gnimmel (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gnimmel) wrote,@ 2006-10-16 23:33:00 |
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The ladder with no human end
There was a time, a few months ago, when I dreamed of mountains. I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps I had read something on the subject. The complexion of my daydreams changed -- just for a week or two -- into a sort of strange and wistful pining, an unrequited wanderlust which went away as quickly as it had come. Perhaps it was just the names; the uppermost places of the Earth cluster, almost without exception, in the Himalayas, and the names of those places have a mystical, assonant ring to them, like the sound of bells coming from an impossibly distant height. Annapurna, they say; Dhaulagiri, Karakorum, Kangchenjunga, Shishapangma, Lhotse, Nuptse, Makalu. It was summer, when I dreamed of mountains, and I dreamed of cold, clear air and white snow and peaks encompassing the horizon. Of course, climbing mountains is not like that, not that sort of mountain; it is dirty, and technical, rather dangerous and hard. And I do not understand the way that mountains work, not in my instinctual heart; I don't understand their sudden storms or their thin air. Even in the lower hills of Scotland (and I do not think I have ever climbed anything with snow on it) there have been moments of perplexity. Walking up the slopes behind Blairmore house in bright woodland sunshine, Chris and I came out onto the first hill's bald peak -- and instantly our benign sky was all wailing winds and hail. We went back down, and the sun returned. But every time we tried to go back up to the peak, foul weather arose from seemingly no-where. I am stubbornly drawn to the heights, sometimes, and it worries me that this lack of understanding does not worry me, if that makes any sense. That I think mostly of the cairns and the clear water and the ponds of the hills which reflect only sky, and have a strange love for strange places that are dangerous.
The other thing about the high places -- the highest places of all, the holy grails of climbing -- is that they make you stupid. Again, I do not understand this; not on an instinctual level. There is a certain height beyond which humans cannot survive very long, and it is in that height range that some of the more fearsome peaks lie. Earth's atmosphere is a thin thing, up at the top of the world. Without enough oxygen to breathe, it is not unknown for people to simply drop dead, or to fall asleep and not wake up; quite aside from the cold. I think to myself, well, one must watch for the warning signs, of course, and be sensible. And that is what everyone thinks, beforehand. The point is that another one of the bits of you which just doesn't work very well in the high places is your brain. And this, in part, is why there are dead people -- several of them -- who sit like frozen milestones on the path to the peak of Everest, and why every few years some capricious storm or other comes in and wipes another handful or two of climbers off the face of the mountains, or leaves them stranded in the frozen dark with no way home and only radio to say goodbye. These events are called tragedies, which I think is not quite true. Everyone knows beforehand that there are deaths. This knowledge is woven out into a whole tapestry of whispers and rumours and superstitions -- that K2 has a curse upon women, or that one may succeed in one's summit attempt more readily if it falls upon an exact date when previous successful attempts were made.
When instinct touches on the mountains, and intersects with death and superstition and peculiar weather and the like, one comes out instead with another meme -- that the mountain is sacred, that its anger is the anger of the gods, and that it should be left well alone. Or perhaps that it should be meddled with; for after all, Aleister Crowley spent not a little portion of his life trying to climb K2. These days the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world is not so because of difficulty, but because it is a a sacred place, and climbing is forbidden. And some say that Everest is sacred, and should not be insulted; although it had to wait until the 1960s to have a Nepali name at all, much less one of a goddess.
Now, here's another thing: Everest, or Sagarmatha, or Chomolungma: it is the tallest mountain in the world.
But it is not the tallest mountain in the solar system.
In fact Earth's mountains are entirely ordinary. There are mountains over half the height of Everest on the moon, and innumerable volcanoes on Io. Maxwell Montes on Venus is 11km tall -- somewhat more than Everest; and in addition its highlands are covered in a thin but shiny layer of weathered lead. There are mountains on Mercury and maybe on Titan. The solar system is, quite frankly, riddled with lumpy rocks.
And then there is Mars. Mars does not have tectonic plates; the slow dance of Earth's continents means nothing to it. Form a volcano on Mars, and that volcano will stay exactly where it started, until the end of Mars. Form a volcano which grows over time, and -- well. You might end up with Olympus Mons, a mountain so huge -- and so flat -- that if one could stand on its peak the rest of Mars would be invisible behind its horizon.
Olympus Mons is three times the height of Everest. Of course, it would be ludicrous to climb such a mountain -- there is not even a breathable atmosphere at its base. But I was raised with the bright, hopeful sci-fi of the Fifties in my ears, a creed which says How hard can it be? and Whyever not? to such hubristic concepts as terraforming, and thus it is not so unimaginable after all that such a place might one day -- oh humanity! -- have an atmosphere that one could breathe. And though there is a terrifying mile-high cliff at the base of Olympus Mons, thereafter the slope becomes rather shallow. It would not be a difficult climb, perhaps. Once one had been hauled up that terrible cliff. It would be a saunter, a gentle hill walk. Except that at the summit there would be very little between the climber and the black airless depths of space. Except that at the summit it would be impossible to survive.
And I was thinking again of sacred mountains, of the dead bodies on Everest and the high holy places. Would that be the function of Olympus Mons, on some far-future terraformed Mars? It would be the pure, cold dangerous climb ad absurdam, the pilgrimage without a concievable homecoming, the prescripted tragedy. Undertaking this pilgrimage, one would climb until one fell, in the high unmapped unguessable places, and one would fall on the gentle slopes amongst the frozen pilgrims of the past and there remain.
It is rather warm down here of Gwydir Street, and I have stopped dreaming of mountains some time ago. I am not entirely sorry to see them go.
There was a time, a few months ago, when I dreamed of mountains. I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps I had read something on the subject. The complexion of my daydreams changed -- just for a week or two -- into a sort of strange and wistful pining, an unrequited wanderlust which went away as quickly as it had come. Perhaps it was just the names; the uppermost places of the Earth cluster, almost without exception, in the Himalayas, and the names of those places have a mystical, assonant ring to them, like the sound of bells coming from an impossibly distant height. Annapurna, they say; Dhaulagiri, Karakorum, Kangchenjunga, Shishapangma, Lhotse, Nuptse, Makalu. It was summer, when I dreamed of mountains, and I dreamed of cold, clear air and white snow and peaks encompassing the horizon. Of course, climbing mountains is not like that, not that sort of mountain; it is dirty, and technical, rather dangerous and hard. And I do not understand the way that mountains work, not in my instinctual heart; I don't understand their sudden storms or their thin air. Even in the lower hills of Scotland (and I do not think I have ever climbed anything with snow on it) there have been moments of perplexity. Walking up the slopes behind Blairmore house in bright woodland sunshine, Chris and I came out onto the first hill's bald peak -- and instantly our benign sky was all wailing winds and hail. We went back down, and the sun returned. But every time we tried to go back up to the peak, foul weather arose from seemingly no-where. I am stubbornly drawn to the heights, sometimes, and it worries me that this lack of understanding does not worry me, if that makes any sense. That I think mostly of the cairns and the clear water and the ponds of the hills which reflect only sky, and have a strange love for strange places that are dangerous.
The other thing about the high places -- the highest places of all, the holy grails of climbing -- is that they make you stupid. Again, I do not understand this; not on an instinctual level. There is a certain height beyond which humans cannot survive very long, and it is in that height range that some of the more fearsome peaks lie. Earth's atmosphere is a thin thing, up at the top of the world. Without enough oxygen to breathe, it is not unknown for people to simply drop dead, or to fall asleep and not wake up; quite aside from the cold. I think to myself, well, one must watch for the warning signs, of course, and be sensible. And that is what everyone thinks, beforehand. The point is that another one of the bits of you which just doesn't work very well in the high places is your brain. And this, in part, is why there are dead people -- several of them -- who sit like frozen milestones on the path to the peak of Everest, and why every few years some capricious storm or other comes in and wipes another handful or two of climbers off the face of the mountains, or leaves them stranded in the frozen dark with no way home and only radio to say goodbye. These events are called tragedies, which I think is not quite true. Everyone knows beforehand that there are deaths. This knowledge is woven out into a whole tapestry of whispers and rumours and superstitions -- that K2 has a curse upon women, or that one may succeed in one's summit attempt more readily if it falls upon an exact date when previous successful attempts were made.
When instinct touches on the mountains, and intersects with death and superstition and peculiar weather and the like, one comes out instead with another meme -- that the mountain is sacred, that its anger is the anger of the gods, and that it should be left well alone. Or perhaps that it should be meddled with; for after all, Aleister Crowley spent not a little portion of his life trying to climb K2. These days the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world is not so because of difficulty, but because it is a a sacred place, and climbing is forbidden. And some say that Everest is sacred, and should not be insulted; although it had to wait until the 1960s to have a Nepali name at all, much less one of a goddess.
Now, here's another thing: Everest, or Sagarmatha, or Chomolungma: it is the tallest mountain in the world.
But it is not the tallest mountain in the solar system.
In fact Earth's mountains are entirely ordinary. There are mountains over half the height of Everest on the moon, and innumerable volcanoes on Io. Maxwell Montes on Venus is 11km tall -- somewhat more than Everest; and in addition its highlands are covered in a thin but shiny layer of weathered lead. There are mountains on Mercury and maybe on Titan. The solar system is, quite frankly, riddled with lumpy rocks.
And then there is Mars. Mars does not have tectonic plates; the slow dance of Earth's continents means nothing to it. Form a volcano on Mars, and that volcano will stay exactly where it started, until the end of Mars. Form a volcano which grows over time, and -- well. You might end up with Olympus Mons, a mountain so huge -- and so flat -- that if one could stand on its peak the rest of Mars would be invisible behind its horizon.
Olympus Mons is three times the height of Everest. Of course, it would be ludicrous to climb such a mountain -- there is not even a breathable atmosphere at its base. But I was raised with the bright, hopeful sci-fi of the Fifties in my ears, a creed which says How hard can it be? and Whyever not? to such hubristic concepts as terraforming, and thus it is not so unimaginable after all that such a place might one day -- oh humanity! -- have an atmosphere that one could breathe. And though there is a terrifying mile-high cliff at the base of Olympus Mons, thereafter the slope becomes rather shallow. It would not be a difficult climb, perhaps. Once one had been hauled up that terrible cliff. It would be a saunter, a gentle hill walk. Except that at the summit there would be very little between the climber and the black airless depths of space. Except that at the summit it would be impossible to survive.
And I was thinking again of sacred mountains, of the dead bodies on Everest and the high holy places. Would that be the function of Olympus Mons, on some far-future terraformed Mars? It would be the pure, cold dangerous climb ad absurdam, the pilgrimage without a concievable homecoming, the prescripted tragedy. Undertaking this pilgrimage, one would climb until one fell, in the high unmapped unguessable places, and one would fall on the gentle slopes amongst the frozen pilgrims of the past and there remain.
It is rather warm down here of Gwydir Street, and I have stopped dreaming of mountains some time ago. I am not entirely sorry to see them go.
