"Mt. Everest has the steepest ridge and the most thrilling cliff I have ever seen in my life. My beloved... I cant tell you how fascinated I am by this mountain." this is1921In, Mallory wrote a letter to his wife at the Everest camp. A few days later, in the process of attacking the Everest, on the hillside not far from the peak, he disappeared forever in a sudden thick fog.

This book is an attempt to explain how this can happen: how can a mountain completely "fascinate" a person? How can such an unusually strong love be invested in a behemoth piled up by rocks and ice? Why did those parents, children, husbands and wives lose their loved ones to the mountain? Such fascination is not unique to Mallory. The more civilized and prosperous the times are, the more people are willing to abandon everything they love and comfort on the ground, endure all kinds of spiritual and physical pain, and climb thousands of meters high. "Why climb the mountain?" has become the most fundamental but also the most difficult question to answer, perplexing countless climbers and non climbers.

However, human mountaineering is only a modern thing. Three centuries ago, climbing mountains at the risk of life would only be regarded as insanity, but as soon as human beings began to climb mountains out of spiritual needs and love of beauty, mountains began to exert a huge and usually fatal attraction to human brain, making countless people willing to die in the mountains.

How did this infatuation of life and death come into being in these three hundred years? How can the steep, desolate and dangerous mountain characteristics be transformed into valuable experiences such as sublimity, divinity and Transcendence in human hearts? Why do humans become addicted to the fear of facing heights and pursue this thing with their lives again and again? In fact, we not only see the dizzy history of the earth in every fold of the mountain and every section of the rock stratum, but also get Gods vision in the vast field of vision at high altitude, and experience that the sense of self becomes stronger due to the expansion of vision. At the same time, we are also attacked: on the top of the mountain, the boundlessness of time and space makes you insignificant. So the author said, "those who climb the top of the mountain are half in love with themselves and half in love with self annihilation."

From numerous mountaineering records and his own personal experience, the author understands that "mountains are only geological accidents. Mountains do not intend to kill people or please people. Any emotional attributes of mountains are endowed by human imagination." what humans climb is not only a mountain in essence, but also a mountain in their hearts. Therefore, it is fascinating to explore why human beings climb mountains. What we explore is not only ice, snow and stones, but also the internal scenery of mankind for 300 years. It is how human perception accumulates and becomes rich in the face of mountains. It is that we will become more aware of human beings and ourselves

Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the worlds highest places.