Extract from The Climbing Essays

20: (Beinn A'Chaoruinn And) The Vision Of Glory (1993)

Three dreary months round Christmas, sunless, short-dayed, my mood dull as the season. Trudging between dark squads of regimented conifers up the forestry track into Coire na h-Uamha, above Loch Moy, there was no expectation in my mind beyond that of dogged exercise. The northernmost of the mountain's trio of east ridges bulked sullen into dank cloud above. There was not even relief in the particular. Everything crystalline and light-reflecting was subdued, stilled. I shuffled through soft snow to the foot of the ridge's first buttress and embarked on the climb.

There is something to be said for creating interest in your choice of line for the ascent. Technicality puts an edge on the way the mind apprehends the immediate world. The focus closes down: to the ash-petalled lichen on the blocky face before you; to fronded heather moustaching the ledge into which you have swung the pick of your axe; to a fine balance in the configuration of your limbs across this airy crest. You are entering the dimension of approach; a lightness is beginning to hover in hitherto- leaden air. You're heading into the white world, cloud and the void beneath.

Which is how it was on Beinn a'Chaoruinn. I picked my way up the buttress – easy enough in summer but treacherous terrain now: powdery snow, rock greasy underfoot – and onto the snow slope above that curved up to the summit.

Let's introduce an element of misadventure. I took my crampons out of my sack at a ledge above the buttress, for the slope beyond was iron-hard neve, and steep. In my carelessness, my hurry to get out that morning from the chalet at Roy Bridge, I'd forgotten that they were adjustable, had last been worn by a friend with bigger feet. When I stood up, they rolled off my boots. In amused disgust, I pushed them back in the sack.

Amused? Oh yes – and you would be right to question by what token I found it thus. A few hundred feet of hard snow ahead, the potential for a fall of 1000 feet, bumping and sliding into the corrie below. But I still went at it, smashing the axe into the snow with murderous intent, belting at it with my boots so that three or four ferocious kicks would produce half an inch of precarious purchase, getting a rhythm into the work, resting after 100 feet or so with one leg down a little crevasse the meltand- freeze had produced against a small outcrop of rock.

Then it came. I was slumped contortionate against the rock, panting from exertion, head lolling backwards over my left shoulder, when the hovering brightness intensified. Suddenly the mist was scoured with utmost speed from the face of the mountain, shreds of blue sky tore across, shafts of brilliant light pierced into the corrie. From the ridge opposite, diamond whirlwinds danced along the cornice edge, all glitter and coruscation, shapes of the Mamores beyond a phantasmal ivory gleam.

I do not know how you can adequately describe these moments and their effect on our lives. I write this eight months after the glance over my shoulder away from the dangerous world of the particular in which I had been engrossed. Yet what I saw in that moment is imprinted on my consciousness, is a part of the heart-life.

Our essential life, the joy-life, is a sequence of these moments. How many of us could count even 60 such? I recollect: the badger that passed three or four feet upwind of me one moonlit night, and I was so still it knew nothing of my presence there; the descent one evening after doing one of the difficult ice-gullies on Cyfrwy down the Foxes' Path on Cader Idris at sunset, and the sun caught ice-rimmed meltholes where rocks pierced through, making each a flaring rosette sharp against the mauves and blues of gathering night; morning light in a room above the sea in West Cork, hair of spun gold on the shared pillow and her eyes a clearest blue flickering into wakefulness; or on Brandon Mountain, a glory round each of our spectral reflections on the mist ...

There is a common element in all this. It is beauty, and I am continually astonished how little is said about it in our modern world, and in our specific outdoor world where it is surely the prime and common factor in all our activity.

Once, years ago, I was out walking in Derbyshire. It was an October half-term, I was 12 or 13 and had caught the train from Manchester to Hayfield, intending to walk up on to Kinder Scout by way of Kinder Low and descend Grindsbrook to Edale. I knew next to nothing about mountains and to me this was a mountain. The day was fine, the bracken golden on the lower slopes. I dawdled along, started to climb the hill's shoulder towards a prominent group of rocks. In an instant the sky darkened. From the moor above streamers of mist poured down in front and behind. The gritstone outcrop ahead writhed, its nebs and boulders shape-shifting amongst the vapours. I was suddenly cut off from all the world of normality, nature animate all around me, and I was intensely scared. I fled. I ran terrified down out of the mist to the top of Jacob's Ladder, stopped there, chest heaving, watching all the frightful mystery down out of which I'd come. And it transfigured itself before my eyes. There and then it became not a thing of fear but a vision of vital and resonant loveliness.

The valley-greens flared with fierce intensity, bracken seemed on fire, mist was gilded with the sun. What had been terror was now beauty. As I sat and watched it there was a stillness within me beyond anything I'd known. I was annihilated, had no existence, simply looked out at the inconceivable beauty of the world that had detached me from any concept of self in order that I might see.

Does not everyone who comes to the mountains know something of this experience? It is at the root of a thousand hero-myths; it is Wordsworth's 'Fair seedtime had my soul/ Fostered alike by beauty and by fear'; it is Simone Weil's 'Everything has to pass through the fire. But those who have become flame are at home in the fire. But in order to become fire it is necessary to have passed through hell.'

The moments seem to come more easily in the mountains. Their literature – beyond the ego-fixated narratives of achievement – is permeated by accounts of them. Here's Eric Shipton – greatest mountaineer-explorer of the century – groping towards its definition as he falls asleep in the Karakoram: 'We settled down on a comfortable bed of sand, and watched the approach of night transform the wild desert mountains into phantoms of soft unreality. How satisfying it was to be travelling with such simplicity. I lay awaiting the approach of sleep, watching the constellations swing across the sky. Did I sleep that night – or was I caught up for a moment into the ceaseless rhythm of space.' (from Blank on the Map)

Once, on the High Street of a busy Welsh town, I stopped to talk to a good, resentful, careworn woman who told me this or that ugly thing about her husband, knowing he and I shared a passion for the hills. Behind her I saw light travelling across the cliffs and gullies of Ysgolion Duon, and wished her the moments that being there might bring, that her anger might be purged, affronts to her sense of self cleaned away by them. What you go through on the mountains is not the nagging, passive fear of abandonment and loss; it is not the burdening responsibility; it is the occasional going through into the white world, into the world of light.

Whatever our stated reasons for coming to them, it is the vague sense, the half-understood glimpse of this that draws us back time and again to go beyond fear, effort and discomfort into quietude and appreciation. We should not plan to conquer our hills, but rather to abandon ourselves to them. I remember so thinking as I pulled my foot from its crevasse on Beinn a'Chaoruinn and set back into the slope, into the sting of spindrift that obliterated the summit, my movements a joy, and imprinted in my mind the vision of glory harvested there.