Mountain is available on DVD, Blu-ray and on demand. Narrated by Willem Dafoe, Mountain is a cinematic and musical collaboration between acclaimed director Jennifer Peedom (Sherpa) and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, one of the greatest chamber orchestras in the world.
Jammer deze trailers…. de film is zo anders, door de vreselijk mooie muziek in combinatie met de beelden…. mijn geliefde opera….
Documentaire gebaseerd op het boek van Robert Macfarlane. De film brengt een ode aan de bergen. Een bergtop bereiken wordt gezien als een grote prestatie, met de nodige risico’s. Verteller: Willem Dafoe.
credits
regie:Jennifer Peedomcast:Willem Dafoescenario:Robert Macfarlane, Jennifer Peedomproductie:Jo-Anne McGowan, Jennifer Peedomcamera:Renan Ozturkmuziek:Richard Tognettimontage:Christian Gazal, Scott Grayschrijver:Robert Macfarlanekijkwijzer:Ajaar:2017genres:Documentairelanden:Australiëimdb: Meer credits van Mountain opIMDB https://www.vprogids.nl/cinema/films/film~12553842~mountain~.html
Mountain is a 2017 Australian documentary film, co-written, co-produced and directed by Jennifer Peedom. It premiered at the Sydney Opera House in June 2017. Mountain follows Peedom’s 2015 documentary film Sherpa.
Synopsis
The film explores high peaks around the world while telling the relationship between humans and mountains across time.
Cast
- Willem Dafoe as Narrator
Production
After her critically acclaimed film, Sherpa, Peedom resumes her work with American mountaineer and photographer Renan Ozturk. He is responsible for most of the images in the film. American actor Willem Dafoe narrates the film and reads passages from Robert Macfarlane‘s book “Mountains of the Mind“.
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 84% based on 68 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Mountain offers a visually thrilling — and surprisingly affecting — look at man’s relationship with some of Earth’s most imposing natural wonders.” On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating “universal acclaim”.
Janine Israel from The Guardian gave the film four out of five stars and called it a “masterful documentary”. Gayle MacDonald from The Globe and Mail gave the film three out of four stars, praising the visual and musical feature of the film. Harry Windsor from The Hollywood Reporter called it “one of the most visceral essay films ever made” thanks to the musical score and the non-traditional narrative approach, however, he criticised the length of the movie, defining it “slightly overextended”.
Accolades
At the 8th AACTA Awards, Mountain won three awards: “Best Cinematography in a Documentary” (Renan Ozturk), “Best Original Music Score in a Documentary” (Richard Tognetti), and “Best Sound in a Documentary” (David White and Robert Mackenzie). The documentary was also nominated for “Best Editing in a Documentary” (Christian Gazal and Scott Gray) and “Best Feature Length Documentary.
Robert Mackenzie was nominated for the “Award for Best Sound” at the 2017 Australian Screen Sound Guild. The film was also nominated for “Best Documentary Feature” at the 2017 Hamptons International Film Festival and “Best Documentary Film (Local or International)” at the 2018 Australian Film Critics Association Awards.
Mountain (2017)
Regie: Jennifer Peedom | 74 minuten | documentaire | Voice-over: Willem Dafoe
We vergeten nog weleens dat de mens eigenlijk maar een vlekje is in een veel te groot universum. Wie daar graag aan herinnerd wordt, hoeft alleen maar te kijken naar de eindeloze hemel, de oneindige oceaan of de onmetelijke woestijn. Of hij trekt wandelschoenen aan en begint aan de beklimming van dat andere natuurfestijn: een berg.
De Australische documentaire ‘Mountain’ is volledig gewijd aan bergen. Vanuit de hoogte kijken we neer op de bergen beneden en (vooral) op de fanaten die bergen beklimmen, afdalen met ski of fiets, of zich met een parachute naar beneden storten. Sommige beelden zijn speciaal voor deze documentaire geschoten maar de meeste zijn afkomstig uit beeldarchieven van over de hele wereld.
De film kent drie dominante elementen: beelden, muziek en voice-over. De beelden zijn fabelachtig mooi, vooral die waarin de mens een kruimeltje lijkt tegen een enorme massa. Daarbij zorgen de halsbrekende toeren die de bergbedwingers uithalen voor spektakel en opwinding. De score met oude en nieuwe klassieke muziek, vaak onheilspellend en dramatisch, gaat een geslaagd huwelijk aan met de beelden. Dat huwelijk doet soms denken aan klassieker ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, al haalt ‘Mountain’ nooit dat niveau.
Dat mindere niveau danken we deels aan de voice over, die steeds maar hetzelfde praatje afdraait. Over de aantrekkingskracht van de berg, het bergbeklimmen als mentale beproeving, de berg als oerkracht, de mens als zoekende en meer van dat fraais. Gelukkig zorgt een korte geschiedenis van het bergbeklimmen voor een beetje variatie. Maar echt diep gaat het allemaal niet, en na een half uur geloven we die teksten verder wel.
‘Mountain’ heeft ook te kampen met een gebrek aan focus. Aan de ene kant de schitterende bergen, aan de andere kant de waaghalzen die nauwelijks oog lijken te hebben voor al die natuurpracht. Die waaghalzen zijn van het type dat bij gebrek aan bergen een driedubbele triathlon loopt, in een rubberbootje de Atlantische Oceaan oversteekt of de Eiffeltoren beklimt bij windkracht 10. De psyche van dat type leent zich allicht voor een docu, maar dan niet een die specifiek over bergen wil gaan.
Dat alles maakt van ‘Mountain’ een film vol schoonheid maar met een karige inhoud. De plots opduikende kritiek op het massatoerisme op Mount Everest komt te laat en is ook zo weer voorbij. Net als deze documentaire trouwens, die met 75 minuten mooi op tijd afklokt.
Henny Wouters https://cinemagazine.nl/mountain-2017-recensie/
Waardering: 3
Bioscooprelease: 22 maart 2018
DVD-release: 4 september 2018
Mountain review: high hopes at high altitudes
This meditative film, narrated by Willem Dafoe, explores humanity’s fascination with conquering peaks while urging us to have more respect for these wild places.
Michael Hale
22 December 2017
from our January 2018 issue
Credit: Jon Griffiths
In 1960, the American novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner wrote to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission extolling governmental protection of the wild. The final sentences of the Wilderness Letter, as it came to be known, stated: “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” Stegner’s words, articulating and weighing the emotional and spiritual value of wild places, find a present-day analogue in the writings of Robert Macfarlane, whose 2003 book Mountains of the Mind forms the backbone of this new documentary from Australian director Jennifer Peedom.
Peedom’s previous film, Sherpa, detailed the 2014 climbing season on Mount Everest, during which 16 Nepalese Sherpas died in an ice avalanche while preparing a route to the peak for commercial climbers. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the Sherpa guides refused to resume work on the mountain for the rest of the year, much to the chagrin of expedition owners unable to get their outraged wealthy clients to the promised summit. With Mountain, Peedom chooses to remain at altitude, contemplating the majesty of the titular landform and examining humanity’s relationship with it.
The opening credits show eminent classical musicians tuning up (the film is a collaboration with the Australian Chamber Orchestra), as a Hollywood star readies himself for voiceover duties, so one could be forgiven for suspecting an aesthetically awe-inspiring but ruinously sentimental prestige documentary – March of the Mountains, if you will – is in the offing. However, while its visual elements are regularly – sometimes literally – breathtaking, Mountain is also a nuanced meditation that could find a wide audience if distributed in mainstream cinemas.
Credit: Jon Griffiths
With a dynamism made possible by advances in drone technology, the film reveals mountains alternately as places of stately splendour and perilous exposure. Principal cinematographer Renan Ozturk has recorded a wide variety of adrenaline-charged footage, which is supplemented by a skilfully assembled archival section on mountaineering history and cuts from existing mountain films that will be familiar to many thrill-seekers and YouTube aficionados.
Excerpts show us American uber-climber Alex Honnold achieving a state of grace while free-soloing (climbing without a rope) the sheer rock face of El Sendero Luminoso in Mexico, and Danny Macaskill’s jaw-dropping mountain-bike ride across the Cuillin Ridge on the Isle of Skye. Their exploits gain greater meaning here, their human story dwarfed by enchanting landforms that, as the film notes, “were here before we were even dreamed of. They watched us arrive, they will watch us leave.”
Credit: Jon Griffiths
Macfarlane has distilled his 306-page book, which details the history of man’s fascination with mountains, into a few minutes of poetic voiceover script, read by the suitably craggy-voiced Willem Dafoe and interspersed throughout the 74-minute film. Remarkably little of the book’s essence has been lost, thanks to the artful combination of visuals and a notable soundtrack. The timeless feeling of beauty and perfection inspired by one sequence of mountain vistas is sublimely accentuated by the accompaniment of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, while the tension of more precarious scenes is heightened by a jagged original score.
While the film takes an unequivocally romantic approach to mountains, it doesn’t shy away from casting a critical eye on the colonial thinking that underpinned early mountaineering exploits and that continues in a different form today. A Western newspaper headline declaring Everest conquered, following Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s successful ascent in 1953, reveals an attitude that contrasts with the reverence shown to the mountain by people living in its shadow. The shots of huge queues of affluent novices being shepherded slowly up the world’s highest peak are among the most impactful in the film.
Commercialisation of the wild, even by those who love it most, is a complicated issue. Peedom’s project succeeds in conveying the allure of mountains, while also underlining their importance to us. Stegner’s letter played a major role in the passage of the Wilderness Act, which enshrined significant reserves across the US. With wild places throughout the globe now under unprecedented pressure, Mountain can be part of a contemporary geography of hope.
MOUNTAIN director explains soundtrack + win tickets!
BY JENNIFER PEEDOM, MOUNTAIN DIRECTOR
A unique cinematic and musical collaboration between the Australian Chamber Orchestra and BAFTA-nominated director Jennifer Peedom, MOUNTAIN is a dazzling exploration of our obsession with mountains. The documentary, screening theatrically in Australia from September 21, shows us the spellbinding force of high places – and their ongoing power to shape our lives and our dreams.
Jennifer and ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti drove this international collaboration that also involved US cinematographer Renan Ozturk, British writer Robert Macfarlane and American actor Willem Dafoe. The soundtrack features music by Chopin, Grieg, Vivaldi, Beethoven and new works by Tognetti. “Putting visuals with music can elevate music,” Tognetti says. “It’s what happens at the opera. You end up listening more with your eyes and seeing more with your ears.”
When Richard Tognetti of the Australian Chamber Orchestra approached me to collaborate on this project, I said ‘yes’ straightaway for three reasons.
Firstly, I knew the Australia Chamber Orchestra was an absolutely world class orchestra because I’d been to many of their concerts. I played violin until the end of high school, so I have some classical music training and a love of classical music. So the opportunity to work with the ACO was an opportunity I wasn’t going to pass up.
Secondly, it felt like a unique creative opportunity. Collaborating with an orchestra was always going to produce a very different kind of film, and I was interested in that as a creative challenge. Filmmaking is always about collaboration but I knew in this case, the collaboration was the most important aspect of the project. That idea was exciting.
I certainly had to flex my creative muscles in a very different way. Working with classical music presented a whole new set of creative constraints that we had to work through. But we approached these constraints as a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t always easy, but the result truly speaks to the trust and mutual respect of that collaboration.
The third reason I got involved was because, despite all of the films that I’d made on mountains and about adventurers, I still felt that I had something to say – there were ideas that I still wanted to express. There’s a line in the film: “To those who are enthralled by mountains, their wonder is beyond all dispute. To those who are not, their allure is a kind of madness”. I was really interested in exploring the space between those two points of view and how significantly our feelings towards mountains have changed in such a relatively short period of time.
Bringing Robert Macfarlane into the mix was an essential part of that collaboration. His book Mountains of the Mind explored many of the ideas I wanted to express, so I approached him to write a very sparse, poetic narration script. Without Robert’s beautiful words, I wouldn’t have been able to say what I wanted to say in this film. His script is breathtaking.
This project would not have happened without our principal cinematographer Renan Ozturk from Camp4 Collective, who I had worked with on my 2015 film Sherpa. A true mountaineer, whose images are utterly poetic. He was the third collaborator in this marriage of music, words and picture. He introduced me to a number of other cinematographers, whose images helped give us the vast international scope of this film.
Many of the images have been captured under the most extreme circumstances on the highest and most unforgiving mountains in the world using all sorts of new technology, including drones. So a big shout out to our Renan and also to the team at Sherpas Cinema and all the cinematographers who worked so hard to capture these extraordinary images.
Each of us brought our own ideas to MOUNTAIN, and it really was like a masterclass in collaboration. Each us raised the bar, inspiring the others to do the same. The result is a testament to that alchemy. It has been one of the most challenging, but enriching projects of my career.
I hope that the experience of seeing, and hearing, MOUNTAIN will be a very moving, dare I say transcendental experience!
https://www.cutcommonmag.com/mountain
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
Thu 13 Nov 2003 15.41 GMT
Possession
“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.”
– Théophile 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 grandfather’s 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 grandmother’s 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. Mill’s 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 mountain’s 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 expedition’s 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.
* * *
That was it – I was sold on adventure. In one of the reading binges which only the expanses of childhood time permit, I plundered my grandfather’s library and by the end of that summer I had read a dozen or so of the most famous real-life exploration stories from the mountains and the poles, including Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s tale of Antarctic endurance, The Worst Journey in the World, John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest and Edward Whymper’s bloody account of his Scrambles Amongst the Alps.
The childish imagination has more trust in the transparency of a story than the adult imagination: a readier faith that things happened the way they are said to have done. It is more powerful in its capacity for sympathy, too, and as I read those books I lived intensely with and through the explorers. I spent evenings with them in their tents, thawing pemmican hoosh over a seal-blubber stove as the wind skirled outside. I sledge-hauled through thigh-deep polar snow. I bumped over sastrugi, tumbled down gullies, clambered up arêtes and strode along ridges. From the summits of mountains I surveyed the world as though it were a map. Ten times or more I nearly died.
I was fascinated by the hardships these men – for they were almost all men – faced and endured. At the poles there was cold intense enough to freeze brandy solid, to freeze dogs’ tongues to their coats if they tried to lick them, and to freeze men’s beards to their jackets if they looked down. Woollen clothing stiffened to the rigidity of sheet metal, and had to be beaten with hammers to make it bend. At night the explorers melted their way inch by agonizing inch into their reindeer-hair sleeping-bags, which the cold had hardened into icy scabbards. In the mountains there were the cornices that overhung cliff-edges like horizontal waves, the invisible attacks of altitude, and avalanches and blizzards which could whitewash the world in an instant.
Except for Hillary and Tensing’s successful ascent of Everest in 1953, and Ernest Shackleton’s salvation of his entire crew in 1916 – Worsley’s miraculous navigation, the little James Caird steering its impeccable line across 800 miles of stormy southern ocean, Shackleton remaining imperturbable while above him Europe fractured like pack-ice – almost all of these stories resulted in death or mutilation of some sort. I liked these grisly details. In some of the polar stories barely a page went by without the loss of a crew member or a body part. Occasionally crew member meant body part. Scurvy ravaged the explorers as well, destabilizing the flesh so that it fell from bones like wet biscuit. One man was so badly afflicted that blood seeped from pores all over his body.
There was also something about the setting of these stories, the stages on which they took place, which stirred me profoundly. I was attracted by the bleakness of the places these men got to – the parsimony of the landscapes of mountain and pole, with their austere, Manichean colour scheme of black and white. The human values in the stories were polarized, too. Bravery and cowardice, rest and exertion, danger and safety, right and wrong: the unforgiving nature of the environment sorted everything into these neat binaries. I wanted my life to be this clear in its lines, this simple in its priorities.
I came to love them, these men: the polar explorers with their sledges, their songs and their soft spot for penguins; and the mountaineers with their pipes, their insouciance and their unfeasible stamina. I loved how inconsistent their rough appearance – their indestructible tweed breetches, their bristling mutton-chops and moustaches, the silk and the bear grease with which they insulated themselves against the cold – seemed to be with their almost fastidious sensitivity to the beauties of the landscapes they moved in. Then there was the combination of aristocratic finickiness (the sixty tins of quail in foie gras, the bow-ties and the vintage Montebello champagne that were carried on the 1924 Everest expedition, for example) with enormous hardihood. And their acceptance that a violent death was, if not probable, certainly very possible.
They seemed to me then the ideal travellers: unfazed by adversity and unassuming in person. I longed to be like them. I longed in particular for the thermostat of little Birdie Bowers, Scott’s right-hand man, who, during the voyage south on the Terra Nova, washed on deck every morning in a bucket of sea water, and who was able to sleep – to sleep – in temperatures down to -30C.
Above all, I was drawn to those men who travelled to climb the high peaks of the Greater Ranges. So many of them died. I learned the roll-call by heart: Mallory and Irvine on Everest, Mummery on Nanga Parbat, Donkin and Fox on Koshtan-Tau . . . The list went on and on, through the ranks of the less familiar. The imaginative light the mountaineers cast over me was like that cast by the polar expeditions – the beauty and danger of the landscape, the immensities of space, the utter uselessness of it all – but with high altitudes in place of high latitudes. To be sure these people had their faults. They were beset by the sins of their age: racism, sexism and an unflagging snobbery. And mingled with their bravery was an acute selfishness. But I didn’t notice these traits at the time. All I saw was impossibly brave men stepping out into the brilliant light of the unknown.
* * *
The book which undoubtedly made the deepest impression on me was Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, dictated by Herzog from a hospital bed in 195I. He couldn’t write it himself because he had no fingers left. Herzog was the leader of a team of French mountaineers which, in the spring of 1950, travelled to the Nepal Himalaya with the aim of being the first group to summit one of the world’s fourteen 8,000-metre peaks.
After an arduous month of reconnaissance, and with time running out before the arrival of the monsoon, the French team made their way into the heart of the Annapurna range, a lost world of ice and rock locked off by a ring of the highest mountains on earth. ‘We were in a savage and desolate cirque of mountains never before seen by man,’ wrote Herzog.
‘No animal or plant could exist here. In the pure morning light this absence of all life, this utter destitution of nature, seemed only to intensify our own strength. How could we expect anyone else to understand the peculiar exhilaration that we drew from this barrenness, when man’s natural tendency is to turn towards everything in nature that is rich and generous?’
Gradually, the team moved up the mountain, establishing successively higher camps. The altitude, the extreme cold and the load-bearing began to take their toll. But as Herzog grew physically weaker, so his conviction strengthened that the summit was attainable. Eventually, on 3 June, he and a climber called Louis Lachenal left Camp V, the highest camp, in a bid for the top of Annapurna.
This final stage of the mountain involved the ascent of a long, curving ramp of ice the team had nicknamed the Sickle glacier, and then of a steep band of rock which protected the summit itself. Aside from this band, the route offered nothing serious in the way of technical obstacles and, keen to save weight, Lachenal and Herzog left their rope behind them.
The weather was immaculate when they departed Camp V, with a pristine sky. Clear skies bring the lowest temperatures, though, and the air was so cold that both men felt their feet freezing inside their boots as they climbed higher. Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.
In his account of the climb, Herzog describes becoming progressively more detached from what was happening to him. The clarity and thinness of the air, the crystalline beauty of the mountains and the strange painlessness of frostbite conspired to send him into a state of numbed serenity, which made him insensitive to his worsening injuries:
“There was something unusual in the way I saw Lachenal and everything around us. I smiled to myself at the paltriness of our efforts. But all sense of exertion was gone, as though there were no longer any gravity. This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity – these were not the mountains I knew; they were the mountains of my dreams. “
Still in this trance – still immune to pain – he and Lachenal forced a way through the final rock band, and reached the summit:
“I felt my feet freezing, but paid little attention. The highest mountain to be climbed by man lay under our feet! The names of our predecessors on these heights chased each other through my mind: Mummery, Mallory and Irvine, Bauer, WeIzenbach, Tilman, Shipton. How many of them were dead – how many had found on these mountains what, to them, was the finest end of all . . . I knew the end was near, but it was the end that all mountaineers wish for – an end in keeping with their ruling passion. I was consciously grateful to the mountains for being so beautiful for me that day, and as awed by their silence as if I had been in church. I was in no pain, and had no worry.”
The pain and the worry came later. While descending the rock-band, Herzog dropped his gloves and, by the time he reached Camp IV, he was barely able to walk. Both his feet and his hands were severely frostbitten. During the desperate retreat down steep ground to Base Camp, he fell and smashed several bones in his already devastated feet. When he was forced to abseil, the ropes ripped away the flesh of his hands in thick strips.
Once the terrain became less precipitous, it was possible for Herzog to be carried, and he was portaged off the mountain first by piggy-back, then in a basket, then on a sledge and finally on a stretcher. During the retreat, his feet and hands were wrapped and bagged in plastic to save them from further harm. When they reached camp each night, Oudot, the expedition doctor, injected novocaine, spartocamphor and penicillin into Herzog’s femoral and brachial arteries, pushing the long needle in through the left and right flanks of his groin, and the bends of his elbows: an experience so painful that Herzog begged for death in preference. By the time he was off the mountain, Herzog’s feet had turned black and brown; by the time they reached the safety of Gorakpur, Oudot had amputated almost all of his toes and fingers.
I read Annapurna three times that summer. It was obvious to me that Herzog had chosen wisely in going for the top, despite the subsequent costs. For what, he and I were agreed, were toes and fingers compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it. This was the lesson I took away from Herzog’s book: that the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain-top – from death in valleys preserve me, 0 Lord.
* * *
Twelve years after I first read Annapurna – twelve years during which I had spent most of my holidays in the mountains – running my finger along the spines in a second-hand bookshop in Scotland, I came across another copy. That night I sat up late and read it through again, and again fell under its spell. Soon afterwards, I booked flights and a climbing partner – an Army friend of mine called Toby Till – for a week in the Alps.
We arrived in Zermatt in early June, hoping to climb the Matterhorn before the summer crowds clogged it up. But the mountain was still thickly armoured with ice: too dangerous for us to attempt. So we drove round to the next valley, where the thaw was supposed to be a little more advanced. Our plan was to camp high overnight, and then the following morning ascend a mountain called the Lagginhorn by its easy south-east ridge. At 4,010 metres, I reflected briefly, the Lagginhorn was almost exactly half the height of Annapurna.
It snowed that night, and l lay awake listening to the heavy flakes falling on to the flysheet of our tent. They clumped together to make dark continents of shadow on the fabric, until the drifts became too heavy for the slope of the tent and slid with a soft hiss down to the ground. In the small hours the snow stopped, but when we unzipped the tent door at 6 a.m. there was an ominous yellowish storm light drizzling through the clouds. We set off apprehensively towards the ridge.
Once we were on it, the ridge turned out to be harder than it looked from below. The difficulty came from the old, rotten snow which was cloaking the ridge to a depth of several feet, together with six inches of fresh fall lying on top of it, uncompacted and sticky. Rotten snow is either granular, like sugar, or forms a crunchy matrix of longer, thinner crystals which have been hollowed out and separated from one another. Either way, it is unstable.
Instead of picking our way cleanly from rock to rock, we had to clamber along the snow, never sure if there was a rock beneath each foot placement, or air. There was no path broken to guide us, either: evidently nobody had been up the ridge since the previous summer. And it was cold, too, violently cold. Where my nose ran, the liquid froze to my face in plump trails. The wind made my eyes water, and the eyelashes on my right eye froze together. I had to separate them by pulling my eyelids apart.
After two hours of work we were nearing the summit, but the angle of the ridge was becoming more severe and our progress had become even slower. I could feel the cold chilling me deep inside. My brain, too, felt slower, more slurred, as though the temperature had congealed my thought processes, turned them viscous. We could have turned back, of course. We carried on.
The final fifty feet of the mountain were very steep indeed, and deep in old, unsound snow. I stopped and assessed the situation. It looked as though the mountain could shuck all the snow off at any moment, like shrugging off a coat. Now and again little avalanches scurried past me. I heard the clatter of a rock-fall on the east face of the mountain.
I was jammed into the snow with the toes of my boots, the slope rearing up in front of my face. I tilted my head right backwards and looked up to the skyline. Clouds were hurtling over the summit, and for a moment it felt as though the mountain was toppling slowly on to me.
I turned back and called down to Toby, twenty feet below me, ‘Do we go on? I don’t like the look of this stuff at all. I reckon the whole lot could go at any time.’
Below Toby, the slope narrowed down to a chute which funnelled out over the precipices on the south face of the ridge. If I slipped, or the snow gave way, I’d slide past Toby, pull him off, and we’d free-fall hundreds of feet down to the glacier.
‘Of course we do, Rob, of course we do,’ Toby called up.
‘Right.’
I had only one ice-axe with me, but the slope was severe enough to need two. Some improvisation was necessary. I transferred the axe to my left hand and made the fingers of my right hand as rigid as possible. I would try to stab them into the snow, using them as an axe-head to give myself purchase. Nervously, I started to climb.
The snow held, the ad hoc axe worked, and suddenly we were there, on a summit the size of a kitchen table, clasping the iron-piping cross which peeked out of the thick snow on the summit, terrified and elated at once. To every side of us the mountain fell away. It felt as though we were balanced on the pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower. The clouds had cleared and a glossy white light had replaced the murk of the early morning. I spotted the yellow dot of our tent thousands of feet below. Seen from this height, the glacier which we had crossed the previous day to reach the base of the ridge resolved itself into a pattern of shallow pale billows. I could see dozens of tiny meltwater lakes which had formed in the hollows between the billows, winking at me like shields in the sun. Their blueness was startling. To our west, the light of the rising sun poured down the mountain faces of the Mischabel range. The wind was fierce, drumming against the skin of my cheeks until it was numb, and pushing coldly through the gaps in my clothing.
I looked down at my hands. I had been wearing thin gloves all the way up and, from jabbing them into the ice slope, three fingertips on the right-hand glove had been ripped off. I couldn’t feel those fingers. In fact, I realized with a strange lack of alarm, I couldn’t feel the hand at all. I held it up close to my streaming eyes. The fingertips which were exposed to the freezing air had turned a waxy yellow colour and become translucent, like old cheese.
I didn’t have any spare gloves. But there wasn’t time to worry about it anyway, because the rotten snow which had just about tolerated our weight during the ascent would already be melting in the morning sun. We needed to get down as fast as possible.
We moved quickly and efficiently during the descent, until we reached what looked like our final obstacle. It was a snow bridge, a thin, sagging ridge of snow maybe thirty feet long suspended between two rock pinnacles – like a sheet pegged up at either end. It was far too sharp and fragile to walk along the top of, and there was no way to climb down and round it. We’d have to climb out along its side, as we had done on the way up, with even less guarantee that the whole structure wouldn’t collapse and send us plummeting down to the glacier.
Toby began to kick himself a little bucket seat in the soft snow.
‘I take it from your behaviour that you’d like me to go first?’ I asked.
‘Yes, please, that’d be grand.’
I edged out along the near-vertical side of the ridge, kicking my feet into its side, the rope bowing horizontally between me and Toby. Where I kicked my feet in, the snow slid away like wet sugar, with a hiss. Here I am, I thought, standing on a more or less vertical wall of slushy snow, edging crabwise across its face, with frostnip in three fingers and only one axe. I cursed Maurice Herzog. Then I glanced down.
Between my legs I could see a whole lot of nothing. I kicked another crampon in, and a big slab of rotten snow lurched off from beneath my foot and cart-wheeled away towards the glacier, disintegrating as it went. I hung there, my arms raised above me, watching the snow tumble. A tingling began in my buttocks and then scampered to my groin and my thighs, and soon my whole midriff was encased in a humming, jostling swarm of fear. The space felt vast and malevolently active, as though it were inhaling me; pulling me off into its emptiness.
One axe only – why did I bring only one? Again, I used my right hand, the hand with the waxy fingers, to stab into the snow. The fingers didn’t hurt, which helped. And so I carried on, keeping up a rhythm. Kick, kick, stab, stab, swear. Kick, kick, stab, stab, swear.
We made it, of course – I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise – and as we sledged down the remaining slopes to our tent on our rucksacks, we whooped with joy and relief at having got the summit and made it back.
Sitting on a boulder outside the tent two hours later, I stared at my fingers with a fatigued disinterest. It had turned into a bright day, warm and windless, and the landscape was illuminated with the exact, egalitarian sunlight of high places. Sound carried precisely through the thin air, and I could hear the clanking and talking of climbers descending the Weissmies, half a mile or so away. My right hand didn’t particularly feel like part of me. But, I was vaguely relieved to notice, only the pads of three fingers were affected, and those not to any serious depth. When I tapped them against the rock they made a hard, hollow sound, like wood knocking on metal. I got out my penknife and started to whittle at them. On the flat grey rock between my knees grew a pile of little iotas of skin. Eventually, when I had whittled down to pink skin, and my fingers had started to hurt at each scrape of the knife, I cremated the pyre of shavings in the orange flame of a lighter. They went with a crackle and the scent of charred flesh.
* * *
Three centuries ago, risking one’s life to climb a mountain would have been considered tantamount to lunacy. The notion barely existed, indeed, that wild landscape might hold any sort of appeal. To the orthodox seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century imagination, natural scenery was appreciated largely for the extent to which it spoke of agricultural fecundity. Meadows, orchards, grazing fields, the rich sillion of crop lands – these were the ideal components of a landscape. Tamed landscapes, in other words, were attractive: landscapes which had had a human order imposed upon them by the plough, the hedgerow and the ditch. As late as 1791 William Gilpin noted that ‘the generality of people’ found wilderness dislikeable. ‘There are few,’ he continued, ‘who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature’s rough productions.’ Mountains, nature’s roughest productions, were not only agriculturally intractable, they were also aesthetically repellent: it was felt that their irregular and gargantuan outlines upset the natural spirit-level of the mind. The politer inhabitants of the seventeenth century referred to mountains disapprovingly as ‘deserts’; they were also castigated as ‘boils’ on the earth’s complexion, ‘warts’, ‘wens’, ‘excrescences’ and even, with their labial ridges and vaginal valleys, ‘Nature’s pudenda’.
Moreover, mountains were dangerous places to be. It was believed that avalanches could be triggered by stimuli as light as a cough, the foot of a beetle, or the brush of a bird’s wing as it swooped low across a loaded snow-slope. You might fall between the blue jaws of a crevasse, to be regurgitated years later by the glacier, pulped and rigid. Or you might encounter a god, demi-god or monster angry at having their territory trespassed upon – for mountains were conventionally the habitat of the supernatural and the hostile. In his famous Travels, John Mandeville described the tribe of Assassins who lived high among the peaks of the Elbruz range, presided over by the mysterious ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. In Thomas More’s Utopia the Zapoletes – a ‘hideous, savage and fierce’ race – are reputed to dwell ‘in the high mountains’. True, mountains had in the past provided refuge for beleaguered peoples – it was to the mountains that Lot and his daughters fled when they were driven out of Zoar, for instance – but for the most part they were a form of landscape to be avoided. Go around mountains by all means, it was thought, along their flanks or between them if absolutely necessary – as many merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries had to – but certainly not up them.
During the second half of the 1700s, however, people started for the first time to travel to mountains out of a spirit other than necessity, and a coherent sense began to develop of the splendour of mountainous landscape. The summit of Mont Blanc was reached in 1786, and mountaineering proper came into existence in the middle of the 1800s, induced by a commitment to science (in the sport’s adolescence, no respectable mountaineer would scale a peak without at the very least boiling a thermometer on the summit) but very definitely born of beauty. The complex aesthetics of ice, sunlight, rock, height, angles and air – what John Ruskin called the ‘endless perspicuity of space; the unfatigued veracity of eternal light’ – were to the later nineteenth-century mind unquestionably marvellous. Mountains began to exert a considerable and often fatal power of attraction on the human mind. ‘The effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great,’ Ruskin could claim proudly of his favourite mountain in 1862, ‘that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it.’ Three years later the Matterhorn was climbed for the first time; four of the successful summitteers fell to their deaths during the descent.
By the end of the century the Alpine peaks had all been climbed – mostly by the British – and almost all the Alpine passes mapped. The so-called Golden Age of mountaineering had come to an end. Europe was considered by many to be passé and mountaineers began to turn their attention to the Greater Ranges, where they exposed themselves to extreme hardship and even greater risks in their bids to reach the summits of Caucasian, Andean and Himalayan mountains – Ushba, Popocatépel, Nanga Parbat, Chimborazo, or Kazbek, where Vulcan was said to have chained and bolted Prometheus to the rock.
The imaginative potency of these greater peaks around the turn of the nineteenth century was formidable, and they frequently became objects of obsession within the minds of their individual admirers. Kanchenjunga, the 8,000-metre peak visible in good weather from the white-roofed hill-station of Darjeeling, enthralled decades of sahibs and memsahibs escaping the lowland heat of the Indian summer. ‘Clear and clean against the intense blue sky the snowy summit of Kinchinjunga,’ intoned Francis Younghusband, the Great Gamer who led the British attack on Tibet in 1904, ‘ethereal as spirit, white and pure in the sunshine . . . We are uplifted.’ An avid public followed the fortunes of Martin Conway’s bold 1892 expedition to Gasherbrum in the Karakorum via dispatches to The Times of London. And Everest, the highest and most potent of them all, came to enchant the British entière, who considered it very much their mountain. Among the enchanted was George Mallory, whose death on its shoulder in 1924 shocked the nation. A newspaper obituary for Mallory and Irvine drew admiring attention to the ‘close link of minds between the people at home and the assailants themselves’.
Today, the emotions and attitudes which impelled the early mountaineers still prosper in the Western imagination: indeed if anything they are more unshiftably ensconced there. Mountain-worship is a given to millions of people. The vertical, the ferocious, the icy – all these are now automatically venerated forms of landscape, images of which permeate an urbanized Western culture increasingly hungry for even second-hand experiences of wildness and wilderness. Mountain-going has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities of the past twenty years. An estimated 10 million Americans go mountaineering annually, and 50 million go hiking. Some 4 million people in Britain consider themselves to be hill-walkers of one stripe or another. Global sales of outdoor products and services are reckoned at $10 billion annually, and growing.
What makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die. In seven murderous weeks in the Alps in the summer of 1997, 103 people were killed. The average annual death toll on the Mont Blanc massif comes to almost three figures. Some winters more people perish in the mountains of Scotland than on the roads surrounding them. When Mallory climbed Everest, it was the last bastion of unconquerable earth, the ‘Third Pole’. It is now a gargantuan, tawdry, frozen Tai Mahal, an elaborately frosted wedding-cake up and down which climbing companies annually yo-yo hundreds of under-experienced clients. Its slopes are studded with modern corpses: most lie within what has become popularly known as the Death Zone, the altitude bracket within which the human body enters a gradual but unstoppable process of degeneration.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/13/guardianfirstbookaward2003.gurardianfirstbookaward
https://www.theguardian.com/books/guardianfirstbookaward2003
