Robert Macfarlane - Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

9

I thought of the resistless passion which drives men to undertake terrific scrambles. No example can deter them a peak can exercise the same irresistible power of attraction as an abyss.

THOPHILE GAUTIER, 1868

I was a twelve-year-old in my grandparents house in the Scottish Highlands when I first came across one of the great stories of mountaineering: The Fight for Everest, an account of the 1924 British expedition during which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit of Everest.

We were staying in the house for the summer. My brother and I were allowed to go anywhere except into the room at the end of the hallway, which was my grandfathers study. We played hide and seek, and I often hid in the big wardrobe in our bedroom. It smelt strongly of camphor, and there was a clutter of shoes on the floor of the wardrobe which made it difficult to stand up in. My grandmothers fur coat hung in it, too, sheathed in thin clear plastic to keep the moths away. It was strange to put a hand out to touch the soft fur and feel the smooth plastic instead.

The best room in the house was the conservatory, which my grandparents called the Sun Room. Its floor was paved with grey flagstones, always cold underfoot, and two of its walls were giant windows. On one of the windows my grandparents had stuck a black card cut-out in the shape of a hawk. It was supposed to scare away small birds but they regularly flew into the windows and killed themselves, thinking that the glass was air.

Even though it was summer, the inside of the house was filled with the cold mineral air of the Highlands, and every surface was always chilly to the touch. When we ate dinner, the chunky silver pieces of cutlery which came out of the dresser were cold in our hands. At night, when we went to bed, the sheets were icy. I would wriggle as far down the bed as I could go, and hold the top sheet down over my head to create an airlock. Then I would breathe as deeply as I could until I had warmed up the bed.

There were books everywhere in the house. My grandfather had not tried to organize them and so very different books found themselves neighbours. On a small shelf in the dining room Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, The Hobbit and The Fireside Omnibus of Detective Stories shared space with two leather-bound volumes of J. S. Mills System of Logic. There were several books about Russia whose titles I did not properly understand, and dozens about exploration and mountaineering.

One night, unable to sleep, I came downstairs for something to read. Against one side of the hallway was a long pile of books lying stacked on their sides. Almost at random, I pulled a big green volume out from halfway down the pile, like a brick from a wall, and carried it to the Sun Room. In the bright moonlight, I sat on one of the wide stone window-ledges and started to read The Fight for Everest.

I already knew some of the details from my grandfather, who had told me the story of the expedition. But the book, with its long descriptions, its twenty-four black-and-white photographs and its fold-out maps bearing unfamiliar place names the Far East Rongbuk glacier, the Dzongpen of Shekar, the Lhakpa La was far more potent than his account. As I read, I was carried out of myself and to the Himalaya. The images rushed over me. I could see the gravel plains of Tibet scrolling away to distant white peaks; Everest itself like a dark pyramid; the oxygen bottles the climbers wore on their backs and which made them look like scuba-divers; the massive ice-walls on the North Col which they scaled using ropes and ladders, like medieval warriors besieging a city; and, finally, the black T of sleeping-bags which was laid out on the snow at Camp VI to tell the climbers at the lower camps, who were staring up at the mountains higher slopes through telescopes, that Mallory and Irvine had disappeared.

One passage of the book excited me more than any other. It was the description by Noel Odell, the expeditions geologist, of his last sighting of Mallory and Irvine:

There was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere above me, and I saw the whole summit ridge and final peak of Everest unveiled. I noticed far away on a snow slope leading up to what seemed to me to be the last step but one from the base of the final pyramid, a tiny object moving and approaching the rock step. A second object followed, and then the first climbed to the top of the step. As I stood intently watching this dramatic appearance, the scene became enveloped in cloud

Over and over I read that passage, and I wanted nothing more than to be one of those two tiny dots, fighting for survival in the thin air.