The Cabin in the Mountains Read online

  The experiences of that summer made an unforgettable impression on him. He recalled how, on Midsummer’s Day 1819, in the early morning, he climbed Filefjell:

  Midsummer’s Day 1819, in the early morning, I climbed this peak for the first time. Before I reached the highest point on the track, the sun had risen in all its majestic glory behind the Hurrungane peaks, spreading a light of shifting colours across their desolate vastness. The air was cool and rather damp, as it is in early April in the central parts of Sweden. Just a few wisps of clouds floated in the sky, soon dispersed by the rays of the sun. At my feet, beside the glinting waters of Lake Uttra, Nystuen was still in shadow. The mountains on the far side of the valley, with Stugu the highest among them, stood like dark phantoms flecked by bright patches of snow. In a blue-tinged declivity lay the valley of Skougstad, where the masses of the mountains to the east meet. Below the Hurrungane a layer of mist hung, seeming to rise from the waters of Bydin lake.

  After his tour of duty ended Carpelan returned to Stockholm, where his experience of the aesthetic power of the Norwegian mountains continued to haunt his imagination. Between 1821 and 1823 he published Voyage pittoresque aux alpes norvégiennes, a set of aquatints based on the sketches from 1819, and continued to produce work based on that magical summer until his death in 1830, in Stockholm, at the age of forty-three. Tuberculosis, a common killer at the time, was suggested as the cause of death. His contemporary, Johannes Flintoe, was of a different opinion: ‘While he carefully monitored its corrosive effect on the copper plate, the nitric acid, including dispersed copper, inhaled in quantity, did its morbid work – all the while his fascination with the artistic product was enough to drive all thought of the poison and its fatal consequences from his mind.’ It was clear to him that Carpelan’s fascinated addiction to the aquatint process, through which he refined and reiterated his love of the Norwegian mountains, was the true cause of his death, as surely as if he had lost his footing and tumbled from the top of Filefjell.

  A hand-painted aquatint of Skutshorn by Wilhelm Maximilian Carpelan.

  One of the finest examples of Carpelan’s hand-coloured aquatint, ‘Skutshorn ved Vangsmjøsa’, is a depiction of a mountain that is little known among Norwegians themselves, but remarkable among connoisseurs of the mysterious for a phenomenon that has given the mountain its name: at intervals Skutshorn emits a series of shot-like booms or groans, accompanied by a vertically slanting jet of steam. These phenomena may, it occurred to me, be understood as a reminder of the persistence of danger to be associated with mountains, no matter how many times we paint them, no matter how easily we may fly across them and burrow through them. It seemed to me – as I reached the south-eastern corner of the living-room wall and stood to stretch my back for a few moments, noticing, as I did so, that the faint hints of grey in the beis that now showed subtly through in the afternoon sunlight slanting in through the terrace windows went some way towards justifying the poetic name given the shade by its manufacturers – that Skutshorn’s shot-like groans might conceivably be understood as a kind of warning on the dangers of taking mountains for granted; indeed, that our fear of mountains was something better left intact, and that our appalling and requisitioning arrogance, the idea that all of this is somehow ours, somehow just for us, for our convenience and use, has led inevitably to a diminished respect, which might possibly provoke a catastrophe the real dimensions of which have not yet become apparent to us, so that as soon as possible we should return to the attitude of devotional respect epitomised by the ninth-century Icelandic chieftain Thorolf Mostrarskjegg who, the Landnámabok (‘The Book of the Settlements’) tells us, named the only mountain on his farm ‘Helgafell’, meaning Holy Mountain, and who in the strangely touching intensity of his devotion insisted that no one might look upon it with an unwashed face.

  Perhaps we should not even look on mountains at all, or we may yet experience the fate of the homunculus depicted in Edvard Munch’s painting Skrik – Scream – and hear so acutely as to be unable to blank out the anguished howl of the landscape. Over the years Munch wrote several different versions of the experience that led to the painting, but the gist of them was always the same. Making his way on foot into Kristiania (Oslo) down the Ekeberg hill, ‘the sun set and suddenly the sky turned into blood. My friends continued walking. I stopped by the fence, deathly tired. Over the cold blue fjord and city was a flaming reddish yellow, and I felt a great scream pass through nature.’

  Returning to the task of painting the cabin, as I moved the paint-pot onto a new bed of newspapers I saw in an old number of Aftenposten from 2012, in an item about the sale at Sotheby’s in New York of one of the five more or less identical versions of Scream that Munch made of the image, that a version of this point had in fact been raised by the seller of the painting, the Norwegian philanthropist and idealist Petter Olsen. At a press conference after the sale he spoke to the world’s journalists. Expecting to hear what it ‘felt like’ now that he no longer owned the painting, now that he was a hundred and twenty million dollars richer than he had been yesterday, they were instead treated to a halting address by a man in a suit slightly too big for him who urged upon the world a new understanding of Munch’s painting as a visionary cry of pain and a warning. Almost incidentally, as he did so, he corrected a widespread misconception concerning this painting, that it is the creature that is doing the screaming, for as Munch’s captions to the picture consistently make clear, the creature raises its paws to its ears to block out the terrifying sound being made by the landscape. In our anthropocentric lunacy it is we humans, said Olsen, with our shrugging indifference to the frailty of all forms of life on Earth, who are responsible for this scream of pain, and for which we must now take responsibility.

  Olsen’s was an interesting interpretation. It seemed to me, as I loaded up my brush and resumed my long, crouched, sideways shuffle along the timbers below the terrace windows, that it came close to a secular form of the belief in Original Sin that holds our presence and activities here on Earth to be essentially malign. In doing so it also suggested a nostalgia for the oppressive and yet bracing power vested in that ancient conception. Better far to accept that as humans we are born bad and that our first great challenge is not to become worse, and our second to improve.

  At this point, realising I had forgotten to protect the white sashes of the terrace windows, I stood up and began applying strips of masking tape along their edges, lulled by the simplicity of the task into permitting myself a few moments in satisfied contemplation of the sheer extent of timber I had now stained, almost without my having noticed it. I was, however, quickly brought down to earth by the sight of the massive gable overhang, supported on three large and heavy cinched pillars that defined the outer limit of the planked terrace that extended along the entire length of the front of the cabin and outwards for about two metres, and the knowledge that at some point that gable would have to be painted. Dimly I realised that in a not-too-distant future I would need to climb all the way to the top of a fully extended sliding ladder, bearing with me as I did so the open pot of wood stain and two brushes of different widths, in order to paint the weatherboards nailed horizontally along the peak of the gable.

  Already this gable had begun to haunt my dreams. Frequently, before falling asleep at night, I would spend what felt like an hour but was probably ten minutes imagining ways of painting it that would totally eliminate any and every possibility of my falling from the top of the fully extended ladder, either directly backwards, or in slow motion sideways as I leaned over to extend the reach of my brush as far as possible. Most of these ideas involved coils of rope threaded around and through the rungs and sides of the ladder, anchored in some way to the central pillar or to the network of supports that connected each pillar to the front wall of the cabin.

  As these imaginings progressed, what started out as a simple anchoring strategy might gradually develop into a fantastic web of criss-crossing ropes connecting the ladder, all three
pillars, the cross-pillars, even entering the cabin itself through the open window of the hems (loft or first floor) and like some Jules Verne monster flailing about the walls and floor and ceiling in search of the ultimate fail-safe anchorage. I spent an entire evening on YouTube watching short videos showing how easy it was for one man to handle a fully extended sliding ladder. In one, which seemed to be an American fire-brigade training video, the instructor trained recruits to shout verbal warnings to themselves. I latched on to ‘NO OVERHEAD OBSTRUCTIONS’ and fell asleep whispering it repeatedly to myself, as though it were a mantra guaranteeing my safety.

  It was in the middle of one of these fitful half-dreams of falling that I saw again a photograph I had come across recently in a book about the early history of mountaineering in Norway. As the old ambiguity towards the mountains and Vidda as predominantly places of work and fear died away, and following the work of collectors like Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe and the aestheticisation of the mountains by painters like Carpelan, Balke, Flintoe, Tidemand and Gude, who found beauty and magnificence there, a third phase in Norwegians’ relationship towards their mountains began with the advent of mountaineering as a sport.

  Climbing Storen: Therese Bertheau and William Cecil Slingsby with their guide, Per Berge.

  The photograph I saw in my mind’s eye seemed in its way to encapsulate the emerging history of this development, and I was struck once again by the way in which this too was tied, as so much of the understanding of modern Norway is tied, to that unique brand of nationalism practised by Norwegians in which a ferocious patriotism is soundly underpinned by a remarkable sense of – for want of a better word – decency.

  Two of those in the photograph are Norwegians. Leading on the rope is the local guide, a farmer named Per Berge; behind him, wearing a skirt and hat, is Therese Bertheau, the first lady of Norwegian climbing; the third member of the party is a Yorkshireman named William Cecil Slingsby.

  The photograph is from an ascent made in 1900 of Store Skagastølstind, commonly known as ‘Storen’ (‘The big one’), a peak in the Jotunheimen and the third highest mountain in Norway. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1876, Slingsby had made the first ascent of what has sometimes been described as ‘the Norwegian Matterhorn’. In 1894 Bertheau had made the first ascent of the mountain by a woman. Slingsby, a man free of many of the most common prejudices concerning women, who had on several of his climbing expeditions in Norway been accompanied by both his sister and his wife, practised a great courtesy in all his dealings with the Norwegians of both sexes whom he came across, and held Ms Bertheau in particular regard; in the preface to his memoirs Norway: the Northern Playground, she is the only mountaineer whom he thanks by name. It was at his specific request that Bertheau agreed to join him in what was self-consciously a celebration of their joint individual achievements as the first man and woman to reach the top of the mountain. In a second famous picture, Bertheau and Berge can be seen standing on the top and helping Slingsby up the final few yards. In both photographs it is Bertheau, in her skirt and tall, brimmed hat with its bright decorative band, who compels our attention. It looks as if the climb were undertaken on a whim one day after work (she was a schoolmistress in Kristiania) and, for a reason I cannot quite fathom, the hat makes it look as if the whole thing was somehow easier for her than it was for Berge and Slingsby.

  Her triumphs, and her status as the first lady of Norwegian mountaineering, are beyond question. But it was Slingsby, as a serial conqueror of peaks previously thought to be unclimbable, on the twenty-one visits he made to Norway between 1872 and 1921, and by his introduction of what were, to Norwegians, useful novelties like the ice axe and climbing boots with nails in their soles, who was most intimately bound up with the third great change in the attitude towards mountains, the conquest phase that succeeded the fearful respect of the Middle Ages and the aestheticising of the Norwegian mountain landscape by painters and poets. His status in this respect remains unquestioned by Norwegians, and his maiden ascent of Store Skagastølstinde in 1876 is universally regarded as the beginning of mountaineering as a sport in Norway. He remains an important figure in the recent history of the country, his name and its association so familiar to Norwegians that Bergans, one of Norway’s largest manufacturers of outdoor clothing and equipment, when launching a new range of high-performance jackets in 2018, called it ‘the Slingsby Collection’.

  Therese Bertheau and Per Berge help William Cecil Slingsby to the top of Storen.

  For much of the first part of his ascent Slingsby was accompanied by two Norwegians. One was an urbane philologist and schoolteacher, a native of Bergen named Emanuel Mohn, whom he had met in 1874 on a steamboat on its way to Bergen. Mohn had already climbed a number of peaks in Jotunheimen and knew the region so well he described himself as a ‘jotunologist’. The second man was Knut Lykken, a farmer, reindeer hunter and their guide. Mohn was a tireless advocate of the mental and physical benefits of mountaineering and the outdoor life and in his writings extolled the virtues of climbing and rambling that remain such an intrinsic part of the Norwegian self-image. Mountaineering adventures, he wrote, were ‘the Viking expeditions of our own times’, offering as they did the same opportunities to exercise ‘manly courage and strength’. But like the Englishman Slingsby he urged women, too, to discover and share with the men the joys and benefits of mountaineering.

  Knut Lykken took a different and more traditional view of their enterprise. For him the mountains remained the Utgard of pre-Christian mythology, a hard and dangerous workplace. The idea of a mountain peak as something to be climbed for its own sake was quite foreign to him. Mohn recalled Lykken telling them, as they stamped their way across the Galdebergsbreen glacier, that it was one of his best fields for reindeer hunting, but that though he had often in the course of the chase been to the upper edge of the glacier, with the summit of the Galdeberget mountain a mere three hundred feet above him and easily climbable within fifteen minutes, the thought of doing so had never occurred to him. Here, in this collision of attitudes, the peasant working-class past of Norway met its urban, middle-class future.

  Basing the belief on certain passages in Snorri Sturluson’s History of the Norwegian Kings, Slingsby shared Mohn’s view that in climbing to the tops of mountains as an end in itself they were reviving a pastime that had first been enjoyed a thousand years earlier, in Viking times. In the ensuing centuries its pleasures had been forgotten, and not been seriously revived in any way until 1820, when the geologist Professor Baltazar Keilhau and a botanist and doctor named Christian Boeck scaled Falkenebbe (Falcon’s Beak), later renamed Falketind (Falcon Peak), and made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to scale Skagastølstind, the most northerly of the Skagastøl peaks. Slingsby relates that, on one of Keilhau and Boeck’s expeditions, one member of the party was almost killed when caught in an avalanche, his life saved only by a large and solidly constructed barometer strapped to his back, which protected him from a falling stone that would otherwise have broken his spine.

  On their way into the Hurrangane peaks of which Storen forms the most majestic part, Slingsby, Mohn and Lykken followed the route into Jotunheimen taken by Keilhau and Boeck in 1820. Bad weather delayed their start for several days but, when they finally set out, during the next five days they made five maiden ascents. Slingsby describes the ascent of the great mountain in gripping detail; how Mohn declined to join him for the final and most dangerous part of the ascent, pleading exhaustion, and Lykken refused to go any higher on the grounds that it was too dangerous, leaving him to climb the final five hundred and eighteen feet alone and without ropes, using tiny ledges no wider than his hand, which first had to be chipped free of the layers of ice that covered them all with his axe. Reaching what they had thought from below to be the summit, Slingsby found there to be a knife-edged ridge some sixty yards long leading to the actual top, with three peaklets and a notch that obliged him for the first time to trust to an overhanging and loose rocky ledge. When at last he reache
d the summit, ‘a rock table four feet by three’, he abandoned himself to the pleasures of the experience, mingling the triumphs of conquest with the aesthetic ecstasies now revealed spread out to him on all sides. ‘But in such a place, alone, out of sight of every living creature,’ he writes, ‘one of the greatest desires of my heart granted to me, it will be easily understood, when I say that a feeling of silent worship and reverence was more suitable than the jotting down of memoranda in a notebook. The scene was too overwhelming for my notes. I longed to have my trusty friend Mohn by my side, and his absence was a bitter disappointment.’ Later, after a drink of cold tea, some goat’s milk cheese and a few prunes, he built a small cairn and wedged his khaki handkerchief into the side of it before making his way down to rejoin his companions.