Adventures in Robert Macfarlane’s Aboveworld and Underland

Camping on the glacier, the snow fell softly all night, making the tent sag. But by dawn the stars were out when we set off along the steep snowfield, climbing with the sun. At the Col, we turned left and stepped on the 3,870m summit of Mont Blanc de Cheilon before noon.

Under the dazzlingly blue summer sky the shiny peaks of the Pennine Alps rose like pointed clouds, with the fang of Matterhorn in the distance and the Lac Dixence reservoir a long way down. The euphoria of summiting must have made me careless as we descended: that night’s new snow had covered the slippery ice underneath.

Read also: Overkill on Everest, Damien Francois

The crampons did not hold, and in less than a second I was hurtling past the Indermühle brothers, Fritz and Urs. Both instantaneously dug their axes into the ice, and their combined strength on the rope arrested my fall with a jerk.

‘We made it, of course — I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise…’ Robert Macfarlane writes about his own close shave on nearby Lagginhorn (4,100m) in the first chapter of his book Mountains of the Mind. What possesses human beings to climb mountains despite, but probably also because of, the fear and danger?

Read also: 

Not just another book on Everest, Kunda Dixit

Nepal's Grand Trek Road, Kunda Dixit

The book came out in 2004, but this passage is worth re-reading in the context of what transpired on Mt Everest this spring:

‘What makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die… Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.’

As a boy, Macfarlane was inspired to climb after spending a summer in his grandparents’ library thrice re-reading Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna. What possessed Mallory, Herzog and others to put their lives on the line? Macfarlane inserts his own adventures and near-death experiences in the Alps, Pamir and Himalaya to dissect the philosophy of mountaineering. We learn about the early Western fascination with mountains and their ‘conquest’, starting with Thomas Burnett, Charles Lyell and others. Charles Darwin, we learn, used his ability to peer into deep time to ponder not just the origin of species, but also the impermanence of mountains. Alfred Wegener showed peaks have a past and future and are constantly reshaped by continental drift.

Read also:

Highs and lows of Sir Ed, Kunda Dixit

‘To understand even a little about geology gives you special spectacles through which to see a landscape,’ writes Macfarlane in his elegant prose. ‘They allow you to see back in time to worlds where rocks liquefy and seas petrify…’

So it is while trekking in Nepal. What seems to be stunning scenery frozen in time is actually just one frame in a timelapse video that began millions of years ago, and will continue for millions more as mountains rise and fall.

The book devotes a whole chapter to mountains maps, and how they ‘do not take account of time, only of space’. A flat map of mountains does not show the vertical scale. All maps of mountains should be in 3-D, and even depict the time dimension. For example, how to show that Everest Base Camp is now 50m lower than during the 1953 Hillary and Tenzing expedition because the Khumbu Glacier has shrunk? Swiss cartographer Eduard Imhof’s 1962 map of the Everest region shows glacial ice on Imja, where there is now a lake 2km long.

After writing about the ‘upper world’ of the mountains, Macfarlane has just come out with Underland: A Deep Time Journey employing the same methods of personal exploration combined with musings on our subterranean consciousness. The chapters on Greenland are especially relevant during this climate emergency.

Both books force us to expand our understanding of time, to time beyond our lifetimes, beyond the existence of our species, beyond cataclysmic meteorite hits. In that vast timescale, our day-to-day concerns, poverty and suffering, wars and genocide appear like a blip. The Anthropocene is a passing phase, and the Yellow Band on the summit of Everest will once more be at the bottom of a future ocean.

Both books remind us of the insignificance and impermanence of our own species in the vastness of space time. Human beings have moulded and modified the surface of the Earth, in some cases irreversibly, but there are other worlds below and above us that are untouched and unknown.

Macfarlane's lyrical prose lends itself to the spiritual message to humankind of looking at existence from a cosmic perspective — this is not at all reassuring when we are confronted with a climate apocalypse. But, somehow in a mysterious way, it is comforting to know that none of this really matters. Not petty nationalism, not fake news propagated by our leaders, not who wins Nobel Prizes, not overcrowding on Everest.

At a book signing ceremony of Underland in Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore recently (pictured right), I asked Macfarlane about the traffic jam on Everest.

“When I saw that photograph of Everest, I said to myself this is not climbing, this is not queuing, it is dying … these were people standing in line ready to fulfill what to me is a profoundly philosophical and problematic vision of conquest, of the need to be the highest, the need to take a summit selfie, that proves you have dominated nature. That is not supposed to be what all this is for.”

Mountains of the Mind:
Adventures in Reaching the Summit
by Robert Macfarlane
Vintage, 2004
$17.95 306 pages

Underland: A Deep Time Journey
by Robert Macfarlane
W.W. Norton Company 2019
Hardcover $16.14 496 pages