Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane Read Free Book Online Page A

later in
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
(1859), Lyell won over his audience with a combination of irresistibly accumulating facts – in this respect his writing resembled the processes it was describing – and illuminating anecdotes. There was something appealing, too, in the democracy of the knowledge Lyell was outlining. You did not need special equipment or long training to decipher the earth’s history: only an acute pair of eyes, a basic knowledge of Uniformitarian principles, and curiosity and courage enough to peer over the edge of the ‘abyss of time’. Given these minimal qualifications anyone could attend the most exciting show on earth – its past.
    To witness in action this new way of feeling about mountains, let us turn to the year 1835, and to the town of Valparaíso, ledged precariously on the Pacific coastline of Chile. The town’s name means Paradise Valley, and a less fitting name could not have been found for it. To begin with it does not occupy a valley, but rather the thin strip of approximately horizontal ground that runs between the Pacific combers and the range of red rock mountains which rise steeply upbehind the town. And it is positively not paradisal. The steady offshore breeze which scours the surface earth, the steepness of the ground and the salty soil mean that there is no vegetation to speak of. There is little other life to be found here save for the human inhabitants, who have made their homes in huddles of low white-washed houses with red-tiled roofs, which congregate in the stream-cuts and ravines. Near the shoreline, dories bob in rows, ready to service the big ships that come to anchor out in the deeper water – for Valparaíso, unlikely as it may seem, is Chile’s principal sea-port. Over the whole scene hangs the clear, dry air of the coastal summer.
    It is from Valparaíso on 14 August 1835 that Charles Darwin sets out on horseback for a long excursion into the Andean hinterland. Out in the bay is moored his ship, the ten-gun brig HMS
Beagle
, on which he is serving as scientific observer. While studying at Cambridge, Darwin had become interested in geology, and before he sailed south from Devonport on a ferociously stormy evening in December 1831, he packed the first volume of Lyell’s
Principles
as reading for the long voyage out towards South America. He tested Lyell’s theories in the field during a stop at the Cape Verde Islands, and by the time the
Beagle
first sighted the flatlands of Patagonia, Darwin’s imagination was primed to interpret the landforms he encountered in Lyellian terms: to infer a deep past for their present appearance. ‘I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brains,’ he would later write to a friend, Leonard Horner, ‘for I have always thought that the great merit of the
Principles
, was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind & therefore that when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes.’
    Leaving Valparaíso, Darwin first rides northwards along the coast for a day, in order to see the beds of fossilized shells which he has been told he must visit. They are astonishing – long banks of calcified molluscs which have been elevated, Darwin correctly deduces, bygradual crustal movement to their present resting-place several metres above the level of the sea. Having seen the shells – and having watched a gang of locals with pick and shovel plunder barrowloads of them for lime-burning – Darwin turns his horse inland, and canters up through the wide and fertile valley of Quillota (‘whoever called Valparaíso Valley of Paradise must have been thinking of Quillota’, he would observe later to his journal). The valley is densely packed with olive groves, and with stands of orange, peach and fig trees which have been manicured into tiny square orchards by the valley’s inhabitants. On its higher slopes prolific fields of wheat flash in the sunlight, and above