I’ve recently become bogged down in several areas — working, writing, etc. — and only my continued inspiration from Napoleon the Great hae kept up my spirits. No self-pity or fishing for sympathy here; these moods happen to us all, and in due course pass into other, better seasons of life. As I was lying awake thinking about things that crowd the brain during the least crowded hours of the night, my mind’s eye summoned an imaginary staircase. If I could take the first steps up, perhaps I could ascend to enlightenment, will, and maybe even answers. But immediately on the heels of that thought, there came another. What if I were to climb the staircase? What if it led . . . nowhere? Had I just turned a hopeful image into a despairing one? On the contrary, readers. It made the air sparkle. Transitional, haunted autumn, when we make our annual crossing-over, can have that effect. So, I dedicate this essay to the exploration of that structure which allows us to explore in the first place.
But first, let’s discuss the meaning and history of stairs. Our word “stair” translates in the Old English to upstîge, or simply “stair.” We can easily see that upstîge is related to the following modern lexemes: upstairs, story/storey, and stage (“stage” as in one of a sequence of levels). The term has even older roots in the Germanic staegar, which is close to the Dutch steiger, meaning: scaffolding/climb. We recognize from these our own “stagger,” “stumble,” and “step.” In turn, “step” is related to the German treppe and the Danish trappe. And because our nuanced English language, the subtlety of which allows us to pick and choose just the right word with just the right valence from our unusually large vocabulary (by some estimates over a million words, but who really knows?), multiple synonyms for “stair” abound. Take the word “scale” (as in to scale the heights of). The Romance languages’ word for “stair” comes from the Latin scalaria. The Italian has its scala; French its escalier; Spanish its escalara; Romanian its scara. Meanwhile, the Latin transliteration of the ancient Greek “ladder” is klimax. We can rightly conclude that our inherited tongue is a pleasing marriage of the great Classical and Teutonic traditions. Love your language, readers!
Our earlier human ancestors probably got their inspiration for stair technology from first, nature; second, necessity; then the demands of more complex societies; and finally, from the aesthetic awe that staircases can impress upon the senses. We can find natural examples of stairs at places like Italy’s Scala die Turchia, or the “Giant’s Causeway” off the coast of northern Ireland. The first manufactured stair was its most primitive, mostly two-dimensional iteration: the ladder. As civilizations matured and its members became ever-more invested in height and grandeur, their stairs had to evolve in complexity as well. Spiral staircases — economical in space, but rich to the eye — trace their origins to at least the fifth century BC, and became common after the completion of Trajan’s Roman Column in the early second century AD. During the medieval period, sometimes accused of being dominated by incurious sticks-in-the-mud, staircases became things of exquisite artistry. Building on this knowledge, Renaissance-man Leonardo da Vinci engineered the mazy double-helix staircase in central France’s Château de Chambord. Indeed, stair structures have long been “diverse,” but not at all “inclusive.” They exclude based on age — daunting, or impossible for small children and the elderly. They are obstacles for those suffering handicaps, injury, or exhaustion. Nowadays, they weed out the lazy.
Since their invention, staircases have been laden with symbolic meaning: They represent both the ascent to heaven and the descent into darkness or the unknown; a transition and a celebration, or perhaps regression and dread. Stairs can indeed be treacherous: a lure for a victim, a portal for a predator, with the goal of making contact. Untold numbers of people have suffered injuries or worse after losing their feet on a flight of stairs. They can be frail bridges over fantastic depths that combine the human fear of indefinite extension and definitive end. There is sometimes a queasy feeling that comes over us as we gaze up or down a long, winding flight of stairs, and then gauge the danger of climbing them — to who knows where? Who can say? We, too, are struggling through a transitional period in our race’s history for which there are no shortcuts. We have no choice but to take the stairs.
So, fix your eyes on the vanishing point, and let us begin the climb together as we hoist ourselves over an invention that has remained a central architecture in all our worlds, real and imaginary, natural and man-made, things of dreamscapes and nightmares. What’s the worst that could happen?
One of the scariest staircases that people have climbed were those on the cliff-steps of an ancient mountain. The thought that crosses one’s mind on the side of a lonely hill, or before the threshold of huddled mountain ranges, is similar to his second thoughts while taking a flight of darkened, creaky stairs: I shouldn’t be here. I am disturbing old memories. I am awakening monsters, cruel gods, or vengeful ghosts. One push, or fright from them, and I will fall off the edge, and keep falling forever. Veteran climbers have described mountain ascension as though they had passed into an alternate existence, or another dimension, where all else fell away. They breathed in ragged “lungfuls of the diamond air." It was like climbing a huge staircase, for one started from down there and made his torturous way up there. But in the meantime, he was neither here, nor there — a weird nowhere emphasized by the void above and the yawning chasm below.
Mountain-climbing as a popular sport began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a manner characteristic of the age, it matured into a flurry of nationalist-imperialist campaigns, as furious as any Alpine blizzard. Indeed, climbing or forging paths in the mountains have long been associated with the most exciting imperial conquerors in history: Hannibal crossed the Alps in the third century BC, and Alexander had earlier approached the Indian Subcontinent when matching wills with the Hindu Kush. The most successful painting of Napoleon was Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). “Soldiers!” the general declared to his troops after his crowning victory at Marengo, “Hannibal stormed the Alps, we have turned them!” From the gigantic bastions of Tyrol “the clangour of their trumpets resounded.” In this spirit, and when squaring off against an as-yet unclimbed mountain, the idea was not to woo, but to lay siege to its foothills. Sometimes more than 200 people showed up, all so that a handful of mountaineers might successfully stake their national colors atop the summit. These latter-day crusaders included peasants and courtiers: the climbers themselves, native guides, journalists, soldiers, photographers, porters, scientists, geographers, politicians, etc. If we bring overwhelming force to bear, the Mountain will have no choice but to surrender. Or so they must have thought. The foreign Mountain was an antagonist whom the army of European expeditioners would conquer for themselves and their empires.
One of the first men to try for the tallest summit in the world was a young Englishman named George Mallory (1886-1924). Handsome and intrepid, Mallory typified the passage in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim that explained how “from time to time God causes men to be born . . . who have a lust to go abroad” at the risk of any and all peril and to “discover news — today it may be of a far-off thing, tomorrow of some hidden mountains.” And the risk was great, indeed. Not only were mountains physically hazardous — more so than today, for lack of modern safety equipment — but they excited an awful feeling, part ecstasy and part dread. Amid the fluttering heights, the sky there was a darker blue, the sun more luminous. There have been no staircases so spiritually moving as those carved by Divine hand upon the greatest of our mountains. They are a gift of beauty that, like all true beauty, does not conceal, but emphasizes its deadliness.
When attempting a Himalayan ascent, there are narrow straits of both footpaths and timelines from which climbers mustn’t stray. In the case of George Mallory’s Everest — and throughout the greater Asian range — the stern dictator of these is the Monsoon. Like all storms, the South Asian Monsoon begins with air — with invisible heats and colds that conjure some of the largest and most visible phenomena on Earth. The hot, dry summer drafts that rise from India’s baking interior draw vast amounts of moisture from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. They swirl together, then unleash seemingly endless curtains of rainfall. But the seasonal storms that first overtake and then flood all before them suddenly meet the impenetrable wall of 229,500 square miles that is the planet’s greatest land barrier: the Himalayas. Like soldiers aligned in rank upon titanic rank, they bar any advance. The Monsoon clouds find the rocks too tall to surmount, and too solid to break through. Thus, they pack against the Indian side of the slopes and spend themselves in downpours, ferocious and long-lasting. This epic war between land and sky has been going on for unfathomable ages past and will continue to be waged for unfathomable ages to come. We humans have only a blink of the eye given to us with which to marvel at this natural drama; it’s no surprise that many are drawn to share a piece of space and time with our more majestic neighbors, tiny though it must be. It is within this window between Monsoon rains that Himalayan climbers must make their bid.
By the 1924 attempt at Everest, George Mallory had become skeptical of the aggressive method — the imperial siege mentality that dominated mountain-climbing strategy — and he longed to whittle the expedition down to essentials in personnel and equipment. At times, he thought of the mountain’s hewn sides as a “staircase for men to walk up and down.” But during others, he condemned such a view as “Lies, all lies! To think at all of mountains in [those] terms was a lie. The whole mood was [false], mean, vaunting, blasphemous . . .” If I had to guess why he favored this “truer,” more intimate meeting with the mountain, I would say that it had to do with his recent experiences during the First World War. In the most graphic way possible, that conflict had illustrated the folly of throwing more and more bodies over the top and expecting that a massive storm of men would be enough to flush out a fortified enemy. It was a crude, arrogant way to wage war. He also knew that no matter how many of their supporters and team-organizers encircled the mountain, at a certain point thousands of feet skyward, climbers would be alone — alone with their oxygen-starved thoughts and agonized steps; alone while half-crawling up the stairway that led to the “roof of the world.” That certain light, found only in the mountains, was the only thing that went with them as they ascended. But despite Mallory’s private wishes, the 1924 Everest Expedition mirrored its previous and grandly-outfitted attempts. As if speaking of an entrenched foe, Mallory admitted, “From Everest, we expect no mercy"
Both the trenches and Himalayan mountain-tops were indeed merciless, lifeless places, but they could not have been more visually or spiritually different. The muds of France sucked a man under, while the mountains uplifted his eyes to rungs leading heavenward. The promise must have been irresistible to a soul still healing from his wartime wounds. In his notes, Mallory referred to the “unshouldering” of burdens that was needed to take up a higher one, a process he called, “the golden dream.” During that late spring, he and his winnowing team reached the rare, lung-starving heights of 28,000 feet, near the First Step below the summit. In his final diary entry, Mallory was tired, but optimistic. “Sic istur ad astra,” he wrote, “so we go to the stars.” On June 8, 1924, 28,230 feet up the side of Everest, Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew (“Sandy”) Irvine were last seen by a fellow-mountaineer) who waited behind near Camp VI:
At 12:50 [p.m.], I saw M & I . . . on a ridge nearing the base of [the] final pyramid . . . There was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere, and the entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on [two] tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow crest beneath a rock step in the ridge; the black spot moved . . . [and] approached the great rock step and shortly emerged on top . . . Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.
No one knows whether Mallory and/or Irvine made the summit. In 1999 several climbers discovered the former’s frozen remains lying face-down on the snow just below the famous Yellow Band.His camera, still sheltered beneath his body and protected from all those intervening years of high-altitude blizzards, birds, and ultraviolet sun-rays, contained well-preserved negatives that nevertheless failed to solve the 75-year-old mystery. The romantic in me rejects this image in favor of his companion’s “fascinating vision.” I prefer to think that he did indeed reach the top, and then, as if ascending Jacob’s Dream-Ladder, “vanished” into clouds that no longer hid “the stars” from his eyes. It “may even be that he found [his] Kingdom."
.
Not all ascents have been made with such jubilant expectations. Indeed, mountains are an effective, but underrated setting for a horror story. Since ancient times, people have held them in great fear and respect. When turning toward the north, Livy contemplated “the dreadfulness of the Alps.” During a sojourn in Tyrol, a sixteenth-century Jesuit felt himself “displaced in an unknown, alien world.” High in the hills, there was “nothing elegant [or] lovely . . . only things huge and immense . . . and a certain appearance of infinity.” Frowning precipices rose, wreathed in mist. When he turned to one side, he saw blank flats and “contemplated the even surface of the sea, stretching on and on, as far as the sight of the eyes could ever reach.” Turning to the other, there was its impossible opposite: “the most riven face of the earth, enormous masses lifted up and depressed in various ways, towering, overhanging, leaning back, thrown together, in every kind of uneven and confused position.”[14] The startled priest could almost hear the cracking of these ancient plates. Half-dreaming, he cocked an ear toward the trickling noises of infant rivers, the murmur of “dark trees,” and “the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound.”
Mountainous areas have maintained their capacity to astonish and frighten us into the modern era. Patagonian peaks look like a small child’s drawing of mountains — impossibly vertical and piercing — spears in the void. Films about “Blue Light” filtering through the crystals of split rocks have borrowed from this pervasive, siren-like aura that inhabits all desolate places — particularly the frozen towers that crown our planet’s high ground. The 1933 Tibetan authorities forbade Western pilots — notably the Houston Flying Expedition — from overflying the northern slopes of Everest. Foul-tempered demons lived there and should on no account be disturbed from their slumber, they explained. While climbing the Alps’ Matterhorn, a group of mountaineers felt themselves “surrounded by the weird, unearthly flicker of innumerable will-o’-the-wisps that appeared to shadow [their] every move.” A terrified Swissman whispered, “Look . . . the dead people!” All present felt that “the fiends who haunt the crags of the Matterhorn were already gloating over their prey.” They knew that most people who go missing in the mountains are never found. Present-day mountaineer Stephen Alter described his own eerie experience near cliffs he knew well. On purpose, he had come alone. The area had always been “a private sanctuary.” But as he “ascended a natural staircase in the rock,” his sanctuary became an uncomfortable exposure. Alter “felt suddenly uneasy and afraid . . . [A]ll at once, [he] was gripped by a feeling of vulnerability . . . a primal impulse warning [him] of danger.” He froze in terror, “as if confronting a malevolent presence. Every shadow seemed to conceal a threat. Every rustling leaf signaled ambush.”) Alter obeyed his sixth sense, and went back the way he came.
In comparison to the white clouds and spiritually stirring peaks of the Alps and Himalayas, the mountains of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ered Lithui (Ash Mountains) enveloped its climbers in putrid fogs and impenetrable darks. No armies yet lay siege to the foothills of Sauron’s kingdom; only two hobbits, whose hopes for success were less likely than Mallory’s, ”crept along the road towards the mountains.” Soon, the path “began to bend away southwards, until it came right under the great shoulder of rock that they had seen from the distance. Black and forbidding it loomed above them, darker than the dark sky behind.” Eastward it curved, then rose “steeply.” The “imprisoned moonlight” did not illuminate their way, but only emphasized the “countless black holes looking inward into emptiness.” The sheer face of the mountain lifted before them, vertical as a ladder, for “they had come to the first stair that Gollum [their unreliable guide] had spoken of. The darkness was almost complete, and they could see nothing much beyond their hands’ stretch.” Each uneven step taxed their aching knees, until the hobbits were ready to give in to their exhaustion and collapse. Gollum encouraged them with an unhelpful, “We’re up . . . [the] First stair’s past . . . Next comes the Winding Stair.” A “chill draught” blew down “from the invisible heights above.” At no previous point had the hobbits regretted their journey more. If the stairs of Cirith Ungol led anywhere at all, it was no place for “decent folk.”
Ice demons, yetis, and abominable snowmen aside, the mountains have more often been a source of transcendent joy. “He who goes to the Hills goes to his mother,” was a Hindu proverb that Mallory may have heard from his native guides. If so, he must have agreed. As he scaled cliffs of ice, his “burdens” fell away. Indeed, mountaineers have always repeated the same refrain: “our bodies and souls vanish into a bottomless crevasse, even as we continue to seek the summit.” Whether emblazoned by a light too rich and bright in an atmosphere too thin, or haunted by unseen forces that lurked in a darkness deeper than night, the mountains have made the most beautiful and demanding of staircases, for they demand nothing less than surrender. Vanishing into them forever would, by contrast, be the easiest thing in the world.
But first, let’s discuss the meaning and history of stairs. Our word “stair” translates in the Old English to upstîge, or simply “stair.” We can easily see that upstîge is related to the following modern lexemes: upstairs, story/storey, and stage (“stage” as in one of a sequence of levels). The term has even older roots in the Germanic staegar, which is close to the Dutch steiger, meaning: scaffolding/climb. We recognize from these our own “stagger,” “stumble,” and “step.” In turn, “step” is related to the German treppe and the Danish trappe. And because our nuanced English language, the subtlety of which allows us to pick and choose just the right word with just the right valence from our unusually large vocabulary (by some estimates over a million words, but who really knows?), multiple synonyms for “stair” abound. Take the word “scale” (as in to scale the heights of). The Romance languages’ word for “stair” comes from the Latin scalaria. The Italian has its scala; French its escalier; Spanish its escalara; Romanian its scara. Meanwhile, the Latin transliteration of the ancient Greek “ladder” is klimax. We can rightly conclude that our inherited tongue is a pleasing marriage of the great Classical and Teutonic traditions. Love your language, readers!
Our earlier human ancestors probably got their inspiration for stair technology from first, nature; second, necessity; then the demands of more complex societies; and finally, from the aesthetic awe that staircases can impress upon the senses. We can find natural examples of stairs at places like Italy’s Scala die Turchia, or the “Giant’s Causeway” off the coast of northern Ireland. The first manufactured stair was its most primitive, mostly two-dimensional iteration: the ladder. As civilizations matured and its members became ever-more invested in height and grandeur, their stairs had to evolve in complexity as well. Spiral staircases — economical in space, but rich to the eye — trace their origins to at least the fifth century BC, and became common after the completion of Trajan’s Roman Column in the early second century AD. During the medieval period, sometimes accused of being dominated by incurious sticks-in-the-mud, staircases became things of exquisite artistry. Building on this knowledge, Renaissance-man Leonardo da Vinci engineered the mazy double-helix staircase in central France’s Château de Chambord. Indeed, stair structures have long been “diverse,” but not at all “inclusive.” They exclude based on age — daunting, or impossible for small children and the elderly. They are obstacles for those suffering handicaps, injury, or exhaustion. Nowadays, they weed out the lazy.
Since their invention, staircases have been laden with symbolic meaning: They represent both the ascent to heaven and the descent into darkness or the unknown; a transition and a celebration, or perhaps regression and dread. Stairs can indeed be treacherous: a lure for a victim, a portal for a predator, with the goal of making contact. Untold numbers of people have suffered injuries or worse after losing their feet on a flight of stairs. They can be frail bridges over fantastic depths that combine the human fear of indefinite extension and definitive end. There is sometimes a queasy feeling that comes over us as we gaze up or down a long, winding flight of stairs, and then gauge the danger of climbing them — to who knows where? Who can say? We, too, are struggling through a transitional period in our race’s history for which there are no shortcuts. We have no choice but to take the stairs.
So, fix your eyes on the vanishing point, and let us begin the climb together as we hoist ourselves over an invention that has remained a central architecture in all our worlds, real and imaginary, natural and man-made, things of dreamscapes and nightmares. What’s the worst that could happen?
One of the scariest staircases that people have climbed were those on the cliff-steps of an ancient mountain. The thought that crosses one’s mind on the side of a lonely hill, or before the threshold of huddled mountain ranges, is similar to his second thoughts while taking a flight of darkened, creaky stairs: I shouldn’t be here. I am disturbing old memories. I am awakening monsters, cruel gods, or vengeful ghosts. One push, or fright from them, and I will fall off the edge, and keep falling forever. Veteran climbers have described mountain ascension as though they had passed into an alternate existence, or another dimension, where all else fell away. They breathed in ragged “lungfuls of the diamond air." It was like climbing a huge staircase, for one started from down there and made his torturous way up there. But in the meantime, he was neither here, nor there — a weird nowhere emphasized by the void above and the yawning chasm below.
Mountain-climbing as a popular sport began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a manner characteristic of the age, it matured into a flurry of nationalist-imperialist campaigns, as furious as any Alpine blizzard. Indeed, climbing or forging paths in the mountains have long been associated with the most exciting imperial conquerors in history: Hannibal crossed the Alps in the third century BC, and Alexander had earlier approached the Indian Subcontinent when matching wills with the Hindu Kush. The most successful painting of Napoleon was Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). “Soldiers!” the general declared to his troops after his crowning victory at Marengo, “Hannibal stormed the Alps, we have turned them!” From the gigantic bastions of Tyrol “the clangour of their trumpets resounded.” In this spirit, and when squaring off against an as-yet unclimbed mountain, the idea was not to woo, but to lay siege to its foothills. Sometimes more than 200 people showed up, all so that a handful of mountaineers might successfully stake their national colors atop the summit. These latter-day crusaders included peasants and courtiers: the climbers themselves, native guides, journalists, soldiers, photographers, porters, scientists, geographers, politicians, etc. If we bring overwhelming force to bear, the Mountain will have no choice but to surrender. Or so they must have thought. The foreign Mountain was an antagonist whom the army of European expeditioners would conquer for themselves and their empires.
One of the first men to try for the tallest summit in the world was a young Englishman named George Mallory (1886-1924). Handsome and intrepid, Mallory typified the passage in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim that explained how “from time to time God causes men to be born . . . who have a lust to go abroad” at the risk of any and all peril and to “discover news — today it may be of a far-off thing, tomorrow of some hidden mountains.” And the risk was great, indeed. Not only were mountains physically hazardous — more so than today, for lack of modern safety equipment — but they excited an awful feeling, part ecstasy and part dread. Amid the fluttering heights, the sky there was a darker blue, the sun more luminous. There have been no staircases so spiritually moving as those carved by Divine hand upon the greatest of our mountains. They are a gift of beauty that, like all true beauty, does not conceal, but emphasizes its deadliness.
When attempting a Himalayan ascent, there are narrow straits of both footpaths and timelines from which climbers mustn’t stray. In the case of George Mallory’s Everest — and throughout the greater Asian range — the stern dictator of these is the Monsoon. Like all storms, the South Asian Monsoon begins with air — with invisible heats and colds that conjure some of the largest and most visible phenomena on Earth. The hot, dry summer drafts that rise from India’s baking interior draw vast amounts of moisture from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. They swirl together, then unleash seemingly endless curtains of rainfall. But the seasonal storms that first overtake and then flood all before them suddenly meet the impenetrable wall of 229,500 square miles that is the planet’s greatest land barrier: the Himalayas. Like soldiers aligned in rank upon titanic rank, they bar any advance. The Monsoon clouds find the rocks too tall to surmount, and too solid to break through. Thus, they pack against the Indian side of the slopes and spend themselves in downpours, ferocious and long-lasting. This epic war between land and sky has been going on for unfathomable ages past and will continue to be waged for unfathomable ages to come. We humans have only a blink of the eye given to us with which to marvel at this natural drama; it’s no surprise that many are drawn to share a piece of space and time with our more majestic neighbors, tiny though it must be. It is within this window between Monsoon rains that Himalayan climbers must make their bid.
By the 1924 attempt at Everest, George Mallory had become skeptical of the aggressive method — the imperial siege mentality that dominated mountain-climbing strategy — and he longed to whittle the expedition down to essentials in personnel and equipment. At times, he thought of the mountain’s hewn sides as a “staircase for men to walk up and down.” But during others, he condemned such a view as “Lies, all lies! To think at all of mountains in [those] terms was a lie. The whole mood was [false], mean, vaunting, blasphemous . . .” If I had to guess why he favored this “truer,” more intimate meeting with the mountain, I would say that it had to do with his recent experiences during the First World War. In the most graphic way possible, that conflict had illustrated the folly of throwing more and more bodies over the top and expecting that a massive storm of men would be enough to flush out a fortified enemy. It was a crude, arrogant way to wage war. He also knew that no matter how many of their supporters and team-organizers encircled the mountain, at a certain point thousands of feet skyward, climbers would be alone — alone with their oxygen-starved thoughts and agonized steps; alone while half-crawling up the stairway that led to the “roof of the world.” That certain light, found only in the mountains, was the only thing that went with them as they ascended. But despite Mallory’s private wishes, the 1924 Everest Expedition mirrored its previous and grandly-outfitted attempts. As if speaking of an entrenched foe, Mallory admitted, “From Everest, we expect no mercy"
Both the trenches and Himalayan mountain-tops were indeed merciless, lifeless places, but they could not have been more visually or spiritually different. The muds of France sucked a man under, while the mountains uplifted his eyes to rungs leading heavenward. The promise must have been irresistible to a soul still healing from his wartime wounds. In his notes, Mallory referred to the “unshouldering” of burdens that was needed to take up a higher one, a process he called, “the golden dream.” During that late spring, he and his winnowing team reached the rare, lung-starving heights of 28,000 feet, near the First Step below the summit. In his final diary entry, Mallory was tired, but optimistic. “Sic istur ad astra,” he wrote, “so we go to the stars.” On June 8, 1924, 28,230 feet up the side of Everest, Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew (“Sandy”) Irvine were last seen by a fellow-mountaineer) who waited behind near Camp VI:
At 12:50 [p.m.], I saw M & I . . . on a ridge nearing the base of [the] final pyramid . . . There was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere, and the entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on [two] tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow crest beneath a rock step in the ridge; the black spot moved . . . [and] approached the great rock step and shortly emerged on top . . . Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.
No one knows whether Mallory and/or Irvine made the summit. In 1999 several climbers discovered the former’s frozen remains lying face-down on the snow just below the famous Yellow Band.His camera, still sheltered beneath his body and protected from all those intervening years of high-altitude blizzards, birds, and ultraviolet sun-rays, contained well-preserved negatives that nevertheless failed to solve the 75-year-old mystery. The romantic in me rejects this image in favor of his companion’s “fascinating vision.” I prefer to think that he did indeed reach the top, and then, as if ascending Jacob’s Dream-Ladder, “vanished” into clouds that no longer hid “the stars” from his eyes. It “may even be that he found [his] Kingdom."
.
Not all ascents have been made with such jubilant expectations. Indeed, mountains are an effective, but underrated setting for a horror story. Since ancient times, people have held them in great fear and respect. When turning toward the north, Livy contemplated “the dreadfulness of the Alps.” During a sojourn in Tyrol, a sixteenth-century Jesuit felt himself “displaced in an unknown, alien world.” High in the hills, there was “nothing elegant [or] lovely . . . only things huge and immense . . . and a certain appearance of infinity.” Frowning precipices rose, wreathed in mist. When he turned to one side, he saw blank flats and “contemplated the even surface of the sea, stretching on and on, as far as the sight of the eyes could ever reach.” Turning to the other, there was its impossible opposite: “the most riven face of the earth, enormous masses lifted up and depressed in various ways, towering, overhanging, leaning back, thrown together, in every kind of uneven and confused position.”[14] The startled priest could almost hear the cracking of these ancient plates. Half-dreaming, he cocked an ear toward the trickling noises of infant rivers, the murmur of “dark trees,” and “the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound.”
Mountainous areas have maintained their capacity to astonish and frighten us into the modern era. Patagonian peaks look like a small child’s drawing of mountains — impossibly vertical and piercing — spears in the void. Films about “Blue Light” filtering through the crystals of split rocks have borrowed from this pervasive, siren-like aura that inhabits all desolate places — particularly the frozen towers that crown our planet’s high ground. The 1933 Tibetan authorities forbade Western pilots — notably the Houston Flying Expedition — from overflying the northern slopes of Everest. Foul-tempered demons lived there and should on no account be disturbed from their slumber, they explained. While climbing the Alps’ Matterhorn, a group of mountaineers felt themselves “surrounded by the weird, unearthly flicker of innumerable will-o’-the-wisps that appeared to shadow [their] every move.” A terrified Swissman whispered, “Look . . . the dead people!” All present felt that “the fiends who haunt the crags of the Matterhorn were already gloating over their prey.” They knew that most people who go missing in the mountains are never found. Present-day mountaineer Stephen Alter described his own eerie experience near cliffs he knew well. On purpose, he had come alone. The area had always been “a private sanctuary.” But as he “ascended a natural staircase in the rock,” his sanctuary became an uncomfortable exposure. Alter “felt suddenly uneasy and afraid . . . [A]ll at once, [he] was gripped by a feeling of vulnerability . . . a primal impulse warning [him] of danger.” He froze in terror, “as if confronting a malevolent presence. Every shadow seemed to conceal a threat. Every rustling leaf signaled ambush.”) Alter obeyed his sixth sense, and went back the way he came.
In comparison to the white clouds and spiritually stirring peaks of the Alps and Himalayas, the mountains of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ered Lithui (Ash Mountains) enveloped its climbers in putrid fogs and impenetrable darks. No armies yet lay siege to the foothills of Sauron’s kingdom; only two hobbits, whose hopes for success were less likely than Mallory’s, ”crept along the road towards the mountains.” Soon, the path “began to bend away southwards, until it came right under the great shoulder of rock that they had seen from the distance. Black and forbidding it loomed above them, darker than the dark sky behind.” Eastward it curved, then rose “steeply.” The “imprisoned moonlight” did not illuminate their way, but only emphasized the “countless black holes looking inward into emptiness.” The sheer face of the mountain lifted before them, vertical as a ladder, for “they had come to the first stair that Gollum [their unreliable guide] had spoken of. The darkness was almost complete, and they could see nothing much beyond their hands’ stretch.” Each uneven step taxed their aching knees, until the hobbits were ready to give in to their exhaustion and collapse. Gollum encouraged them with an unhelpful, “We’re up . . . [the] First stair’s past . . . Next comes the Winding Stair.” A “chill draught” blew down “from the invisible heights above.” At no previous point had the hobbits regretted their journey more. If the stairs of Cirith Ungol led anywhere at all, it was no place for “decent folk.”
Ice demons, yetis, and abominable snowmen aside, the mountains have more often been a source of transcendent joy. “He who goes to the Hills goes to his mother,” was a Hindu proverb that Mallory may have heard from his native guides. If so, he must have agreed. As he scaled cliffs of ice, his “burdens” fell away. Indeed, mountaineers have always repeated the same refrain: “our bodies and souls vanish into a bottomless crevasse, even as we continue to seek the summit.” Whether emblazoned by a light too rich and bright in an atmosphere too thin, or haunted by unseen forces that lurked in a darkness deeper than night, the mountains have made the most beautiful and demanding of staircases, for they demand nothing less than surrender. Vanishing into them forever would, by contrast, be the easiest thing in the world.
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