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

them rises the Bell of Quillota, a 1,900-metre peak from which there are reputed to be magnificent views. It is this mountain which Darwin has come to climb.
    After spending a night in a hacienda at the foot of the mountain, Darwin procures a gaucho guide and fresh horses, and begins with difficulty to make his way up through the groves of thick-trunked palms and tall bamboo which flourish on the mountainside. The paths are not good, and by nightfall the two men are only three-quarters of the way to the summit. They pitch camp beside a spring, and beneath an arbour of bamboos the gaucho kindles a fire on which he fries beef strips, and boils water for
maté
. In the darkness the firelight dances off the walls of their arbour, and the bamboo seems briefly to Darwin like the architecture of some exotic cathedral, illuminated by flickering flames. The atmosphere is so clear and moonlit, the air so lucid, that Darwin can make out the individual masts of the ships anchored twenty-six miles away off Valparaíso, like little black streaks.
    Early the following morning Darwin clambers up the greenstone blocks to the flat summit of the Bell. From there he looks across to the white towers and ramparts of the Andes, and down at the scars left on the flanks of the lower hills by the voracious Chilean gold-mining industry. The view astonishes him:
    We spent the day on the summit, and I never enjoyed one more thoroughly. The pleasure of the scenery, in itself beautiful, was heightened by the many reflections which arose from the mere view of the grand range … Who can avoid admiring the wonderful force which has upheaved these mountains and even more so the countless ages which it must have required, to have broken through, removed, and levelled whole masses of them? It is well in this case to call to mind the vast shingle and sedimentary beds of Patagonia, which, if heaped on the Cordillera, would increase its height by so many thousand feet. When in that country, I wondered how any mountain-chains could have supplied such masses, and not have been utterly obliterated. We must not now reverse the wonder, and doubt whether all-powerful time can grind down mountains – even the gigantic Cordillera – into gravel and mud.
    From his eagle’s-nest perspective, Darwin’s eye roves around not only in space but also within time. Indeed, the pleasure of viewing the
actual
scenery laid out before him is secondary compared with the visions he has of the
imagined
scenery – the masses of snow-capped peaks and ranges which must once have existed here but, thanks to the ‘wonderful forces’ of geology, no longer do. Darwin is, in effect, gazing at range on range of mountains of the mind, made newly and marvellously visible to him by Lyell’s doctrines.
    Moments like this litter Darwin’s journals. One of the principal thrills for the many readers of his published account of the trip,
The Voyage of the Beagle
(a bestseller in its day), was to travel with Darwin not only to the storm-hammered tip of Tierra del Fuego and the silver deserts of Patagonia, but also back and forth within the recently discovered expanses of geological time. The HMS
Beagle
was one of the world’s first time-travel ships – a prototype of the
Starship
Enterprise
, whose warp drive was fuelled by a mixture of Darwin’s prodigious imagination and Lyell’s insights.

    Anyone who has spent time in wild landscapes will have experienced in some form this deepening of time which John Playfair sensed in Berwick and Darwin felt in Chile. Early one March I walked the length of Strath Nethy, a long Scottish valley which runs round the back of the Cairngorm mountains. In cross-section the glen, like all the glens in that part of the world, is shaped like a flattened U. It is shaped like this because until around 8,000 years ago the Scottish Highlands were overrun with glaciers, as were parts of Wales and Northern England, most of North America and significant sections of