Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane Page B

the Scottish Cairngorms. Perhaps surprisingly, among the youngest mountains on earth are the Himalaya, which began to form only 65 million years ago, when the Indian Plate motored northwards and smashed slowly into the Eurasian Plate – ducking underneath it and then butting it five-and-a-half miles upwards into the air. Compared to the earth’s venerable ranges, the Himalaya are adolescents, with sharp, punkish ridges instead of the bald and worn-down pates of older ranges.
    Like adolescents, too, they are still growing. Everest – which became the world’s highest mountain less than 200,000 years ago – shoots up by a precocious five millimetres or so a year. Give it a million years – the blink of an eye in geological terms – and themountain could have almost doubled its height. Except of course that won’t happen, because gravity won’t tolerate such a structure. Something will give: the mountain will collapse under its own weight, or be shaken apart by one of the huge earthquakes which rack the Himalaya every few centuries.

    For years now I have gone to the mountains and been astonished by deep time. Once, halfway up the mica-rich peak of Ben Lawers in Scotland on a sunlit day, I found a square chest of sedimentary rock, hinged at its back with an overgrowth of moss and grass. Stepping back and looking at it from the side, I could see it was composed of hundreds of thin layers of grey rock, each one no thicker than a sheet. Each layer, I reckoned, was a paraphrase of 10,000 years – a hundred centuries abbreviated into three millimetres’ depth of rock.
    Between two of the grey layers I noticed a thin silvery stratum. I pushed the adze of my walking axe into the rock, and tried to lever the strata apart. The block cracked open, and I managed to get my fingers beneath the heavy top lid of rock. I lifted, and the rock opened. And there, between two layers of grey rock, was a square yard of silver mica, seething brightly in the sunlight – probably the first sunlight to strike it in millions of years. It was like opening up a chest filled to the brim with silver, like opening a book to find a mirror leafed inside it, or like opening a trapdoor to reveal a vault of time so dizzyingly deep that I might have fallen head-first into it.
    * Although, as Simon Winchester has recently pointed out, a 1991 poll returned that 100 million Americans believed God to have created man in his own image sometime in the last 10,000 years. The earth is thought by science to be around 5 billion years old; the first humans to have appeared
circa
2 million years ago.
    * Geology remained a driving force in mountaineering until well into the twentieth century – the first three Everest expeditions (1921, 1922 and 1924) were funded in part as scientific expeditions aimed at bringing back geological (and botanical) knowledge of the Everest region.

3
The Pursuit of Fear
    That Alpine witchery still onward lures,
Upwards, still upwards, till the fatal list
Grows longer of the early mourned and missed.
    FRANCES RIDLEY HAVERGAL, 1884
    I looked upwards. A tall, steep face of rock, striped vertically with snow gullies, angled up into the lightening sky. That was our route. My eye followed the face down. Without relenting in angle, it dropped some 600 feet to a small glacier which arced off the bottom of the face. The convex surface of the glacier looked hard, silvered and pitted like old metal, and it was pocked with stones which had fallen from the cliffs above. Further down, the glacier tumbled over a hundred-foot drop. There its surface turned a curdled grey, and the smoothness of the upper ice became ruptured into crevasses and blocks. I could see glimmers of blue ice far down inside the body of the glacier. That was where we would end up if we fell.
    We had left the hut too late that morning. When we stepped outside, the sky beyond the mountains to our east was already livid with colour. It meant the day would be a hot one; another