THE CALL OF NATURE

By John Elson

ATTENTION, READERS. It's time for a little game of Jeopardy!. First, for $100: this French veteran of the Napoleonic wars invented hiking and the forest trail by painting blue arrows on strategically placed trees in the unmarked wilds of the Fontainebleau woods. For $200: this mountain in Middle Europe was long believed to house the tomb of Pontius Pilate. Finally, for $300: these obscure bits of ancient trivia, and hundreds more like them, can be found in this new book by a professor of history at Columbia University.

You're ready for the daily double if you responded: 1) Who is Claude Francois Denecourt, nicknamed "le Silvain"? 2) What is Mons Pilatus in the Swiss Alps? and 3) What is Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama? Author of iconoclastic, groundbreaking studies of the French Revolution (Citizens) and the Netherlands during its 17th century Golden Age (The Embarrassment of Riches), Schama is one of those rare, imaginative historians who do more than impose order on the known past. He introduces readers to a kind of yesteryear they never dreamed existed.

The grand theme of Landscape and Memory (Alfred A. Knopf; 652 pages; $40) is the many ways men and women have found myth, meaning and symbols of national character in such natural objects as forests, rivers and mountains. Consider, for example, the Alps. To sobersided moderns, these vast, snowy protuberances are no more than vertically enhanced scenery--awesome to be sure, but devoid of greater meaning. Earlier generations were more impressionable. As proof that the mountains were possessed by the devil, the learned physicist and mathematician Johann Jacob Scheuchzer in 1702 compiled an encyclopedic list of dragon sightings in the Alps. (Mons Pilatus was said to harbor a particularly hideous monster, with a head "that terminated in the serrated jaw of a serpent.")

Demonizing the Alps, however, was far from universal. The naturalist Conrad Gesner, who climbed Mons Pilatus in 1555 to disprove its diabolic reputation, thought of the Alps as the "work of the Sovereign Architect." To 19th century Romantics, the Swiss mountains were symbols of virtue, and the herdsmen who dwelt there paradigms of primitive democracy. Thus the Alps through history have been rather like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never know what meaning you'll find inside them.

Schama is that academic exoticus, a professor without a Ph.D.; he has said, "All I want to do is share the past." Like his earlier masterworks, Landscape and Memory is studded with apt illustrations from art and literature, and its pages crackle with epigram and, at times, a dry Gibbonian wit. The book also has a message of rebuke for those multiculturalists who despise Western civilization as the archenemy of nature and the world's primary despoiler of pristine wilds. "Even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture," Schama writes, "may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product." Yosemite is surely overtrekked and tourist befouled, but would we prefer, he asks, that it had never been mapped and emparked? As he notes, "The wilderness, after all, does not locate itself, does not name itself."

In sharing the past, Schama does not merely dramatize history; he personalizes it as well. Landscape and Memory begins with the author's memories of growing up along the estuary of the Thames, near a village where lay the remains of its "fishy fathers"--the aptly named Richard Haddock and Robert Salmon. Later Schama describes a visit to the forests of eastern Poland, where his Hasidic Jewish ancestors made a precarious living as river rats, floating logs to the sawmills of Grodno. Such intimate touches do not detract from the cosmic scope of Landscape and Memory; they are grace notes in what deserves to become a classic.