Climbing Le Morne Brabant: Overcoming Fear on a Mountain

Le Morne Brabant rises above the lagoons and coral reefs of southwestern Mauritius, its sheer cliffs giving little indication from the air of just how steep the climb becomes.

The day’s logistics seem easy. Though, I don’t know yet how much of the morning I am going to spend confusing fear with useful information.

Salish is busy, but I only need a short ride from the hotel to a nearby ranch where I'm due to take a tour, so he sends his cousin to collect me instead. Somewhere above that ranch is the summit of Le Morne.

Le Morne Brabant is Mauritius’ other UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yesterday, Aapravasi Ghat introduced me to the system of indentured labor that expanded after slavery was abolished because capitalism requires cheap labor. Le Morne takes the story backward, to slavery itself and, more specifically, to the people who tried to escape it.

The two sites tell different chapters of the same history.

They also require very different shoes. I didn't pack hiking shoes.

Le Morne rises more than 550 meters from the southwestern edge of Mauritius, a great block of volcanic rock surrounded on three sides by the Indian Ocean. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its cliffs, caves and isolation made it a refuge for escaped enslaved people known as maroons. Small communities hid on and around the mountain, choosing terrain so difficult that pursuing them became dangerous.

Even the mountain’s name carries more history than I realize. Morne is a geographical term common in Mauritius and other parts of the French-speaking world for a steep, isolated hill or mountain, while Brabant came from a Dutch East India Company ship of that name that ran aground nearby in 1783. So, rather prosaically, Le Morne Brabant essentially means Brabant Mountain. But there is an accidental poetry to it. In modern French, morne can also mean gloomy, bleak or somber, which feels too on-the-nose for a place that later became synonymous with slavery, escape and resistance. The mountain was not named for that history, as far as anyone can reliably establish, but over time the landscape seems to have grown into the darker meaning of its own name.

At this point, sitting comfortably as the passenger seat in an air conditioned car, I regard this as an interesting historical fact. A few hours later, I will have a much better appreciation for just how badly someone would have to want to avoid following another person up this mountain.

We drive through fields of sugarcane, which by now I have learned are everywhere on Mauritius.

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Follow sugar backward and you arrive at nearly everything: colonization, slavery, abolition, indentured labor, immigration, wealth, exploitation and eventually the complicated country Mauritius became along with the rest of the world.

The cane fields run toward the mountains in every direction, green and orderly and seemingly endless. I sit quietly waiting for my morning coffee to perform its miracle, while I disassociate looking at the window and every song ever written about sugar begins cycling through my head: Sugar, Sugar, Brown Sugar, Pour Some Sugar on Me, Sugar, We’re Goin Down, Watermelon Sugar, Maroon 5’s Sugar. There is, I realize, a remarkable amount of sugar in the musical canon. Apparently humanity has spent centuries cultivating the stuff and roughly the same amount of time trying to rhyme with it.

Eventually Salish’s cousin turns onto a dirt road in what appears to be the middle of nowhere.

He stops.

He tells me to walk up the road.

So I do.

Travel has slowly trained me to require less information than I once did.

Farther up the dirt track I see a group of people gathering in an open area, which is reassuring because until then there has been no particular evidence that I am going somewhere rather than simply being deposited beside a road.

Sunrise from the base of Le Morne Brabant, before the climbing begins. Île aux Bénitiers sits quietly in the lagoon as the first light breaks behind the mountains. From down here, everything ahead still looks manageable.

Almost everyone in the group seems to be German or Dutch.

This strikes me as oddly specific.

Both countries, it turns out, are strong markets for adventure travel, which makes the composition of the group somewhat less mysterious. If you gather a collection of Europeans in a field at eight in the morning and announce that they will spend the next several hours voluntarily hauling themselves up a mountain, there is a decent chance several of them will be German, Dutch, and/or Swiss.

We climb into the backs of flatbed trucks and bounce along another dirt road toward the base of Le Morne.

Every review I had read online described what we are about to do as a hike (this has since changed for good reason).

This is misleading.

A little farther up Le Morne, the view begins to open across Mauritius’s southwestern coast. Below, a dark stand of pine trees cuts through the tropical vegetation. Local lore says the pines trace back to a Christmas tree brought to the area and later spreading across the landscape. I haven’t found evidence that conclusively proves the story, but it is exactly the sort of wonderfully specific tale that attaches itself to a place and refuses to leave.

Initially, yes, we hike.

Our guide is Bryn James, a South African who has made Mauritius home and founded Explorers Mauritius. He has years of climbing and mountain-rescue experience and moves around Le Morne with the casual confidence of someone walking through his own kitchen.

Gravity appears to be something he acknowledges intellectually but does not personally fear.

I have a more traditional relationship with it.

What stands out about Bryn, though, is not his lack of fear.

It is his almost relentless positivity.

He is encouraging from the beginning.

We’re doing great.

Take your time.

The view is going to be worth it.

Wait until you get to the top.

You’re going to feel so accomplished when you make it.

At first, none of this seems particularly necessary.

Then the trail gets steeper.

And steeper.

Walking becomes grabbing rocks with both hands and pulling myself upward while trying not to pay too much attention to the increasingly large amount of empty space behind me.

There are occasional excuses to stop climbing, and I take full advantage of them.

Plants, for example.

I find myself becoming increasingly interested in botany at roughly the same rate that my body becomes increasingly interested in sweating.

Lichens cover rocks that otherwise seem incapable of supporting anything. At one point I stop to photograph a strange cactus-like plant with long, fleshy stems growing directly from the rock.

I don't know most of their names at the time. I just appreciate the opportunity to stand still.

Only later do I learn that Le Morne is almost as interesting botanically as it is historically. Its isolation and difficult terrain have protected remnants of Mauritius' native vegetation, including two flowering plants found nowhere else in the world. One is Trochetia boutoniana, the red, bell-shaped national flower of Mauritius, whose wild home is Le Morne. The other, Helichrysum mauritianum, is restricted to the mountain as well.

The same inaccessibility I have been complaining about all morning has, in other circumstances, been useful.

One of the flowers I photograph turns out to be Madagascar periwinkle, a little five-petaled pink flower I probably would have walked past anywhere else. It is the source of compounds that led to vincristine and vinblastine, drugs used to treat cancers including leukemia and Hodgkin lymphoma.

A little farther up Le Morne, I stop looking at the summit long enough to notice what is growing underfoot. Madagascar periwinkle blooms along the trail, a small reminder that there is plenty to see on a mountain besides the top.

This seems an unreasonable amount of accomplishment for such a small flower on a nondescript plant.

Then again, I am beginning to reconsider how much can be determined by appearances.

I take a few more photographs.

And, having several rest breaks for botanical curiosity, I continue upward.

At some point, a hike should involve considerably more walking than wondering where to put your hands.

There are sections of Le Morne that are, by any reasonable definition, climbing.

And I begin seriously considering whether I need to do them.

There are several perfectly respectable places where I could stop before the more difficult second half.

I could sit here.

I could wait for everyone else to come back.

I could admire the view from this elevation in the shade.

I ask myself if knowing my limits is a sign of maturity rather than fear.

All of these arguments sound extremely persuasive when you are standing beneath a rock face.

I keep looking for a point at which I can gracefully announce that this is far enough.

I also wonder whether I traveled as far from home as I possibly could only to begin this climb and leave it unfinished.

Bryn seems to recognize exactly what is happening.

He never makes a big production of it.

“Wait until you see the view. It'll be worth it.”

I am fairly certain I would not have made it to the top without him. Not because he physically got me there. But, because for a while he believed everyone on the trek could do it more convincingly than I believed in myself.

There is something useful in that.

This is where the hike begins quietly renegotiating the definition of “hike.” The trail narrows, the rocks get bigger, and walking gradually gives way to climbing. Le Morne is starting to show its teeth.

We like stories in which people find strength entirely within themselves. We dig deep. We overcome. We discover some previously hidden reserve of courage and emerge triumphantly on the other side.

Sometimes that happens, but I believe that, more often than not, we have outside support in some form of another. For example, when someone simply stands a few feet ahead of you and says, "Come on. You can do this," in a supportive way that is different than a junior high school PE teacher.

It just keeps you moving long enough to continue, and then afterwards realize that that the capability was already there.

I realize later that this is how I have managed a surprising number of difficult things in my life.

Higher up, the reward starts making its case. Îlot Fourneau sits below in the lagoon, surrounded by reef and impossible shades of blue. The trail is getting harder, but the view is beginning to explain why Bryn keeps insisting the summit will be worth it.

The scenery gets increasingly ridiculous as we climb.

Clouds move quickly through the landscape, changing it by the minute.

Looking outward eventually leads to looking down.

And looking down is where the trouble starts.

My knees begin shaking.

Literally.

My kneecaps start trembling like they do on old-timey cartoon characters immediately before their legs turn into accordions.

Until this moment I'd assumed that was artistic exaggeration.

Apparently it was observational drawing.

My body has independently concluded that we are in danger.

Bryn, meanwhile, decides this is an excellent time for a photograph. He's been carrying around a GoPro and taking photos and videos of everyone, at times, posing us on overlooks.

Higher still, the trail spills out onto exposed rock of Le Morne. The Indian Ocean stretches away on both sides, the mountains run down the peninsula. The view is spectacular.

He climbs above everyone as they reach the top of the mountain and photographs us one-by-one. Eventually it's my time to make my way up one of the final exposed sections.

“Look up!”

I look up.

 The trail is now a scramble up exposed rock, with the lagoon getting farther below every time I look back. I am smiling here.

“Thumbs up!”

I give him a thumbs-up.

Somewhere behind me is a substantial amount of mountain followed eventually by the Indian Ocean.

The resulting photograph is remarkable because it appears to show a nervously cheerful middle-aged man enjoying an invigorating morning in nature. Unless you know me. Then you can tell I'm nervous and wondering what I've gotten myself into.

We finally reach the top, and Bryn immediately becomes photographer-in-chief, taking our pictures one by one against the view we’ve spent the morning earning. For a few minutes, everyone gets their turn at the edge while the rest of us catch our breath and try to look significantly more composed than we feel.

Apparently terror photographs surprisingly well.

I keep going.

One rock.

Then another.

Then another.

Until eventually there is nowhere higher to go.

I've reached the top.

My body feels weird.

A metal cross marks the summit.

Below us, the lagoon extends outward in enormous bands of turquoise and blue. Coral shelves form pale shapes beneath the water. The reef separates the calm lagoon from the darker Indian Ocean beyond it. Mountains stack along the coast, disappearing into clouds and haze.

At the top, the entire southwest coast of Mauritius finally opens beneath us. Îlot Fourneau sits in the middle of the lagoon, surrounded by reef, sand flats and water shifting through every possible shade of blue. This is the view Bryn kept promising was waiting for us.

There is a very particular satisfaction in arriving somewhere you spent much of the journey considering not reaching.

I feel a combination of surprise at myself for making it and also uncertainty with what I should do with myself. Everyone starts taking photographs. I take a selfie holding onto the giant metal cross for dear life.

At the summit, I finally make it to the giant metal cross. I am hot, exhausted, relieved and still very much afraid of heights, but for the first time all morning there is nowhere left to climb. I’ve made it.

And this is when I notice the guy who obviously knows his way around a gym.

I saw him at the beginning of the climb because it would have been difficult not to. He is extraordinarily. At the bottom of the mountain, without consciously deciding to do so, I had placed him in a category. People Who Will Have No Problem With This.

I put myself in another category.

Now we are at the summit.

He stays well back from the edge, and his girlfriend explains that he’s afraid of heights as she offers to take my phone and snap a few photos of me.

Really afraid.

“Really?!?!” I accidentally blurt out, standing beside the giant metal cross, physically spent and emotionally wrung out in ways I've never felt before.

Suddenly something about the morning rearranges itself.

I feel relieved. I had looked at him and seen strength while I looked at myself and saw timidity.

Beside the cross, the mountain keeps going. This jagged rocky peak rises above us, making the place we’ve just reached feel even more improbable. For once, though, I’m perfectly happy to admire the next bit from exactly where I’m standing.

I had spent much of the climb interpreting every trembling knee and every thought of turning around as evidence that perhaps I was simply not as capable as the adventurous Europeans that surrounded me.

Yet here is the person I had unconsciously selected as the physical embodiment of capability, standing at exactly the same summit, afraid of exactly the same thing.

The mountain has exposed the flaw in my assessment of both of us.

Fear has accompanied me into an extraordinary number of places in my life.

It has gone to college with me, walked into rooms where I knew no one, sat through job interviews, made phone calls I had rehearsed in my head beforehand, introduced itself to strangers, attended dinners and events where everyone else seemed to know exactly how to behave, boarded airplanes, traveled with me to countries I knew almost nothing about, and followed me all the way up the side of Le Morne, a mountain so forbidding that the slaveowners themselves would not climb it. These are ordinary things for many people. With anxiety, even the ordinary can require a surprising amount of courage.

However, the longer I'm alive, the more I realize that its presence has never been particularly reliable evidence of what happens next.

Everyone else seems more confident, therefore they must be stronger. But confidence and capability are not the same thing.

Neither fact tells us who gets to stand at the top of the mountain.

We both do.

Nothing about my fear had predicted the outcome.

Climbing Le Morne Brabant has taught me that fear is a terrible measure of capability.

The sentence occurs to me with the force of something I should have understood a long time ago.

Bryn takes everyone's photographs at the summit, posing us for a video that he said he'd share with us.

For a few minutes, Le Morne becomes what summits tend to become once people successfully reach them: smiling, phones, congratulations and photographic evidence that nobody can later accuse us of making the whole thing up.

Then Bryn walks toward the edge and plants his feet widely apart. He appears completely at ease.

Then he tells us the story for which Le Morne is famous.

At the top, Bryn takes over as photographer, somehow managing to look completely at home on rock that has spent the last hour terrifying me.

According to Mauritian oral tradition, when slavery was abolished in 1835, officials climbed the mountain to tell the maroons hiding there that they were free.

The people living above supposedly saw armed men approaching and believed they had come to capture them.

Rather than return to slavery, the story says, some threw themselves from the cliffs.

It is an extraordinary story.

There is one problem with the story: archaeology has never actually proved it happened.

What we do know is that Le Morne was a refuge for maroons, people who escaped slavery and disappeared into a landscape designed, almost perversely, to make pursuit miserable. The mountain gave them cliffs, caves, dense vegetation and enough difficult terrain to make anyone following them reconsider their career choices.

The famous story says that when British soldiers climbed the mountain to tell the maroons slavery had been abolished, some mistook them for captors and jumped from the cliffs rather than surrender. It is a powerful story. It is also one for which no conclusive archaeological evidence has been found.

That does not make it meaningless. It just makes it history, which is rarely as tidy as plaques at landmarks (or near where things happened) would like it to be. Some things survive in archives. Some survive under a few feet of dirt. Some survive because people keep telling the story until it becomes part of the place itself.

Standing up here, I understand why this particular story stuck and wonder about how multiple things can be significant simultaneously.

Le Morne is beautiful in the way places can be beautiful when they are also actively trying to kill you. The cliffs are severe. The terrain is unforgiving. Every route seems to involve a drop you would prefer not to think about. And that, of course, was the point. The same geography making my knees behave like unreliable machinery once made this mountain useful to people who desperately needed not to be found.

I am not going to pretend my morning of recreational terror has anything meaningfully in common with what maroons endured. But there is something about putting your hands on the rock, feeling how steep it is, and looking down from where they once hid that turns a sentence in a history book into something physically and mentally exhausting.

At the bottom, I had been told Le Morne was a refuge because it was inaccessible.

At the top, every muscle in my body has now submitted supporting documentation.

Eventually, we start back down.

Then comes the part I have been trying not to think about: going back down. We gather at the top of the steep section and begin negotiating the same rock in reverse, one person at a time. The lagoon below is spectacular. Looking directly at how far below it is feels less helpful.

This introduces an unfortunate fact I had managed not to think about while climbing. Everything I just climbed now has to be negotiated in reverse.

So I start down. One section at a time, the same way I came up.

Farther down, the mountain finally starts giving some ground back. The trail is still steep and rocky, but trees close in around us again and the exposed summit feels a little farther away with every step. My legs are tired. My fear, annoyingly, is still in excellent shape.

As we make our way down, the summit gradually gets farther away rather than closer, and by the time we reach the bottom, I haven't conquered my fear of heights. Fear remains undefeated. I had spent much of the morning asking whether I was capable of reaching the top. Fear kept offering an opinion. Fortunately, capability got the final vote.

I pause and turn for one last look at the mountain I’ve just climbed. I take a deep breath, capture her in one final photo, then climb into the back of the pickup truck for the ride down to meet my driver again.

Maybe that is what I will remember most about Le Morne. I was afraid. I considered stopping multiple times, questioned myself repeatedly. And I still reached the summit.

Sometimes someone else sees what we are capable of before we do. Sometimes strength looks nothing like we expect it to, and the person who looks fearless turns out to be afraid too. Maybe the most useful thing we can do is stop waiting to feel like the person who can handle what comes next.

Fear is a terrible measure of capability.

I suspect I’ve spent much more of my life proving that than I realized, but Le Morne reminded me that sometimes moving forward means putting down what you’ve been carrying and trusting others to help.

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