Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit by Robert Macfarlane

Author:Robert Macfarlane [Macfarlane, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Nonfiction, Travel, Philosophy, Adventure, History
ISBN: 9780307538635
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2003-05-07T23:00:00+00:00

For a long time, Noah held the altitude record. Opinion differs sharply as to the location and height of the biblical Mount Ararat, upon the slopes of which the Ark was deposited by the subsiding flood-waters. And according to the expedition log (the Book of Genesis) Noah never actually made it to the summit. Nevertheless, it was indisputable that he had been to a considerable altitude. William Whiston, an eighteenth-century Cambridge cosmogonist, calculated that the mountain upon which the Ark came to rest was six miles high – that is, nearly 32,000 feet: 3,000 feet or so higher than Mount Everest. Had Whiston’s arithmetic been correct, and had the Ark been laden as described in Genesis, its humans and other animals would have died swiftly of hypothermia, hypoxia and the other fatal effects of extreme altitude. Shem, Ham, Japheth and Noah’s other implausibly fertile sons and daughters would not have gone forth and multiplied. The world would not have been restocked with flora, fauna or humanity.

So perhaps Whiston erred on the high side. But then early estimates of altitude, like early estimates of geological time, were deeply muddled. This is unsurprising. There was no need for accurate calculations of height. Almost no one climbed mountains, and for those few who did it was not a comparative undertaking. Measuring the depths of seas, or the extent of coastlines, was far more necessary than measuring height. Pliny the Elder claimed the highest mountain in the world reached 300,000 feet above sea-level: out by over 270,000 feet. Until the eighteenth century the volcanic Peak of Tenerife was thought by many to be the highest mountain in the world because it rose straight from the sea so prominently on one of the major maritime trade routes. It is in fact well under half the height of Everest.

To those early travellers who were obliged to go to altitude – the merchants and pilgrims who crossed the Alpine passes on their way to and from Rome, for example – it was obvious from the nausea, dizziness and headaches they experienced that there was a bad fit between height and the human body. Of the many early accounts of what is now referred to as AMS – Acute Mountain Sickness – perhaps the most vivid is to be found in the diary of Jose de Acosta, who in 1580 found himself unable to complete a journey in the Andes due to an attack of what the Andeans called puna. ‘I was surprised with such pangs of straining and casting’, wrote de Acosta, ‘as I thought to cast up my heart too, having cast up meate fleugme and choller, both yellow & greene.’ Travellers sought to combat the effects of altitude by clasping vinegar-soaked sponges to their mouths and noses; this seems to have done little to mitigate the symptoms of altitude, or to increase the pleasures of the journey.

There is scant evidence that any widespread aesthetic appreciation of views was in operation in Europe before the eighteenth century.

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