A LINE ABOVE THE SKY: A STORY OF MOUNTAINS AND MOTHERHOOD. By Helen Mort (Ebury Press, 2022). Hardcover, 278 pages, $20.74.

Beyond the crisp lines of streets and rivers, beyond the typed names and elevation points of cities and mountains, beyond the ripples of hillside contours and the dots of marked trails, there are other tracks of passage, invisible on official maps: arched corridors through tall underbrush, faint disturbances of talus below an alpine ridge. All the uncharted itineraries where someone—a deer, a bear, a person—left behind the usual routes of travel to search for an object of longing: a source of water, a view above a canopy of trees, the beginning of a sinuous new climb over granite pinnacles. And where others learned to follow, at first piecing together barely perceptible clues: the smooth edge of a rock horn polished by human hands, the scatterings of words in a story like ice crystals across a drift of snow.

“Desire paths,” as British author Helen Mort describes in A Line Above the Sky, “are lines made deeper by use, signs of need, of want.” Such lines exist in life and literature as well, and part of their allure and promise—as she observes—is their challenge of authority and their rejection of established ways. In a previous poetry collection, No Map Could Show Them, she wrote of women mountaineers finding their own paths across landscapes that long seemed defined by men’s stories, of forgotten contours relearned and new ones redrawn, of “unwritten routes, stone-knuckled paths to overshoot, words/practised till they come out rough.”

A Line in the Sky traces such journeys ever farther and deeper as Mort recounts her own experiences of balancing a climbing life with new motherhood. She writes of both outer and inner landscapes with a deftness and poignancy that recalls Nan Shepherd’s classic book The Living Mountain: words themselves appear to merge with ranges, weaving together heather and stone, ice and desire; braiding flows of underground rivers and undercurrents of thought. Sensory details suggest ghostly presences and numinous ideas, hinting at all that remains unutterable or ineffable.

In one of many haunting passages, Mort compares the aftermath of childbirth to the commitment of a ropeless climb: “No way to undo the sequence of moves that have led to this point, this small blue room, this breathing being who is separate from me, alone in the world, his chest rising and falling under an artificial sun.” In another, citing the epigraph Ed Douglas and David Rose chose for their biography of Alison Hargreaves, Mort recounts: “Winthrop Young describes ‘a region of heart’s desire’ that is saved for mountain wildness, for ‘the silvery glacier fire’ and shadow, howling winds and streams.”

One of the great alpinists of the 20th century, Hargreaves was often condemned by the media for mountaineering as a mother, particularly after her death on K2. And at times, Mort recounts, Hargreaves seemed to feel the impression of a divided self, torn between her longing for her children and for high mountains, between the way her critics distorted her image and the way she knew her real self. Yet climbing also represented a means for her to regain a sense of “unity,” Mort observes, to experience moments of “pure power, pure movement, pure attention”—as it has for other women in sexist societies, before and since. Mothers or not, Mort shows us, we are each part of a vast cordée féminine, our individual stories interconnected with those of all other women. And by acting on that solidarity, we might trace desire paths that remake the possibilities on every map, not only in the mountains but in the rest of life.

— Katie Ives