The Living Mountain A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland

Those who have travelled in high mountains or to the poles are likely to be familiar with the white-out: the point at which snow, cloud and blizzard combine such that the world dissolves into a single pallor. Scale and distance become impossible to discern. There are no shadows or waymarks. Space is depthless. Even gravity's hold feels loosened: slope and fall-lines can only be inferred by the tilt of blood in the skull. It felt, for that astonishing hour up on Ben a' Bhuird, as if we were all flying in white space.

To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there is always running water; and up here that is a sound one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the watercourses. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time.

I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower - that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountain top, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and the effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age. The scientists have the humility to acknowledge that they don't know how it has been done.

Next day a brilliant sun spangled the snow and the precipices of Ben a' Bhuird hung bright rose-red above us. How crisp, how bright a world! but, except for the crunch of our own boots on the snow, how silent. Once some grouse fled noiselessly away and we lifted our heads quickly to look for a hunting eagle. And down valley he came, sailing so low above our heads that we could see the separate feathers of the pinions against the sky, and the lovely lift of the wings when he steadied them to soar. Near the top of the glen there were coal-tits in a tree, and once a dipper plunged outright into the icy stream. But it was not an empty world. For everywhere in the snow were the tracks of birds and animals.

By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear.Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round.