I’ve read Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain before, but for pleasure. It’s a beautiful book, and a powerful evocation of a specific place: the Cairngorms, a mountain range in northern Scotland. Because I wanted to write about it in the paper I’m currently working on, I had to read it again–this time, taking careful notes. Believe me, reading Shepherd’s prose more than once is a joy, and it’s a book I will return to again and again.
The 2011 paperback edition features an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, a fine writer and, among other things, a walker, as was Shepherd. That introduction is worth discussing in detail, because Macfarlane both reads the book carefully and sensitively and places it within a specific philosophical context that I would not have considered. He begins by describing the Cairngorms (a place I’ve never been, although I’d like to go) as “Britain’s Arctic”: “a low-slung wilderness of whale-backed hills and shattered cliffs” (ix). Shepherd only ever lived in the village of West Cults, near the foothills of the Cairngorms, and those mountains, Macfarlane writes, “were her heartland”:
Into and out of those mountains she went in all seasons, by dawn, day, dusk and night, walking sometimes alone, and sometimes with friends, students or fellow walkers from the Deeside Field Club. Like all true mountain-lovers, she got altitude sickness if she spent too long at sea-level. (x)
Shepherd lectured in English at the College of Education at Aberdeen University and was the author of five books; The Living Mountain, her last, was written in the final years of the Second World War but not published until 1977. Its focus is on the Cairngorms, which Shepherd knew “‘deeply’ rather than ‘widely,'” according to Macfarlane: “They were her inland-island, her personal parish, the area of territory that she loved, walked and studied over time with such concentration within its perimeters led to knowledge cubed rather than knowledge curbed” (xv-xvi).
Shepherd walked and hiked and climbed in the Cairngorms for decades, and yet unlike mountaineers, who seek the summits of mountains, Shepherd walked over them with a different goal in mind. For Macfarlane, she practiced “a kind of unpious pilgrimage”:
She tramps around, over, across and into the mountain, rather than charging up it. There is an implicit humility to her repeated acts of traverse, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point. The pilgrim contents herself always with looking along and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto total knowledge. (xvii)
Shepherd’s “first idea,” according to Macfarlane, was her belief that a mountain has an inside: “a superbly counter-intuitive proposition, for we tend to think of mountains in terms of their exteriors—peaks, shoulders, cliffs. But Shepherd is always looking into the Cairngorm landscape, and I now find myself doing the same when I am in the massif” (xx). “Again and again,” Macfarlane writes,
her eyes pry into the luminous interior of clear-watered lochs or rivers. She dips her hand into Loch Coire an Lochaine, she walks naked into the shallows of Loch Avon, she pokes fingers down mouse holes and into the snowpack. “Into,” in The Living Mountain, is a preposition that gains—by means of repeated use—the power of a verb. She goes to the mountain searching not for the great outdoors but for profound “interiors,” deep “recesses.” (xx)
“This preoccupation with the ‘inside’ of the mountain is no conceit, Macfarlane continues; “rather, it figures the book’s attempts to achieve what she calls an ‘accession of interiority.’ For Shepherd, there was a continual traffic between the outer landscapes of the world and the inner landscapes of the spirit” (xxi).
Shepherd’s second idea is her refusal to privilege a single perspective. “Her own consciousness is only one among an infinite number of focal points on and in the mountain,” Macfarlane contends. “Her prose watches now from the point of view of the eagle, now from that of the walker, now from that of the creeping juniper. In this way we are brought–in her memorable phrase–to see the earth ‘as the earth must see itself'” (xxiii-xxiv). “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else,” Macfarlane writes, “and The Living Mountain is filled–woven–with images of weaving and interconnection,” showing that the world is “an unmappable mesh of interrelations” (xxiv-xxv). The fact that this mesh is “unmappable” is vitally important. For Shepherd, “knowledge is mystery’s accomplice rather than its antagonist,” Macfarlane argues (xxvi). “What Shepherd learns–and what her book showed me–is that the true mark of long acquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty: a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge” (xxvi).
The Living Mountain‘s most radical proposition, according to Macfarlane, is Shepherd’s claim that “‘the body must be said to think'” (xxix). The book was written at the same time that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was writing The Phenomenology of Perception, in which the French philosopher
argued for the foundational role that sensory perception plays in our understanding of the world as well [as in] our reception of it. He argued that knowledge is “felt”: that our bodies think and know in ways which precede cognition (the processing of experience by our minds). Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are therefore inextricably intertwined or “engaged.” The body “incarnates” our subjectivity and we are thus, Merleau-Ponty proposed, “embedded” in the “flesh” of the world. (xxix-xxx)
For Merleau-Ponty, body and world are “endlessly relational,” and the world is “made manifest only by presenting itself to a variety of views, and our perception of it is made possible by our bodies and their sensory-motor functions. We are all co-natural with the world and it with us, but we only ever see it partially” (xxx). There are many affinities between Shepherd’s thinking and Merleau-Ponty’s, Macfarlane argues, but more importantly, her “belief in bodily thinking” gives the book a contemporary relevance:
More and more of us live more and more separately from contact with nature. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world—its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits—as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are literally losing touch, becoming disembodied, more than in any previous historical period. Shepherd saw this process starting over sixty years ago, and her book is both a mourning and a warning. . . . Her book is a hymn to “living all the way through”: to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world. (xxxi)
Shepherd’s book offers “a rigorous humanism, born of a phenomenology that–astonishingly–she mostly deduced by walking rather than developed by reading” (xxxii-xxxiii). The Phenomenology of Perception is on my reading list, and while I was aware of its importance before, Macfarlane’s discussion of the parallels between it and The Living Mountain makes me want to turn to it sooner rather than later.
“For Shepherd, the body thinks best when the mind stops, when it is ‘uncoupled’ from the body,” Macfarlane writes. “This is Shepherd’s revised version of Descartes cogito. I walk therefore I am. The rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the ‘I am,’ the beat of the placed and lifted foot” (xxxiii). The knowledge The Living Mountain offers “arrives slantwise, from unexpected directions and quarters, and apparently limitlessly,” just like the knowledge the mountain offers” (xxxiii). “However often I read The Living Mountain, it holds astonishment for me,” Macfarlane concludes; “there is no getting accustomed to it” (xxxiv).
The Living Mountain is divided into 12 chapters; each focuses on one aspect of the Cairngorms–the geology and topography, water, frost and snow, air and light, plants, animals, human activities–but all are interconnected. The first chapter, “The Plateau,” begins with what is in many ways a summary of the book and its purpose:
Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them. (1)
Shepherd describes the Cairngorms for readers unfamiliar with them and then writes, “this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind” (1). Part of that reality is the “malady” that afflicts people like her, who are susceptible to mountains:
This bodily lightness, then, in the rarefied air, combines with the liberation of space to give mountain feyness to those who are susceptible to such a malady. For it is a malady, subverting the will and superseding the judgment: but a malady of which the afflicted will never ask to be cured. For this nonsense of physiology does not really explain it at all. . . . No, there is more in the lust for a mountain top than a perfect physiological adjustment. What more there is lies within the mountain. Something moves between me and it. Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it. (8)
The Living Mountain recounts that movement between place and mind, the interpenetration that alters the nature of both.
In the second chapter, “The Recesses,” Shepherd recollects her earlier encounters with the mountains. “At first, made to discover the tang of height, I made always for the summits, and would not take time to explore the recesses,” she writes (9). Then, she went with a man “who knew the hill better than I did then” to the Coire an Lochain, where she saw Loch Coire an Lochain, a loch whose unremarkable name–“Loch of the Corrie of the Loch, that is all” (10)–belies its remarkable character: “I put my fingers in the water and found it cold. I listened to the waterfall until I no longer heard it. I let my eyes travel from shore to shore very slowly and was amazed at the width of the water” (10). This experience changed Shepherd’s sense of how things are: “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 onlooker. This is how the earth must see itself” (11). “So I looked slowly across the Coire Loch, and began to understand that haste can do nothing with these hills,” she continues. “I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see” (11). She had a similar experience later, encountering Loch Avon, whose icy waters she waded into: “My spirit was as naked as my body,” she recalls. “It was one of the most defenceless moments of my life” (13). She sees the edge of the shelf along the shore, the dividing point between the loch’s shallows and its great depths, and is shaken: “I do not think it was the imminence of personal bodily danger that shook me,” she writes–so it was not a fear of drowning that prompted her strange response. “That first glance down had shocked me into a heightened power of myself, in which even fear became a rare exhilaration: not that it ceased to be fear, but fear itself, so impersonal, so keenly apprehended, enlarged rather than constricted the spirit,” she continues (14).
Part of the loch’s power, she continues, is its inaccessibility. “Silence belongs to it,” she writes. “If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. 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” (14). Listening, in the hills, is better than speaking, and having no destination, rather than heading for the mountain’s summits, is necessary if one is to understand: “Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him” (15).
The third chapter, “The Group,” recounts two ideas that have persisted for Shepherd since her first experience climbing in the Cairngorms, a summit of Ben MacDhui. The first idea is the notion “that a mountain has an inside,” because at the top of Ben MacDhui was a “silent shining loch” (16). The second idea, she continues, “is of the inside of a cloud,” because a bank of cloud rolled in while she was on the mountain (17). That is not an uncommon experience in the Cairngorms, and Shepherd recollects her experiences inside clouds. “Once I was inside a cloud that gave no sensation whatever,” she remembers. “From within it, it was neither tangible nor visible, though as it approached it had looked thick and threatening” (17-18). A few times she has been able to “walk out through the top of a cloud” (18). “Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons,” she writes. “Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation” (18).
Much of these first three chapters is about vision, about seeing the mountains from a distance, and silence. The fourth chapter, “Water,” moves from distant objects to closer ones. It begins with a return to the mountains: “So I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place. I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while. . . . I can see to the ends of the earth and far up into the sky” (22). The sense of repetition conveyed by the word “again” is important; Shepherd’s repeated encounters with this place are the precondition for her intimacy with it. “As I stand there in the silence,” she continues, “I become aware that the silence is not complete. Water is speaking. I go towards it, and almost at once the view is lost: for the plateau has its own hollows, and this one slopes widely down to one of the great inward fissures, the Garbh Coire” (22)–the source of the River Dee:
Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself. (23)
Streams and burns are everywhere on the mountain, appearing and then disappearing into the rock. “The water from the granite is cold,” Shepherd writes. “To drink it at the source makes the throat tingle. A sting of life is in its touch. Yet there are midsummer days when even on the plateau the streams are warm enough to bathe in” (26). “The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower,” she continues:
One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes—the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear my distinguish a dozen different notes at once. (26)
When in spate, the water’s force is dangerous:
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 fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and unremitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. . . . I cannot fathom its power. (27)
The idea that there are mysteries to this place that cannot be understood is, as Macfarlane stated in the introduction, one of the central arguments of The Living Mountain.
The next chapter, “Frost and Snow,” covers topics you would think Canadians would understand, but Shepherd has spent a lot of time observing winter on the mountain. She begins with “the struggle between frost and the force in the running water,” a struggle that “is not quickly over” (29). She once spent a day in midwinter watching burns freeze as the weather turned cold: “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” (29). Sometimes, she notes, a third force, the wind, complicates the forms produced by the freezing water:
The ice may be crystal clear, but more probably is translucent; crimpled, cracked, or bubbled; green throughout or at the edges. Where the water comes wreathing over stones the ice is opaque, in broken circular structure. Where the water runs thinly over a line of stones right across the bed and freezes in crinkled green cascades of ice, then a dam forms further up of half frozen slush, green, though colourless if lifted out, solid at its margins, foliated, with the edges all separate, like untrimmed hand-made paper, and each edge a vivid green. (31)
“In short, there is no end to the lovely things that frost and the running of water can create between them,” she concludes, but she also registers her sense that descriptions of “these delicate manifestations” cannot possibly describe them adequately (30-31).
Shepherd recalls sleeping out on a mountain top in winter (like Macfarlane, who often sleeps out in winter, Shepherd has no fear of the cold):
The intense frost, the cloudless sky, the white world, the setting sun and the rising moon, as we gazed on them from the slop of Morrone, melted into a prismatic radiation of blue, helio, mauve, and rose. 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. (29-30)
The following day, in the sunshine, the mountain was very different: “How crisp, how bright a world! but, except for the crunch of our own boots on the snow, how silent,” she writes. “But it was not an empty world. For everywhere in the snow were the tracks of birds and animals,” tracks which “give to winter hill walking a distinctive pleasure. One is companioned, though not in time” (30).
Shepherd’s attention to what happens when the burns freeze is matched by her attention to them when they melt:
At one point . . . near the exit of a loch, the peculiar motion of the current among ice-floes has woven the thousands of floating pine-needles into compacted balls, so intricately intertwined that their symmetrical shape is permanently retained. They can be lifted out of the water and kept for years, a botanical puzzle to those who have not been told the secret of their formation. (33)
She notes the shapes formed as snow is “played with by frost and wind” (33), and the appearance of clouds that foretell the coming of snow (33), and the colours of snow falling and of the land after it has fallen, and of a snowy sky (34). The snow-covered plateau, “seen from without, while snow is taking possession, changes with every air,” she writes (34). Yet the snowy mountain is dangerous, not only because of the risk of getting lost in a storm and freezing to death, but because of the reflection of sunlight. “The winter light has not the strength to harm,” she notes, but in the spring, when the light is stronger, shat isn’t the case, and she was once left badly sunburned and snow-blind at the end of April (35-36).
Still, it is the blizzards that are the greatest danger:
I have watched, from the shoulder of Morrone, the Cairngorm mass eddy and sink and rise (as it seemed) like a tossed wreck on a yellow sea. Sky and the wrack of a precipice and overhang were confounded together. Now a spar, now a mast, just recognisable as buttress or cornice, tossed for a moment in the boiling sea of cloud. Then the sea closed on it, to open again with another glimpse of mounting spars—a shape drove its way for a moment through the smother, and was drawn under by the vicious swirl. Ashen and yellow, the sky kicked convulsively. (36)
It was not long before that storm reached the place where she stood watching: “Soon I could hardly stand erect against their force. And on the wind sailed minute thistledowns of snow, mere gossamers. Their fragility, insubstantial almost as air, presaged a weight and solidity of snow that was to lie on the land for many weeks” (37). “Blizzard is the most deadly condition of these hills,” Shepherd writes:
It is wind that is to be feared, even more than snow itself. Of the lives that have been lost in the Cairngorms while I have been frequenting them (there have been about a dozen, excepting those who have perished in plane crashes) four were lost in blizzard. Three fell from the rock—one of these a girl. One was betrayed by the ice-hard condition of a patch of snow in May, and slipped. All these were young. Two older men have gone out, and disappeared. The body of one of these was discovered two years later. (37-38)
She tells a story of two boys who foolishly headed out onto the mountain just before a blizzard hit, and who froze to death. “They committed, I suppose, an error of judgment, but I cannot judge them,” she concludes. “For it is the risk we must all take when we accept individual responsibility for ourselves on the mountain, and until we have done that, we do not begin to know it” (39-40). The mountain has dangers, and that it is impossible to know the mountain unless one accepts them–and the possibility that one might be harmed by them.
Shepherd begins chapter six, “Air and Light,” with a discussion of the “deep and intense” shadows that the mountain’s “rarefied air” creates (41). “The air is part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and soil,” she continues. “It has its own air; and it is to the quality of its air that is due the endless diversity of its colourings” (41). In addition to colour, the air’s moisture can cause optical illusions–“those shifts in the apparent size, remoteness, and height in the sky of familiar hills” (42). Those illusions are “part of the horror of walking in mist on the plateau, for suddenly through a gap one sees solid ground that seems three steps away but lies in sober face beyond a 2000 foot chasm” (42). “And once in the Monadhliaths,” she writes,
on a soft spring day when the distances were hazed, valley, hills and sky all being a faintly luminous grey-blue, with no detail, I was suddenly aware of a pattern of definite white lines high above me in the sky. The pattern defined itself more clearly; it was familiar; I realised it was the pattern of the plateau edge and corries of the Cairngorms, where the unmelted snow still lay. There it hung, a snow skeleton, attached to nothing, much higher than I should have expected it to be. (42)
Rain, haze, and mist also affect how one sees. Mist is the most frightening; “when the mist thickens, one walks in a blind world,” she writes. “And that is bad: though there is a thrill in its eeriness, and a sound satisfaction in not getting lost” (44). There is beauty in the rain, she writes, but not a “sodden, sullen black rain that invades body and soul alike”; at such times, the mountain “becomes a monstrous place” (44). It is also desolate in the early spring, “when the snow is rather dirty, perished in places like a worn dress”:
But even in this scene of grey desolation, if the sun comes out and the wind rises, the eye may suddenly perceive a miracle of beauty. For on the ground the down of a ptarmigan’s breast feather has caught the sun. Light blows through it, so transparent the fugitive spindrift feather has become. It blows away and vanishes. (44-45)
On another “drab” spring day, “feeling as drab as the weather,”
I stand on a bridge above a swollen stream. And suddenly the world is made new. Submerged but erect in the margin of the stream I see a tree hung with light—a minimal tree, but exquisite, its branches delicate with globes of light that sparkle under the water. I clamber down and thrust a sacrilegious hand into the stream: I am holding a sodden and shapeless thing. I slip it again under the water and instantly again it is a tree of light. (45)
The “tree of light” turns out to be a branch of St. John’s Wort, the oily leaves of which are reflecting the light (45).
“Storm in the air wakes the hidden fires,” Shepherd writes (45). Those “hidden fires” include lightning, the aurora borealis, and “the electric flickers we call fire flauchts” (45). “Under these alien lights the mountains are remote. They withdraw in darkness” (45). That reminds Shepherd of what it’s like walking in the dark, which “can reveal new knowledge about a particular place” (46). Once, during a wartime blackout, she walked over the moor:
it amazed me to find how unfamiliar I was with that path. I had followed it times without number, yet now, when my eyes were in my feet, I did not know its bumps and holes, nor where the trickles of water crossed it, nor where it rose and fell. It astonished me that my memory was so much in the eye and so little in the feet, for I am not awkward in the dark and walk easily and happily in it. Yet here I am stumbling because the rock has made a hump in the ground. To be a blind man, I see, needs application. (46)
The more one comes to know the mountain, the more mysteries it appears to possess.
In her seventh chapter, “Life: The Plants,” Shepherd sets out to correct a misapprehension her readers might have about the mountain after reading the previous half of the book:
I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world. But I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grow from the soil and breathes the air. All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird—all are one. (48)
It is surprising, though, given the “terrible blasting winds,” that anything can grow on the mountain (48). “The plants of the plateau are low in stature, sitting tight to the ground with now loose ends for the wind to catch,” she writes. “They creep, either along the surface, or under it; or they anchor themselves by a heavy root massive out of all proportion to their external growth” (49-50). Lower down the slopes and on the moors is the “profuse luxuriance” of the heather (50). Walking through the heather in summer, its pollen “rises in a perfumed cloud” and
settles on one’s boots, or if one is walking barefoot, on feet and legs, yellowy-fawn in colour, silky to the touch, yet leaving a perceptible grit between the fingers. Miles of this, however, stupifies 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. (51)
The best thing about heather is the feel of it underfoot–especially when she removes her boots and walks barefoot on the mountain.
There are many smells on the mountain, but they are all of life, “plant and animal. Even the good smell of earth, one of the best smells in the world is a smell of life, because it is the activity of bacteria in it that sets up this smell” (52). She loves the odours of plants, particularly fir trees and pines, which, because “the fragrance is the sap, is the very life itself”: “When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering. I draw life in through the delicate hairs of my nostrils” (52). Here is the interpenetration between Shepherd and the mountain that Macfarlane describes; Shepherd’s nostril hairs are an interior version of the pines’ needles, and the life of one enters into the life of the other. The birch trees, though, require rain to release their odour: “It is a scent with body to it, fruity like old brandy, and on a wet warm day, one can be as good as drunk with it. Acting through the sensory nerves, it confuses the higher centres; one is excited, with no cause that the wit can define” (53). The birches are loveliest when naked: “Without transfiguration, they are seen to be purple–when the sap is rising, a purple so glowing that I have caught sight of a birchwood on a hillside and for one incredulous moment thought the heather was in bloom” (53). But even more spectacular than spring is October, “the coloured month here, far more brilliant than June, blazing more sharply than August,” as the leaves of deciduous trees and shrubs turn colour (54).
Shepherd shifts now to the effect of human activity on the forests. The great old-growth pine forest of Rothiemurchus is mostly gone, she notes, and the effects on animals, birds, and the land itself are marked (54-56). Other activities seem less catastrophic; she describes how old women use fir roots to make fire for tea (57-58), and recalls her childhood experiences of picking stag moss:
We lay on the heather and my fingers learned to feel their way along each separate trail and side branch, carefully detaching each tiny root, until we had thick bunchy pieces many yards long. It was a good art to teach a child. Though I did not know it then, I was learning my way in, through my own fingers, to the secret of growth. (58)
The mountain “never quite gives away” that secret, Shepherd writes, and although humans are “slowly learning to read it,” watching, pondering, patiently adding “fact to fact,” “[t]he more one learns of this delicate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect . . . the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery” (59).
The following chapter, “Life: Birds, Animals, Insects,” examines the other life forms on the plateau. Shepherd recalls her first visit there in summer, on a warm day, and her discovery of swifts:
Something dark swished past the side of my head at a speed that made me giddy. Hardly had I got back my balance when it came again, whistling through the windless air, which eddied around me with the motion. This time my eyes were ready, and I realised that a swift was sweeping in mighty curves over the edge of the plateau, plunging down the face of the rock and rising again like a jet of water. (60)
She is “shocked . . . with a thrill of elation. All that volley of speed, those convolutions of delight, to catch a few flies! The discrepancy between purpose and performance made me laugh aloud–a laugh that gave the feeling of release as though I had been dancing for a long time” (60). There is something erotic in that release, and in the strength of her response to these birds:
I have never felt so strongly as when watching swifts on the mountain top. Their headlong rush, each curve of which is at the same time a miracle of grace, the swishing sound of their cleavage of the air and the occasional high pitched cry that is hardly like the note of an earthly bird, seem to make visible and audible some essence of the free, wild spirit of the mountain. (61)
“Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain–eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare,” she writes. “The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches may hope to survive” (64). And yet, she continues, “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” (64).
But speed is not the only characteristic of the animals and birds living on the plateau. Deer, especially, seem to have the ability to become invisible: “Indeed there are times when the earth seems to re-absorb this creature of air and light,” Shepherd writes. “Roes melt into the wood–I have stared a long time into birches where I knew a doe was standing and saw her only when at last she flicked an ear” (72). Fawns, though, lack patience, and will walk away rather than stand still (72).
Shepherd concludes the chapter with a catalogue of bird, animal, and insect life on the mountain:
Other young things–leverets in the form wrapped in silky hair–fox cubs playing in the sun in a distant fold of the hill–the fox himself with his fat red brush–the red-brown squirrel in the woods below, whacking his tail against the tree-trunk and chattering through closed lips (I think) against the intruder–gold-brown lizards and the gold-brown floss of cocoons in the heather–small golden bees and small blue butterflies–green dragon flies and emerald beetles–moths like oiled paper and moths like burnt paper–water-beetles skimming the highest tarns–small mice so rare seen but leaving a thousand tracks upon the snow–ant-heaps of birch-twigs or pine-needles (preens, in the northern world) flickering with activity when the sun shines–midges, mosquitoes, flies by the hundred thousand, adders and a rare strange slowworm–small frogs jumping like tiddly-winks–rich brown hairy caterpillars by the handful and fat green ones with blobs of amethyst, a perfect camouflage on heather–life in so many guises. (74)
Those life forms are so varied and wonderful, compared to the creatures humans value for economic reasons–sheep, deer, and Highland cattle, whose faces, Shepherd suggests, must “be the origin of the Scots conception of the Devil” (74-75). The life that exists outside of what we value, outside of what we consider to be a resource, is nearly beyond our comprehension; I think that’s the reason Shepherd relies on a catalogue to convey its variety and wonder. The range of living creatures simply outstrips her descriptive power.
The next chapter, “Man,” is about human activity on the mountains. “Up on the plateau nothing has moved for a long time,” Shepherd writes. “I have walked all day, and seen no one. I have heard no living sound. Once, in a solitary corrie, the rattle of a falling stone betrayed the passage of a line of stags. But up here, no movement, no voice. Man might be a thousand years away” (76). And yet, she continues, “as I look around me, I am touched at many points by his presence”: in cairns, paths, stepping stones across burns, bridges, “the remains of the hut where the men who made the Ordnance Survey of the eighteen-sixties lived for the whole of a season,” “in the map and compass that I carry, and in the names recorded in the map,” “in the hiding-holes of hunted men,” “in the sluices at the outflow of the lochs, the remnants of lime kilns by the burns, and the shepherds’ huts, roofless now, and the bothies of which nothing remains but a chimney-gable,” and “in the wrecked aeroplanes that lie scattered over the mountains” (76-77). The traces of human activity are everywhere on the mountain, even when it seems to be utterly devoid of people.
It is a hard life for those who live in the Cairngorms. “These crofts and farms and gamekeepers’ cottages breed men of character,” Shepherd writes. “They are individualists, gritty, tough, thrawn, intelligent, full of prejudice, with strange kinks and a salted sense of humour. Life here is hard and astringent, but it seldom kills grace in the soul” (80). The days are long, the work hard: “In these crannies of the mountains, the mode of supplying elemental needs is still low, laborious and personal” (82). Nevertheless, in “these simple acts” of drawing water, building fires, and cooking, “there is a deep pervasive satisfaction”: “Whether you give it conscious thought or not, you are touching life, and something within you knows it” (82). But before you accuse Shepherd of romanticizing a life she did not care to lead, she notes that “if I had to do these things every day and all the time I should be shutting the door on other activities and interests”–including, no doubt, exploring the mountain and writing about it–“and I can understand why the young people resent it” (82). Not all of the young want to leave, she continues: “Far from it. Some of them love these wild places with devotion and ask nothing better than to spend their lives in them” (82). But others “are restive, they resent the primitive conditions of living, despise the slow ancient ways, and think that praising them is sentimentalism. They clear out” (82).
Shepherd’s contact with those who live on the plateau has been as one of “the lovers of the hills whom they allow to share their houses,” accepting such strangers “on equal terms without ceremonial” (82-83). They accept mountain climbing and “oddities like night prowling and sleeping in the open,” but they have no tolerance for irresponsibility:
They have only condemnation for winter climbing. They know only too well how swiftly a storm can blow up out of a clear sky, how soon the dark comes down, and how terrific the force of a hurricane can be upon the plateau. . . . Yet if a man does not come back, they go out to search for him with patience, doggedness and skill, often in appalling weather conditions; and when there is no more hope of his being alive, seek persistently for the body. (84)
“These people are the bone of the mountain,” she writes, after describing and naming several whom she knows well. “As the way of life changes, and a new economy moulds their life, perhaps they too will change. Yet so long as they live a life close to their wild land, subject to its weathers, something of its own nature will permeate theirs. They will be marked men” (89). What an odd phrase to end the chapter with–“marked men”–with its (to my ear) negative connotations, its source (I think) in the story of Cain and Abel. Wasn’t Cain the first “marked man”? Why end this chapter’s evocation of those who live on the mountain with that phrase?
The following chapter thinks about sleep. It begins with a summary of Shepherd’s experience in the Cairngorms:
Well, I have discovered my mountain—its weathers, its airs and lights, its singing burns, its haunted dells, its pinnacles and tarns, its birds and flowers, its snows, its long blue distances. Year by year, I have grown in familiarity with them all. But if the whole truth of them is to be told as I have found it, I too am involved. I have been the instrument of my own discovering; and to govern the stops of the instrument needs learning too. Thus the senses must be trained and disciplined, the eye to look, the ear to listen, the body must be trained to move with the right harmonies. I can teach my body many skills by which to learn the nature of the mountains. One of the most compelling is quiescence. (90)
“No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it,” Shepherd argues, and in sleeping on the mountain, one only “dwells in pure intimacy with the tangible world” (90). She has slept on the mountain at night, and during the day (90-91). Such outdoor sleeping, she suggests, empties or uncouples the mind. “I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain; yet at no other moment am I sunk quite so deep into its life,” she writes. “I have let go my self. The experience is peculiarly precious because it is impossible to coerce” (91). The chapter ends with recollections of different experiences sleeping–or more accurately, awakening–on the mountain, in different seasons, and the strange experiences she has had waking at dawn with birds walking on her, or deer feeding nearby, experiences which leave her wondering if she dreamed them.
Chapter 11, “The Senses,” returns to the evocation of Shepherd’s various senses that has formed much of the earlier chapters. “Having disciplined mind and body to quiescence, I must discipline them also to activity,” she begins. “The senses must be used” (96). Each of the senses is a way to what the mountain has to give” (97): hearing; taste; scent; vision and touch, which “have the greatest potency for me” (97-98). Sight is clearly paramount for Shepherd: “How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry?–the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow; of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal; of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces” (101). “Perhaps,” she wonders,
the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle—as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuously 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. (101-02)
But touch is, she writes, “the most intimate sense of all” (102). She uses her hands to touch the mountain, but also her feet (102-04). Some experiences of touch are so powerful that they seem to annihilate her: “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” (104).
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the book’s last chapter, “Being,” picks up on the senses:
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, livingin one sense at a time to live all the way through. (105)
When she lies on the plateau, she experiences “the total mountain”: “Slowly I have found my way in. If I had other senses, there are other things I should know” (105). “Yet,” she continues,
with what we have, what wealth! I add to it each time I go to the mountain–the eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. So the ear, the other senses. It is an experience that grows; undistinguished days add their part, and now and then, unpredictable and unforgettable, come the hours when heaven and earth fall away and one sees a new creation. The many details—a stroke here, a stroke there—come for a moment into perfect focus, and one can read at last the word that has been from the beginning. (105-06)
“These moments come unpredictably, yet governed, it would seem, by a law whose working is dimly understood,” she writes (106). They come to her when she is waking up outdoors; when she is “gazing tranced at the running water and listening to its song”;
and most of all after hours of steady walking, with the long rhythm of motion sustained until motion is felt, not merely known in the brain, as the ‘still centre’ of being. . . . Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body. (106)
“It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance,” she continues,
that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan.
So I have found what I set out to find. I set out on my journey in pure love. (106)
She recalls her first experiences in the Cairngorms, when she was a child. “I drank and drank,” she writes. “I have not yet done drinking that draught. From that hour I belonged to the Cairngorms” (107). “So my journey into an experience began”–an experience of discovering “the mountain in itself,” a process that “has taken many years, and is not yet complete. 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 growing” (107-08). Finally, she suggests that this journey of discovery has been a kind of pilgrimage:
I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain. (108)
This has been a quite lengthy summary of a rather short book, but I think The Living Mountain deserves this kind of attention. There is so much going on in this book, so much to admire: its detailed evocation of the experiences of the five senses, particularly sight and touch; its suggestion that coming to know a place is also a process of coming to know one’s self; its description of the way walking can produce a state of trance; its loving acceptance of the mountain and all of the creatures, plant and animal and bird and insect, that make it their homes. I find myself wishing I had found, years or decades ago, a place that I might have explored in the way that Shepherd explored the Cairngorms, deeply and thoroughly and humbly–something few of us are able to do, I think, and yet another reason why The Living Mountain is so important.
Work Cited
Shepherd, Nan. The Living Mountain. Canongate, 2011.
