The Climb that Inspired the Novel that Inspired the Climbs: The Many Stories of the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc
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By: Katie Ives
Each book in the American Alpine Club Library is a portal to another world—of golden spires feathered with rime, fluted snow beneath indigo skies, or red-granite aiguilles above a sea of ice. Beyond these worlds, there are countless layers of other worlds encountered by readers inspired to seek their own adventures and return with their own tales. For climbing is an act of storytelling: we trace the arc of a narrative with our bodies and our minds, rising from the base of a mountain toward a climactic point and descending to a resolution. And the history of mountaineering is also the history of reading and imagination, of old dreams endlessly transforming into new ones.
On July 15, 1865, English alpinist Adolphus Warburton Moore found himself on the edge of a ridge that looked like something from a fantasy novel. The slender crest of blue ice seemed to rise for an eternity. Sheer voids dropped off on either side. Neither the iron tips of their alpenstocks nor the hobnails of their boots stuck to its flawless surface.
It was inconceivable to climb. No one had yet established a route on this aspect of Mont Blanc, where the Brenva Face rose for 1,400 meters in a chaos of cliffs, towers, and buttresses, fringed by unstable seracs and swept by avalanches and rockfall.
Still, the Swiss guide Jakob Anderegg kept going, and the rest of the team, including Moore, cautiously followed. As the crest narrowed, they shuffled along à cheval, one leg on either side, aware that any fall might be catastrophic [1].
Long after they finished the first ascent of the Brenva Spur and descended by a safer route, the ice crest lingered in the imaginations of those who read Moore’s memoir, The Alps in 1864. In 1906, British author A.E.W. Mason located the climactic scene of his crime novel Running Water on the Brenva Spur—a point of no return that appeared perfect for an attempted murder of one climber by another, “a line without breadth of cold blue ice” [2].
Mason’s Running Water, like its author’s inspiration, begins with reading. Riding the train to Chamonix, his young protagonist Sylvia Thesiger becomes immersed in an old copy of the British Alpine Journal, published more than two decades prior to the novel. All night, she couldn’t sleep, remembering her first glimpse of the Mont Blanc massif beyond the curtain of a train window, recalling her sense of inchoate longing for its moonlit towers of ice and snow.
Although women climbers had taken part in numerous firsts by the time of the novel’s plot, they weren’t permitted to publish in the Alpine Journal under their own bylines until 1889, when Margaret Jackson recounted her epic first winter traverse of the Jungfrau. And there’s no female author or character in the story Thesiger reads about the first ascent of an aiguille near Mont Blanc. Yet she longs to enter its world, and when she arrives in Chamonix, she hires guides to take her on her own first climb, up the Aiguille d’Argentière. As an ice slope tilts upward, sheer and smooth as a pane of glass, she rejoices, feeling as if she’s finally dreamed her way into a scene from mountain literature, “the place where no slip must be made.” Astounded at her fearlessness and intuitive skill, a guide tells her she bears an uncanny resemblance to a famous climber from the Alpine Journal story she’d just admired.
“I felt something had happened to me which I had to recognize—a new thing,” she recalls. “Climbing that mountain...was just like hearing very beautiful music. All the vague longings which had ever stirred within me, longings for something beyond, and beyond.” Later, after she falls in love with a climber, the memory of that day suffuses their bond with a steadfast alpine glow—“ice-slope and rock-spire and the bright sun over all.”
By the end, however, the novel shifts from her journey of self-discovery toward an outcome more conventional for its era. Newly wed, Thesiger is relegated to waiting below the Brenva Spur while the male hero and villain confront each other above that narrow blue crest. Readers don’t find out, for certain, whether she’ll climb any mountains again. A sense of incompleteness remains: the mysterious promise of her alpine epiphanies and of her suppressed and inmost self seem to flow beyond the narrative’s abrupt conclusion, like the recurring dreams she has of running water.
After the publication of
