The basis for the new documentary film, Mountain: A Breathtaking Voyage into the Extreme. Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own
forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert McFarlane reveals how the mystery of the
world’s highest places has came to grip the Western imagination-and perennially draws
legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes.
His story begins three centuries
ago, when mountains were feared as the forbidding abodes of dragons and other mysterious
beasts.
In the mid-1700s the attentions of both science and poetry sparked a passion
for mountains; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lord Byron extolled the sublime experiences
to be had on high; and by 1924 the death on Mt Everest of an Englishman named George
Mallory came to symbolize the heroic ideals of his day. Macfarlane also reflects
on fear, risk, and the shattering beauty of ice and snow, the competition and contemplation
of the climb, and the strange alternate reality of high altitude, magically enveloping
us in the allure of mountains at every level.