The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane

camp were onerous, but not appalling. There were books, and there was food, though never enough. Brutality was expedient rather than gratuitous: prisoners were clubbed with rifle butts for misdemeanours, but nothing worse than this. Most importantly, there was a view: away and up to the west, through the wire mesh of the camp’s perimeter fence, Murray could see the Abruzzi mountains. Those mountains became, during his months of imprisonment, the home of his hope. When winter arrived, the first snows settled on the Gran Sasso, the highest of the range, and it appeared to Murray like a blue and white ghost floating in the sky, the embodiment of ‘a freedom of spirit’ that could not be constrained by fence and hut and sentry.
    Ten weeks after arriving at Chieti, Murray began to write: about the wild places he had known before his incarceration, about the Scottish mountains, moors and ridges he had loved and explored.
    Paper was scarce. At first he wrote on toilet paper, but the diet of the camps meant that there was little to spare. Then Murray’s mother sent him via the Red Cross a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works , ‘printed on the finest India paper’. He bartered pages of the book - pages whose firmness and texture were much appreciated by the men of the camp - for sheets of blank toilet paper on which he could write.
    The writing Murray did there was a kind of dreamwork: a casting back and a summoning up of the open spaces of Scotland, its ‘rock, snow and ice, as well as the high plateaux and long ridges and wide moors’, from within his confinement. As his stamina waned, his imagination grew stronger. He thrived on the recollections of openness and freedom. The book that Murray began in Chieti, Mountaineering in Scotland - ‘a book written from the heart of a holocaust’, in his phrase - must stand as one of the finest expressions of the power of the wild to act, even in retrospect, even remotely, upon the mind.
    In October, Murray was moved to the Moosburg camp in Bavaria. Prisoners were housed in wire-fenced compounds, in jam-packed bunkrooms, ‘like rats in a slum’. Fleas and lice proliferated, and at night bedbugs swarmed from the mattresses. Still he wrote.
    After a short time, he was moved again, this time to a camp in Bohemia, the westernmost province of Czechoslovakia. The prisoners were searched on arrival. Murray’s thick wad of toilet-paper manuscript was found, and he was interrogated by Gestapo officers, who believed it to be a coded account of troop movements. They took the manuscript from him, and destroyed it. Even to a man of Murray’s mental resilience, it was a severe blow.
    During the years of his confinement, Murray’s health deteriorated. Towards the end of the war, Red Cross parcels were prevented from reaching the camps. The inmates of Murray’s camp had to survive on black bread and minimum rations of potato and turnips. When possible, they would catch and kill dogs and cats, and eat strips of their flesh. Tuberculosis was rife. ‘I am literally a skeleton,’ Murray wrote in a sad letter to a friend. His fingernails became corrugated through vitamin deficiency. His hair had thinned. He could not walk ten yards without stopping to rest, could not walk at all without dizziness. He assumed that, even if he were to survive the war, he would never again be able to climb mountains.
    But through all this, the dreaming continued. In Bohemia, in secret, Murray restarted the manuscript that had been taken from him on his arrival. Weak from lack of food, he became imaginatively uninhibited. ‘I shed,’ he remembered, ‘any reticence about feeling for beauty.’ When he closed his eyes, the mountains and glens sprang to mind, vivid in every detail. He dreamed of the violet dusk of moors, of the green water of the sea lochs in which he had once swum, and the beaten-gold sky of dusk seen from the Buachaille’s top, and then he wrote of these things. During the last year of his