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.   

The Climb 

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].

The Novel

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. 

The Next Climbs

After the publication of Running Water, the ice crest reemerged in a real climber’s recurring dreams. During World War I, Scottish physiologist Thomas Graham Brown took refuge in fantasies inspired by the novel. Night after night, in his sleep, he left behind the horrors of grim battles and shell-shocked men [3] for his own imagined version of the Brenva Face amid a wonderland of shining mountains. The geography seemed so “vivid,” he wrote in his memoir, Brenva, “that a map might be made of the country” [4].

After he recovered from the war, Brown sought the Brenva Face again and again, though its actual topography proved different from what he’d seen in his dreams. Between 1927 and 1933, he established three new routes there, some of the hardest of his day: the Sentinelle and the Major with fellow British climber Frank Smythe; and the Pear with Swiss guides Alexander Graven and Alfred Aufdenblatten. During the last climb, under the shadow of the full moon, Brown felt as if the Brenva had become, once more, “an unknown land,” a flood of dreams subsuming all the real lines he’d climbed. 

As they descended from the summit, light flashed along the running water of a stream, and like Thesiger, he heard an unearthly music cascade through his mind. In his sleep, long afterward, Brown continued to explore the dream version of the Brenva Face, its enigmas unresolved. And for the rest of his life, he kept Mason’s Running Water close by [5].

A Real-Life Sequel to the Novel

Meanwhile, currents of Sylvia Thesiger’s story flowed on through another real alpinist’s life. In 1920 a budding English climbing writer, Dorothey Pilley, strained to see the Alps through the window of a crowded train. She was so overwhelmed with long-held imaginings that her own first glimpse of the range seemed like a chaos of snow-reflected light. 

Since reading Running Water, Pilley had felt spellbound by the unearthly ice arête of the Brenva Spur, but also by the ice slope of the Aiguille d’Argentière, where Thesiger steps into the world of her dreams. The scenes blended in Pilley’s mind with those of other, mythic peaks into “a strange, now unrecapturable farrago of fantasies…perhaps a vague haunting background to all my mountain experiences” [6].        

Like Thesiger, Pilley felt a new self emerge when she climbed, free of the constraints of her society. As if echoing the novel, when she attempted her own early mountain writing, she found herself trying to capture images of running water over stone. Pilley, too, fell in love in the hills, and the awe and light of the mountains remained at the heart of her subsequent marriage [7].

Beyond that point, Pilley’s life story continued along one of many paths that Thesiger might have taken after the novel’s ending—if Thesiger’s author proved bold enough and feminist enough to compose such a sequel. Following a similar yearning for the mysterious, Pilley completed first ascents around the world, often with her husband, Ivor (I.A) Richards. On their most famous new route, the North Ridge of the Dent Blanche, with French guide Joseph Georges, the couple encountered a surreal crest of their own, “as though a dream had got out of place.” Its smooth and at times overhanging rock required “a leap into the void,” they recalled in the Alpine Journal [8].

Pilley also joined the early movement of women taking part in manless, guideless ascents, demonstrating they could be fully independent leaders. And she wrote down her adventures in a book of her own, Climbing Days, which became one of the great classics of literary alpine memoirs. In one of his poems, her husband I.A. Richards quoted her words, “Leaping crevasses in the dark, / That’s how to live!” [9].

The Next Novel?

Mason’s novel haunts me, too. I also fantasize of the imaginary and the real, at times obscuring each other like shadows and moonlight, cascading in unending, luminous streams from ascent to tale to ascent and tale again. Thesiger’s longings appear so vivid they seem to transcend fiction or illusion like the topography of Brown’s recurring dreams. And I wonder what she might accomplish if she were released from the pages of Running Water: Could she return to climb the Brenva Spur herself? Could her life unfold with the same wild audacity that Pilley’s had, taking leap after leap over the voids? Given the intensity of Thesiger’s love of the Alps and her inherent talent, could she, too, write down her own adventures instead of merely reading stories by men? Most of all, could she venture even deeper into the ecstatic communion with the mountains that she’d encountered on her first climb, amid the light, the stillness, and the ice? 

We live in a new era now, when alpine literature is expanding and diversifying, with the influence of new voices and new ideas. It seems past time for someone to write a new novel that could be a sequel to Running Water or else a complete reenvisioning—to find new possibilities within that “line without breadth of cold blue ice.” 

Perhaps one of the readers of my story, now, will write the next book, one that might inspire as yet unimaginable climbs and dreams. 

[I have also explored the story of the Brenva Face in a Sharp End column for Alpinist 75.—Author.] 

This article was made possible with research assistance from AAC Library Director Katie Sauter.

Endnotes

[1] Adolphus Warburton Moore, The Alps in 1864: A Private Journal (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1902). Although the book states “1864” in its title, the 1865 climb is included. 

[2]  A.E.W. Mason, Running Water and The Guide, with introduction and notes by Roberta Grandi (London Academic Publishing, 2021). 

[3] For a biography of Thomas Graham Brown, short-listed for the Boardman-Tasker Award, see Peter Foster’s The Uncrowned King of Mont Blanc (Langley, UK: Baton Wicks Publications, 2019). 

[4] Thomas Graham Brown, Brenva (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1944).

[5]  See Robin N. Campbell’s “Graham Brown’s Eulogy,” in the Edinburgh University Mountaineering Club Online Archives, eumarchives.files.wordpress.com, 1965. 

[6]  Climbing Days, Dorothy Pilley (London: Secker & Warburg, 1935). 

[7] As Pilley’s nephew, Dan Richards, wrote in his biography of her, also called Climbing Days (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 2016), “Ivor and Dorothea were both, first and foremost, mountaineers. They met in the mountains on an equal footing and returned there whenever they could for the rest of their lives…. United climbing companions on a rope, their apparently eccentric union founded in the wild landscape of the mountains.”

[8] Dorothy Pilley and I.A. Richards, “The North Ridge of the Dent Blanche,” Alpine Journal 35 (1923). 

[9] As cited in Dan Richard’s biography of Pilley.