Free Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane Page B

ceaseless shiftings as everything else. Not even words stood for what they once did. Nothing endured any longer except change.
    By and large, however, the disclosures of geology were found inspiring rather than menacing. As well as explaining the forces of the earth, Ruskin urged his public to interpret landscapes for their absence as much as their presence: what had been subtracted from the hills by cataclysm or by the ceaseless work of erosion. In Ruskin’s writing, hills on imaginary hills arose before one’s eyes in a fantasia of contingency, might-have-been and once-was. Like a magnificent Prospero, Ruskin summoned up the ghosts of mountains past; had them arise in the space above the skylines and ridges of the present day. Wild nature, he taught, was a ruin of something once even more astonishing – a dilapidation of what he called ‘the first splendid forms that were once created’. Even the Matterhorn, whose upwards flourish drew admirers in their thousands to the Zermatt valley, Ruskin pointed out to be a sculpture: gouged, chiselled and pared from a single block by the furious energies of the earth. As John Muir would do later in the United States, John Ruskin taught his many readers that the geological past was everywhere apparent – if only one knew
how
to look.
    John Ruskin also believed that mountains moved. And this was perhaps his most important contribution to the formation of our mountains of the mind. Before publishing
Of Mountain Beauty
, Ruskin had spent years pacing the lower paths of the Alps; sketching, painting, observing, meditating. He had concluded that the apparently arbitrary jaggedness of mountain ridges was an illusion. In fact, examined with due diligence and patient eyes, mountains revealed their fundamental form of organization to be the curve, and not the angle as might be concluded by superficial observation. Mountains were inherently curved, and mountain ranges were shaped and arranged like waves. They were waves of rock – ‘the silent wave of the blue mountain’ – and not waves of water.
    Moreover, said Ruskin, mountain ranges, like hydraulic waves, were prone to motion. They had been cast up by colossal forces, andwere still being moved by them. That the movement of mountains could only be imagined and not witnessed was – as James Hutton had pointed out – a function of the minute life-span of a human being. They were not static, but fluid: rocks fell from their summits, and rainwater poured off their flanks. For Ruskin, this perpetual motion was what made mountains the beginning and end of all natural scenery. ‘Those desolate and threatening ranges of dark mountain,’ he wrote:
    which, in nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon with aversion or terror and shrunk back from as if they were haunted by perpetual images of death are, in reality, sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than all the bright fruitfulness of the plain …

    Ruskin’s intuition that mountains moved was proved unexpectedly correct during the course of the twentieth century, in what is the final significant shift in Western imaginings of the past of mountains. In January 1912, in an incident now legendary among earth scientists, a German called Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) stood up before an audience of eminent geologists in Frankfurt, and told them that the continents moved. Specifically, he explained that the continents, which were composed primarily of granitic rock, ‘drifted’ on top of the denser basalt of the ocean floor, like patches of oil on water. Indeed, 300 million years ago, Wegener informed his increasingly incredulous audience, the landmasses of the world had been united into a single supercontinent, an ur-landmass, which he called Pangaea (meaning ‘all-lands’). Under the divisive power of various geological forces, Pangaea had been riven into many pieces and thesepieces had subsequently drifted apart, ploughing over the basalt to their present