Free Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane Page A

the pigments they blended with the oils were mineral in origin. Unburnt pit-coal was used to render the shadows of flesh, particularly by the Flemish andDutch painters of the seventeenth century. Black chalk and common coal were used to furnish a brown tint. The light blues employed to render mountains as films in the far background in the work of, say, Claude or Poussin would have come from copper carbonates or compounds of silver. The ‘scumbling’ effect of which the Dutch masters were so fond for their skyscapes (it gives a cloud-like texture to the skies which superbly imitates the consistency of cirrostratus) was achieved using ground glass as a pigment and ashes as a context. ‘Sinopia’, or red earth, was used to give rouging tints to faces or clothing, or to provide the first tracing of a fresco on to plaster. Geology, therefore, is intimate with the history of painting; in oil paintings of landscapes, the earth has been pressed into service to express itself.
    An even closer coincidence between medium and message can be found in the ‘scholar’s rocks’ which became popular in the T’ang and Sung dynasties of China. Seven centuries before Romanticism revolutionized Western perceptions of mountains and wilderness, Chinese and Japanese artists were celebrating the spiritual qualities of wild landscape. Kuo Hsi, a celebrated eleventh-century Chinese painter and essayist, proposed in his
Essay on Landscape Painting
that wild landscapes ‘nourished a man’s nature’. ‘The din of the dusty world,’ he wrote, ‘and the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while, on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks.’ This venerable Eastern esteem for wilderness explains the popularity of scholar’s rocks, single stones which have been carved into intricate, dynamic shapes by the powers of water, wind and frost. They were harvested from caves, river-beds and mountainsides, and mounted on small wooden pedestals. The stones – which scholars kept on their desks or in their studies, much as we might now keep a paperweight – were valued for how they expressed the history and the forces of their making. Each detail on a rock’s surface, each groove or notch or air-bubble or ridge or perforation, waseloquent of aeons. Each rock was a tiny, hand-held cosmos. Scholar’s rocks were not metaphors for a landscape, they were landscapes.
    Many of these rocks have survived and can be seen in museums. If you stare at one closely enough, and for long enough, you lose your sense of scale, and the whorls, the caverns, the hills and the valleys which nature has inscribed in them can seem big enough to walk through.

    Not everybody, it should be said, was exhilarated by the advances of geology in the nineteenth century. There was a widespread feeling that geology, like the other sciences, had in some way displaced humanity. Scientific inquiry and methodology had been invited into the heart of the human project, and from there it had proved – in the most merciless and irrefutable way possible – that human beings were no more or less important than any other agglomeration of matter in the universe. It had eroded the Renaissance world-view of man as the measure of all things. The desolating expanses of time revealed by geology were more persuasive proof than any other of humankind’s insignificance. To understand that mountains decayed and fell was inevitably to sense the precariousness and mortality of human endeavours. If a mountain could not withstand the ravages of time, what chance a city or a civilization? ‘The hills are shadows,’ wrote Tennyson in his elegy for stasis
In Memoriam
, ‘and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands; / They melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like clouds they shape themselves and go.’ And ‘From’ flowed into ‘form’: philology was showing that language was subject to the same