of unbreachable rocks, pinnacles above the clouds. Yet the absence of a literal Earthly Paradise haunted explorers’ maps and dreams for many more years—a void that merged with different stories of “lost worlds,” such as the tales of Atlantis and Thule. Other imaginary mountains crept in to fill the gaps of vanished mythic highlands. To explain why compasses point north, European cartographers imagined a giant, black, magnetic rock at the North Pole, an island mountain known as the Rupes Nigra. In a 1577 letter, Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator described reading a lost book by a fourteenth-century monk in which the peak appears as “black and glistening,” its apex reaching into the clouds and its base surrounded by a whirlpool. Mercator’s 1595 polar map displays the dark, craggy monolith like an island mountain at the center of four rivers that flow toward walls of encircling peaks.
In Islamic cartographies, the great peak at the North Pole was occasionally identified as Mount Qāf. Persian geographer Hamd Allāh al-Mustawfī al-Qazwīnī described it as a range that ringed the entire earth and rose to a summit just a fathom short of the heavens. According to various traditions, Mount Qāf was made wholly of emerald, azure, or green chrysolite, and its reflections gave the sky its color. It might take five hundred years to reach the summit and two thousand years to circumnavigate the base. To some, ascents could represent a metaphor for the journey of the spiritual life or a passage across the boundary between known and unknown worlds.
Over time, Mount Qāf became connected with Kirghiz stories of the Köyqap peaks in the Tianshan. During the early 1900s, when a German mountaineer, Gottfried Merzbacher, arrived to explore the range, a local resident told him that “very high mountains” still existed beyond a narrow valley, “so long that nobody could get to its end.” Unable to find a way through the twisting gorge of cliff walls and swift waters, Merzbacher turned back, full of regret that thick mist had prevented him from even seeing the distant peaks. After centuries of quests, the desire for an infinite mountain remained undimmed.
CHAPTER 2
A Golden Age of Imaginary Voyages
SINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, MANY Western writers have described the 1336 ascent of the real Mont Ventoux by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch as the start of modern recreational European climbing, the first account of “mountaineering for mountaineering’s sake.” This claim can be misleading: it discounts previous climbs by narrowing the definition of the pursuit to require a particular motivation. It also assumes that earlier ascensionists didn’t occasionally find some pleasure in the act of scrambling up cliffs or reaching summits. Enthusiastic mountain pilgrims such as Egeria predated Petrarch by hundreds of years. Early alpine guides, known as marrons, led travelers over snowy passes while wearing iron-spiked boots and carrying long poles to probe for crevasses. Chamois hunters and crystal prospectors crept along high, narrow ledges. Rulers ordered ascents of peaks to get a bird’s-eye view of conquerable lands or to satisfy their curiosity. Roman historian Aelius Spartianus described how the emperor Hadrian made the ascent of a nearly 11,000-foot volcano, Mount Etna, in Sicily, to contemplate “the sunrise which has many colors, they say, like a rainbow.” And as far back as the ninth century, climbers repeatedly tried to summit 11,608-foot Rochemelon, believed (erroneously) to be the highest mountain in the Alps and to contain a hidden treasure. According to legends, an irate spirit defended its apex with blasts of smoky fog and volleys of loose rocks. (The objective hazards, at least, sound real, though the supernatural cause might be in doubt.) Yet in retrospect, Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux might represent a different mountaineering benchmark: an origin myth of Western climbing history that underscores the potential fallacies of taking some claimed “firsts” too literally.
Petrarch himself didn’t claim any utter originality. In a letter to his spiritual advisor Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro, Petrarch explained that he’d been reading Livy’s History of Rome when he came across an account of King Philip of Macedon’s climb of Mount Haemus. According to Livy, Philip believed that he’d be able to see as far as the Adriatic Sea, the Hister (Danube) River, the Alps, and the Black Sea from the summit, an expansive vista that would help him plan military strategies. But as Philip’s expedition trekked higher up the mountain, they entered a shadowy realm of interweaving branches and wafting mist. Livy expressed his doubts about their subsequent report: “After their descent they said nothing to contradict the popular belief [about the summit vista]; more, I suspect, to prevent the futility of their march from becoming a subject of ridicule than because the widely separated seas and mountains and rivers could really be seen from one spot.”
Fascinated by the story, Petrarch decided to attempt the summit that loomed above his childhood home. Although Mont Ventoux is only 6,263 feet high, its pale limestone summit flashes in the sunlight like a long drift of snow, far above the lavender fields of Provence (now part of France). “My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer,” he wrote. Accompanied by his brother and two servants, he struggled up an “almost inaccessible mass of stony soil.” A local shepherd warned them that he’d already climbed the mountain and derived nothing “except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars.” When they insisted on continuing, the shepherd indicated a faint path. Growing weary, Petrarch sought easier ways to the top, while the rest of the group strode up the most direct route. Again and again, Petrarch realized his detours were taking him farther from the summit. Eventually, he sat down to think. “What thou has repeatedly experienced today in the ascent,” he admonished himself, “happens to thee, as to many, in the journey toward the blessed life.” His desire to find a less steep trail represented his attraction to “low and worldly pleasures,” while the commitment to the direct route symbolized a willingness to follow the difficult path to God.
When, at last, Petrarch joined his companions on the apex, the distant snows of the Alps seemed magnified in the clear, bright air. He thought of his mentor Dionisio in Italy, on the other side of the range, and he opened his copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Dionisio’s gift to him, at random. “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains,” Petrarch read out loud, “and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” Petrarch felt ashamed. He’d let himself become absorbed by the finite wonders of the earth, instead of concentrating on the infinite grandeur of the soul. “Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain,” he declared, “I turned my inward eye upon myself.”
Philosophy professor Unn Falkeid suggests that Petrarch’s allusion to Philip of Macedon’s controversial climb might represent a clue: an allusion to ultimate failure. Was Petrarch suggesting that the idea of climbing a mountain to become closer to the divine is inherently flawed, a misplacement of an internal pilgrimage onto the outside world? Or was he hinting that not everything might be as it seemed in his own account? Although many climbers and armchair mountaineers take Petrarch’s claims literally, historians debate whether his climb happened at all. The sequence of scenes fits the structure of allegory too well to seem entirely natural. Even if Petrarch did plod his way to the summit of Mont Ventoux, he may have altered portions of the story to suit his themes—perhaps to please his reader, who was after all, a monk concerned about the state of Petrarch’s soul.
Still, if Petrarch didn’t climb the peak, the aim of his tale might not have been, precisely, to deceive. As alpine historian Peter Hansen muses, perhaps Petrarch, like Harvey Manning, wanted to convey a message, relying on “poetic license or the artistic imagination, in which something ‘true’ seems best conveyed through something ‘made up.’” While the Mont Ventoux of Petrarch’s tale may contain fictitious elements, the most important summit, it seems, was the one within his mind.
SUMMIT MAGAZINE READERS MAY HAVE ALSO BEEN PRIMED TO ACCEPT the fictionalized cartography of the Riesenstein because of the fantastical elements that have long lingered in alpine maps, as if reflecting the changing, evanescent qualities of mountain dreams. Even as cartographers began to depict the lowlands near their homes more accurately, the real shapes of mountains escaped them. “Ever since the very beginnings of cartography,” Library of Congress cartographer John Hessler observes, “the problem of the vertical has been a central frustration for mapmakers trying to replicate a three-dimensional earth on a flat plane.” While Ptolemy had devised ways to project a round earth on twodimensional pieces of paper, he’d offered few solutions for charting the nuances of peaks. In one map, published with a fifteenth-century edition of his Geographia, an artist rendered the ridgelines of the Alps as streaked blobs. Separated from the rest of the land, they hint at not-quite-mappable realms, still “on the Earth, but not of the Earth,” as Alessandro Scafi described the Eden of old.
