"The Living Mountain"

This is indeed a gem of a book. Nan Shepherd's passage on river ice recalls what swooning Miles said to his Ekaterina: "I want to possess the power of your eyes."

• for more than four decades, until Aberdeen University Press finally and quietly published it in 1977. That same year, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and John McPhee’s Coming into the Country appeared; a year later came Peter Matthiessen’s Zennish mountain epic, The Snow Leopard.
• The pilgrim contents herself always with looking along and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto total knowledge.
• Such illusions, depending on how the eye is placed and used, drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again.
• which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.
• By continental measurement its height is nothing much—around 4000 feet—but for an island it is well enough, and if the winds have unhindered range, so has the eye. It is island weather too, with no continent to steady it, and the place has as many aspects as there are gradations in the light.
• Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.
• Its waters are white, of a clearness so absolute that there is no image for them. Naked birches in April, lighted after heavy rain by the sun, might suggest their brilliance.
• the whole wild enchantment, like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it. The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.
• This may be fun, but is sterile. To pit oneself against the mountain is necessary for every climber: to pit oneself merely against other players, and make a race of it, is to reduce to the level of a game what is essentially an experience.
• Like drink and passion, it intensifies life to the point of glory. In the Scots term, used for the man who is abune himsel’ with drink, one is raised; fey; a little mad, in the eyes of the folk who do not climb.
• The short-sighted cannot love mountains as the long-sighted do.
• Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered.
• bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity.
• Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself.
• To look through it was to discover its own properties. What we saw under water had a sharper clarity than what we saw through air.
• It was one of the most defenceless moments of my life.
• The good of the greatest number is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness.
• It was horrible to stand and stare into that pot of whiteness.
• suddenly there was the cloud, making steadily toward us, with a straight under-edge about the 3000 feet level. We thought: we’re in for it! But nothing more happened than that the sunshine went out, as though a switch had clicked; and in some twenty minutes the sun clicked on again,
• Once, on Lochnagar, we had watched the dawn light strike the Cairngorms, like the blue bloom on plums. Each scarp and gully was translucent, no smallest detail blurred. A pure clear sun poured into each recess.
• but no diagram can explain the serene sublimity these high panoramas convey to the human mind. It is worth ascending unexciting heights if for nothing else than to see the big ones from nearer their own level.
• The edge of cliffs hangs 3000 feet above the smooth water, which is broad and long enough to hold the whole majestic front, corries, ridges and foothills, that jut like a high relief from the block of the plateau. On a still day it has a dream-like loveliness.
• It lies within the tree level, which none of the others do, and has a lovely frieze of pine trees,
• For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength.
• I had no idea how many fantastic shapes the freezing of running water took. In each whorl and spike one catches the moment of equilibrium between two elemental forces.
• The full moon floated up into green light; and as the rose and violet hues spread over snow and sky, the colour seemed to live its own life, to have body and resilience, as though we were not looking at it, but were inside its substance.
• soft dry snow the pad of a hare makes a leaflike pattern. A tiny track, like twin beads on a slender thread, appears suddenly in the middle of virgin snow.
• Where water drips steadily from an overhang, undeflected by wind, almost perfect spheres of clear transparent ice result. They look unreal, in this world of wayward undulations, too regular, as though man had made them.
• Water running over a rock face freezes in ropes, with the ply visible.
• And if one can look below the covering ice on a frozen burn, a lovely pattern of fluted indentations is found, arched and chiselled, the obverse of the water’s surface, with the subtle shift of emphasis and superimposed design that occurs between a painting and the landscape it represents.


• These sultry blues have more emotional effect than a dry air can produce. One is not moved by china blue. But the violet range of colours can trouble the mind like music.
• Miles of this, however, stupefies the body. Like too much incense in church, it blunts the sharp edge of adoration, which, at its finest, demands clarity of the intellect as well as the surge of emotion.
• In the wettest season, when every fir branch in the woods is sodden, the juniper is crackling dry and burns with a clear heat.
• Birch trees are least beautiful when fully clothed. Exquisite when the opening leaves just fleck them with points of green flame, or the thinning leaves turn them to a golden lace, they are loveliest of all when naked.
• the flakes of their bark a foot and a half in length and thick as books, their roots, exposed where the soil has been washed away above the path, twisted and intertwined like a cage of snakes.
• Knowledge does not dispel mystery. Scientists tell me that the alpine flora of the Scottish mountains is Arctic in origin—that these small scattered plants have outlived the Glacial period and are the only vegetable life in our country that is older than the Ice Age. But that doesn’t explain them. It only adds time to the equation and gives it a new dimension.
• I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower—that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountain top, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and the effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age.
• seems odd that merely to watch the motion of flight should give the body not only vicarious exhilaration but release. So urgent is the rhythm that it invades the blood.
• The flight of the eagle, if less immediately exciting than that of the swifts, is more profoundly satisfying. The great spiral of his ascent, rising coil over coil in slow symmetry, has in its movement all the amplitude of space.
• food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain’s own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is—if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function—so much the more is the mountain’s integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.
• In startled flight, his wing-beats are so rapid that the white wings lose all appearance of solidity, they are like an aura of light around the body.
• Or a tossing forest of massed antlers.
• Its flight is fluid as a bird’s. Especially the roes, the very young ones, dappled, with limbs like the stalks of flowers, move over the heather with an incredible lightness.
• I feel that I want to say of her, as Sancho Panza, challenged to find reasons for continuing to follow his master, of Don Quixote: ‘I can do no otherwise … I have eaten his bread; I love him.’
• For falling asleep on the mountain has the delicious corollary of awaking.
• in our odd and unbalanced climate, there is usually a splash of radiant weather.
• drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again. It’s queer but invigorating.
• It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.
• the blunt blow of tumbling water,
• Walking barefoot has gone out of fashion since Jeanie Deans trudged to London,
• it feels water closing on it as one slips under—the catch in the breath, like a wave held back, the glow that releases one’s entire cosmos, running to the ends of the body as the spent wave runs out upon the sand.
• This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated. Then life pours back.
• Here then may be lived a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think. Each sense heightened to its most exquisite awareness, is in itself total experience. This is the innocence we have lost, living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.
• Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.
• The opening it makes in the mind is its capacity to connect the specific and the local with the universal (and as Robert Macfarlane points out in his lovely introduction, the universal is not the same as the general).
• Just as in our own lives events separated in time sit side by side in memory, so the effect of a book is to let us live nearer to total time than linear time allows.