The heights of absurdity

By Robert Macfarlane

When I am unable to get to sleep—which is most nights—I don’t count imaginary sheep, I climb an imaginary mountain. My route starts on a path that leads up shaley moraine, then onto a glacier riven and mazed with glowing blue crevasses. The glacier brings me to a rearing face of ice, several thousand feet high, up which I make my way by cutting steps with my axe, in the old manner of mountaineers. My pace falters as the face steepens until at last, from some point on that impossible wall of ice, I fall to sleep.

This dream-mountain of mine is based on the make-believe summit of W.E. Bowman’s comic classic "The Ascent of Rum Doodle" (1956, reissued by Vintage Classics in 2010). The fictional Rum Doodle—standing 40,000 and a half feet high in the kingdom of Yogistan—is a parody-Everest: supposedly the tallest peak in the world, and the last great prize of modern climbing.