'My spirit soars where the air grows thin'

Shepherd is able to conjure up such a well of emotions in the reader that you’re grateful that a book of this sort exists.

The Living Mountain

Nan Shepherd was 84 years old when The Living Mountain came out in 1977. She’d written the book, a meditation on her beloved Cairngorms in Scotland, in the 1940s during the Second World War. At that time, the prose of this book, a seminal work of nature writing, was thought to be ahead of its time and after getting one rejection, she put it away. Her fiction had already been published in the 1920s and 30s and after that she seemed to have disappeared from view, only to emerge three decades later.

The book had been published in a small print run by the Aberdeen University Press, an institution to which Shepherd had personal and professional ties (she had studied there and also later edited the university’s journal). It came out and was forgotten until resurrected by Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed nature writer, some years ago. In his introduction to the book, Macfarlane talks about how the book changed him. He also reflects on how Shepherd, a woman, approaches a mountain so differently from her male peers. For a man, nature writer or not, tackling a mountain is all about summiting it, conquering the landscape. As a woman, Shepherd cares not for reaching the peak, but going through those magnificent hills.

Shepherd lived all her life in the same area around the Cairngorms. She explored the landscape with her passion for hill walking and wrote about the flora, the fauna and the environment in such pellucid, sensual prose that reading it is to experience ecstatic pleasure.

She covers it all in The Living Mountain — the stone, the water, the plants, the trees, the clouds, the air even. She peers over the edge of a precipice to observe a small, reflecting pool of water. She falls asleep in the open and experiences nature from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She observes the busy life of ptarmigans and snow buntings and hares in this harsh terrain.

Even when lost in the depths of the beauty of these hills, she doesn’t gloss over the treachery of a landscape that is not really conquerable. Deaths happen, of animals and humans. People go missing in sudden blizzards. Their losses are recounted, some of them people she has personally known. There’s heartache in these lines, mourning for lives that are often cut down before their prime.

In the distance, the war drums sound and even in this remote part of Scotland there’s no escaping the drone of aircraft. But the mountains, older than human civilisation, and for whom time moves at a slower pace than us, stand stoic through it all. There’s an odd sort of comfort to be had in contemplating the mortality of the human race in the face of such longevity. Shepherd is able to conjure up such a well of emotions in the reader that by the time this small treasure of a book comes to an end you’re grateful that she thought to take it out of the drawer where it languished for so many years and gave it another chance to see the light.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.