Imaginary peaks, p.9
Imaginary Peaks, page 9
The designation of “Vinson” eventually moved to a 16,046-foot summit in the Sentinel Range, the continent’s true highest point. While surveyors kept correcting elevation errors of other Antarctic peaks well into the twenty-first century, by the culmination of the multinational expeditions of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year, one fact seemed clear: among the many unclimbed summits that corrugated the southernmost continent, no greater elevations than that of Everest existed. In 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Soon after, US scientists began the research that led to the creation of GPS and the spread of satellite mapping—technologies that would generate a sense of cartographic omniscience even greater than airplane photos could achieve.
Decades later, as Moore looked back on the long history of quests for the “highest mountain in the world,” he thought of new interpretations. The tallest peak could be the one that pokes out farthest from the surface of the earth when viewed from space (Chimborazo in the Andes). Or it could be the one that has the highest vertical relief from its terrestrial base to its summit (Denali in the Alaska Range) or from the ocean floor (Mauna Kea in Hawaii). Moore recalled a story told by his departed friend Allen Carpé, who had vanished into the depths of the Muldrow Glacier during his 1932 Alaskan expedition, leaving behind only the faint trace of ski tracks that faded into snow and shadow. During the eighteenth century, as Carpé recounted, while carrying out experiments near Chimborazo, French geophysicist Pierre Bouguer realized that the topography beneath his observation points, as well as the altitude of where he stood, affected the measured value of gravity. It was as though high peaks really did create their own world.
“So relax,” Moore’s wife, Katrina, told him. “There is no highest mountain on earth.” Was the quest over? Moore wondered. He remembered standing outside the Minya Konka base camp under a sky that trembled with stars. The upper regions of the peak seemed suddenly close by, like a blazing white fata morgana in the clear night air. “In the presence of this vision,” Moore wrote, “ellipsoids of reference, Bouguer’s Anomaly, centrifugal force from the unfelt thousand-mile-an-hour spin of the earth’s rotation, all seem to vanish into unimportance: there before us rises our reality.”
THE REAL OBJECTS OF MYTHOLOGICAL QUESTS DON’T ALWAYS FARE well. The story of Nanda Devi, also once believed to be the world’s highest mountain, has long been a powerful warning of the potential consequences of certain desires for enchanted massifs. A 25,643-foot peak in the Garhwal Himalaya of India, its opalescent summit tower is encircled by steep mountains that form a seemingly insurmountable barrier. At the center of this ring is the Inner Sanctuary, where lush meadows and green firs provide a refuge for rare plants, snow leopards, and blue sheep. From the 1880s to the 1930s, expedition after expedition had tried to enter this hidden basin without success. The only feasible passage was through the Rishi Gorge, a narrow, maze-like ravine where meltwater cascaded from glaciers toward the holy Ganga. For local Hindu people, who took their herds to pastures in the gorge, Nanda Devi was the abode of a goddess. For Western visitors, the place recalled the alpine paradise of ancient legends. British travel writer Hugh Thomson later described it in Nanda Devi: A Journey to the Last Sanctuary as “a secluded sanctuary ‘girdled round’ with walls and towers,” like the Xanadu of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, the fabled kingdom of Prester John, or even the mountaintop realm of Eden itself.
On May 28, 1934, a group of British and Sherpa explorers—Eric Shipton, Bill Tilman, Ang Tharkay, Kusang Namgir, and Pasang Bhotia—established a campsite near the meeting point of two rivers, the Rishi Ganga and the Rhamini. This was as close as any foreign team had managed to get to the Inner Sanctuary. The five men sent their local porters home and began to look for a way through walled corridors of winding ledges, slick grassy slopes, abrupt cliffs, wild rapids, and frequent dead ends. At one point, a gigantic shield of dark stone seemed to block the way entirely, rising straight out of the waters toward the sky. Shipton called it “Pisgah,” after a mountain in the Old Testament, “for we felt that if we could climb it we would have access to the ‘Promised Land’ beyond.”
After days of struggling to make any progress, they divided into two groups and searched for a feasible route on both sides of the gorge: Tilman and Tharkay on the south side and Shipton and Bhotia on the north. “We tried places which were obviously quite ridiculous,” Shipton wrote in his memoir Nanda Devi, “just as one searches under the teapot or in the coalscuttle for a lost fountain pen when one has exhausted every likely place.” That evening, Shipton and Bhotia sat in a cave behind a curtain of soft rain to wait for their companions. The gray air had darkened to charcoal when they finally heard Tharkay’s triumphant voice above the din of the whitewater. He and Tilman had just found the “last frail link” in a series of unexpected fissures in the rock that led to the Inner Sanctuary.
The following evening, the team camped amid meadows of wild rhubarb. As the skies cleared, the sunset transformed Nanda Devi into a gilded tower that floated above the earth. During the days ahead, they explored the basin, meandering across soft green grass that lapped against rock-studded glaciers. Hidden spires of ice emerged on the other side of rock walls. Blue sheep gazed unafraid at human passersby. Shipton recalled the ecstasy of the experience: “My most blissful dream as a child was to be in some such valley, free to wander where I liked, and discover for myself some hitherto unrevealed glory of Nature. Now the reality was no less wonderful than that half-forgotten dream; and of how many childish fancies can that be said, in this age of disillusionment?” But he couldn’t remain there forever. When the group’s departure drew near, Shipton stared, transfixed, into the twilight that drifted through the darkening clouds and wind-brushed meadows, feeling an ineluctable loss.
Two years later, while Shipton was participating in an attempt on Mount Everest, Tilman and British climber Noel Odell completed the first ascent of Nanda Devi. When they stood on the top of the mountain, only the sharp white summit of nearby 23,360-foot Trisul emerged above a gloom of clouds. Hamlet’s words upon seeing his father’s ghost passed through Tilman’s mind: “Thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.” A snow pigeon flew by, its pale form glowing against cold, ashen cliffs, reminding Tilman of the spirit of the mountain.
Far below, in base camp, one of the Sherpa staff members, Kitar, had been ill with dysentery for weeks. Despite requests from the other Sherpa workers, Tilman hadn’t agreed to evacuate him. Now, while Tilman was away making his summit push, Kitar had died. In a later interview with Jonathan Neale, author of Tigers of the Snow, two of Kitar’s companions, Pasang Phutar and Ang Tsering, blamed Tilman for the loss. The Pindar River had also flooded, drowning forty villagers and many animals. An Indian journalist suggested the disaster was a result of the trespass into the goddess’s sanctuary.
Shipton never returned to climb Nanda Devi. Instead, he wandered through other scarcely mapped regions. “Lost civilisations beyond the ranges exist only in the imaginations of romantic novelists,” he admitted, but “the detailed exploration of the world is very far from complete.” Nearly four decades later, in That Untravelled World, Shipton looked back on a lifetime spent pursuing the “vague dream worlds of strange lands” found in the adventure books he’d read as a boy, from the snowy mountains that bloomed in lilac hues on evening horizons to the arid ranges that shivered gold along mirage-drenched deserts. With each step he took, his dream worlds receded farther, toward a vanishing point he could never reach. “The springs of enchantment lie within ourselves,” he finally concluded. “They arise from our sense of wonder, that most precious of gifts, the birthright of every child. Lose it and life becomes flat and colorless; keep it and [quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson] . . . all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move.”
Shipton’s biographer Jim Perrin believes this longing for a magic place arises from early memories that form “a lost landscape of experience,” an inner paradise of wonder. A child’s mind can transmute a neighboring farmer’s field into a vast tundra, a patch of weeds into a trackless rainforest—a power of imagination that, for many, fades as they reach adulthood. Climbers might experience its return in brief moments of euphoria that seem outside of time, as if they are once more seeing the world as they first encountered it, when everything seemed marvelous and new.
In the history of exploration, however, such dreams can exact a cost. “If the [Inner] Sanctuary seemed an Eden in the fantasies of early Western travelers,” American climber Pete Takeda wrote in Alpinist, “it’s hard not to imagine a certain inevitability to its beleaguered status.” The popularity of Nanda Devi with international visitors resulted in “an environmental disaster,” Indian mountaineer Harish Kapadia recalls. Trekkers, climbers, and expedition workers cut trees and burned juniper bushes for campfires. Endangered plants slipped away under eroding hillsides or vanished into smugglers’ packs. Blue sheep and snow leopards fled. Garbage accumulated. During the mid-1960s, covert expeditions sponsored by the CIA and the Indian Intelligence Bureau put plutonium-powered sensors on Nanda Devi and nearby Nanda Kot to spy on Chinese nuclear tests north of the range. One of the sensors disappeared, perhaps swept away by an avalanche. Its radioactive core is likely still buried under the ice that is the source of the holy Ganga. “A powerful symbol,” Takeda concluded, “of the dangers of human choices.”
In 1982, to prevent further damage, the Indian government forbade most visitors from entering the Inner Sanctuary. Eighteen years later, Hugh Thomson took part in one of the few research expeditions allowed into the area after the closure. Within the ring of white peaks, he felt as if he’d entered a “secret garden.” Snow leopard prints dotted the ground again. A herd of blue sheep seemed astounded to see trekkers. Thomson recalled the trash-choked streams of earlier decades. He thought of the memorials for those who died on climbing expeditions, so many of them local workers. He remembered the sounds of “ancestral voices prophesying war” that troubled Xanadu. Before leaving, Thomson buried an edition of Paradise Lost under a pile of stones, like a warning to future visitors. “Implicit in the idea of entering a sanctuary,” he observed, “was the idea of its fall.”
CHAPTER 6
Revolts Against a Disenchanted World
INKED LINES OF SHADED PEAKS curl across a yellowed page with names that sound both ancient and familiar, though they don’t belong entirely to any language spoken on Earth: Hithaeglir, the “Misty Mountains”; Erebor, the “Lonely Mountain.” First published during the 1950s, the maps and stories of The Lord of the Rings trilogy became an imaginary refuge for generations of readers desperate to find some invulnerable place beyond the grim realities of their world. By the time J. R. R. Tolkien finished writing the books, he’d lived through two world wars. He’d fought in the first and watched his children leave home to fight in the second. Millions of people had died, cities had burned, trenches had furrowed the countryside, woodlands had been laid waste, and the first detonation of atomic bombs seemed like a precursor to global apocalypse. There appeared to be “only one thing triumphant,” he’d written to his son Christopher, “the Machines.”
As a young British soldier during the First World War, Tolkien had sketched out fragments of his elaborate fantasy worlds “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fog . . . or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire,” as he later wrote. In contrast with the devastation, he recalled memories of a hiking trip in Switzerland, where the “eternal snow” of the Jungfrau seemed “etched . . . against eternal sunshine.” Silberhorn, a satellite peak, “sharp against dark blue,” recurred in his dreams, morphing into his fictional peak of “Silvertine.” In his novels, the hobbit character Sam Gamgee notices starlight above a high alpine spire and imagines a world beyond terror and bloodshed: “Like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
“It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun,” Tolkien lamented in a 1947 essay, for people to consider the world “too narrow to hold both men and elves.” The onslaught of “‘rationalisation’. . . transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip.” Tolkien believed that the realm of Faërie—and the sense of enchantment and possibility that it symbolized—could be expanded again through storytelling. Imaginary realms could remind readers of the unlimited potential of human creativity, offering visions of “Joy, beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” To those who derided the genre of fantasy as escapism, Tolkien responded, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”
In The Road to Middle-Earth, literature professor Tom Shippey defined Tolkien’s concept of “glamour” as “that shimmer of suggestion which never quite becomes clear sight, but always hints at something deeper, further on.” It was something like this glamour that I’d felt as a small girl gazing at the mists that settled on the hayfields and cow pastures of my town and wishing for invisible highlands of snow. Harvey Manning, too, experienced it when, as a young boy, he looked out from Marmot Pass while mountains swelled into the gathering night. The novels of The Lord of the Rings trilogy were among Harvey’s favorite books, and Tolkien’s blend of fantasy and environmentalism may have inspired some of his own stories of unreal peaks. Tolkien’s protagonists try to destroy the power of the Dark Lord Sauron whose industries of war have desolated the Mountains of Shadow. The ents fight to stop orcs from slashing and burning their ancient trees in the Forest of Fangorn. Even the ultimate victory over Sauron, however, feels too late. The elves sail west across the sea to the Undying Lands, taking their magic with them and leaving humans to long for something that draws ever farther away.
I’d read Tolkien’s trilogy obsessively, more than a dozen times between elementary school and high school, and I remember the overwhelming sadness that washed over me whenever I put the books down and returned to ordinary life. I often brought the books along during my own early hiking trips in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Images of Fangorn merged with the gnarled roots that crisscrossed the footpaths and the boreal woods that dimmed the sun. Constellations of Diapensia lapponica, white and yellow flowers that grow only in alpine zones, reminded me of elanors, the golden, star-shaped blossoms of the elven forest of Lothlórien, where the passage of time seems to slow to a near standstill. These low peaks, too, were a refuge for mountain flora, their summits like islands in the sky. Eventually, I realized, what I yearned for wasn’t in the books. It was related to a feeling that I experienced in the cold air above tree line: a sense of inner stillness and emptiness; a glass-like clarity of being, as if the light passed unfiltered into me; a presentiment of the vastness glimmering beyond the edge of sight and mind.
In Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane suggested a desire for this kind of glamour might have influenced the British mountaineer George Mallory’s early attempt on Everest, at least initially. To most climbers at the start of the 1920s, the mountain existed primarily in daydreams, a patchwork of reported, faraway glimpses or a set of vague contour lines on a map. On an early June morning in 1921, when Mallory first saw the real peak as a white tower in the distance, a “slight haze” veiled its snows, contributing “a touch of mystery and grandeur.” In that moment, Macfarlane argued, Mallory didn’t really want a clearer view; he wished it might somehow remain “a conspiracy of imagination and geology, a half-imagined, half-real hill.” Three years later, when Mallory and his climbing partner Sandy Irvine vanished in the mists somewhere near the summit, they became part of that mystery in the minds of armchair mountaineers: two eternally young men, enveloped, as Macfarlane put it, “in a cloud of unknowing.”
More than two decades later, as European countries recovered from World War II, national expeditions marched inexorably on the world’s biggest mountains. Support staff ferried loads to dizzying altitudes. Amid the trampling of feet on worn-down paths and the flurries of telegrams sent to distant press offices, reveries dissolved into the dusty glaciers and broken scree of base camps, the shattered blocks and indigo chasms of icefalls, and finally the upper regions of sharp wind and thin air. In 1950, Annapurna became the first 8,000-meter summit to succumb. Three years later, climbers Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary stood atop Everest. To Tenzing Norgay, who was born not far from the peak, this mountain was Chomolungma, the dwelling of the Goddess of Inexhaustible Giving, Miyolangsangma. Once a forbidden place, the summit felt welcoming to him; none of its sacredness was lost. “My mountain did not seem to me a lifeless thing of rock and ice, but warm and friendly and living,” he recalled.
Back in England, however, newspapers celebrated the first ascent of Everest as a definitive conquest. The story splayed across front pages alongside articles about the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II. Although Hillary was a New Zealander and Tenzing Norgay had lived in Tibet, Nepal, and India (he later became an Indian citizen), the expedition had been organized by British climbers. Its success, as expedition reporter Jan Morris recalled in Coronation Everest, provided a symbol of resurgence for a country that was “emerging at last from the austerity which had plagued them since the second world war, but at the same time facing the loss of their great Empire, and the inevitable decline of their power in the world.”
Still, the idea of mountains as metaphors for national dominion or imperialist nostalgia had long troubled some mid-twentieth–century fiction writers, even in Britain. In 1936, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood published The Ascent of F6, a play about the first ascent of an imaginary peak. When their idealistic hero, Ransom (modeled after Mallory), perishes on the summit of F6, his death turns him into the perfect symbol for British statesmen and journalists to exploit for colonial ambitions and media profits. “He has died,” one cynical newspaper reader declares, “to satisfy our smug suburban pride.” Two decades later, British novelist Mary Stewart set her mystery Wildfire at Midnight during the days before and after the first ascent of the world’s highest mountain. “I’d always imagined [Everest] as the last inviolate spot that arrogant man hadn’t smeared himself over, sort of remote and white and unattainable,” her heroine says. A serial killer overhears the heroine’s words and vows to seek vengeance against climbers who want to “conquer” the wild and destroy its last sanctuaries.
