By Meghan Cox Gurdon

There is nothing more difficult to put into words than the sublime. The thing to be described might be a piece of music, a scenic vista or a jolt of transcendent love. The challenge of defining the indefinable helps explain why writing about art, nature or love can so easily tip into excess. The writer gropes for similes and metaphors, heaps up adjectives or perhaps hides his inability to find the right words behind a scrim of lyricism.

Yet some people can do it. Nan Shepherd did it. In the latter years of World War II, the Scottish novelist was working as a teacher when she finished distilling her experiences of a Scottish mountain range known as the Cairngorms. For years, Shepherd (1893-1981) had walked through, slept in, wondered at and studied the great granite massif with its plateaus and crags, its crystalline waters, its bellowing stags and its confounding weather. Shepherd committed her observations to paper, made one unsuccessful effort to bring the work to market, then slipped her manuscript into a drawer. There it lay for the next 30 years. Published at last in 1977 and reissued in 2011 with an introduction by the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane, "The Living Mountain" has returned in paperback with an afterword by the American artist and writer Jenny Odell.

At roughly 30,000 words and abounding in clean, sharp, profound descriptions of phenomena both interior and exterior, Shepherd's narrative is a marvel of economy. Mr. Macfarlane observes that the work commingles "field-note, memoir, natural history and philosophical meditation." Ms. Odell sees Shepherd's relationship with the Cairngorms as "a blend of obsession and humility."

For all the brevity of "The Living Mountain," it has an unhurried pace. Somehow Shepherd turns her full attention to one aspect after another of "the whole wild enchantment" of the Cairngorms without wasting words or scanting on them. Her prose is fresh and apt. She muses on the "astounding transparency" of the Cairgorms' flowing waters -- the rivers Avon and Dee begin there -- and the "crinkled green cascades" of winter ice. She writes of the way that humidity plays tricks with perspective: "In a dry air, the hills shrink, they look far off and innocent; but in a moisture-laden air they charge forward, insistent and enormous, and in mist they have a nightmare quality."

There is no element of the mountain range that Shepherd condemns. Even the "gray desolation" of early spring may produce, she writes, a sudden "miracle of beauty." She does, however, display strong and unsentimental respect for the real menace of the terrain. Her own foreword to the 1977 edition mentions that in the three decades since she penned "The Living Mountain," numerous people had perished in the Cairngorms. The dead included hikers who'd lost their way, pilots who plummeted into the rocks and a group of students who failed to find shelter during a blizzard. Snow in the Cairngorms is no joke; neither, it seems, is that humbler stuff, water vapor. Clouds may be dainty in the sky, and fog may be lovely when wreathing hills in the distance, but tiny particles of water in the air can combine to disorient and kill with alarming speed. "This swiftness of the mist is one of its deadliest features," we read, "and the wreckage of aeroplanes, left to rust in lonely corners of the mountains, bears witness to its dreadful power."

There, we might say, is nature in a nutshell: A thing of terror may also be a thing of exquisite beauty. In the case of mist, the aftermath of a beautiful, terrible visitation may supply its own separate beauty. "Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons," Shepherd writes, putting the reader in mind of the figure in Caspar David Friedrich's painting "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (ca. 1817).

Those who are on a first-name basis with the proper nouns of Scottish topography will have no difficulty distinguishing between various bits of the Cairngorms: the peaks of Braeriach and Ben Avon; the lochs of Etchachan and Einich; or the many glacier-carved, bowl-shaped valleys known as corries. To the stranger, such names may befuddle. Yet the reader needn't be conversant with Scottish specifics to feel the stir.

Of wider and even universal application is Shepherd's guidance about using the senses to grapple with sublimity -- guidance that would work just as well in the Rockies or on Cape Cod as it did for her in the eastern Highlands. In nature she counsels quiescence: Putting oneself in an open, receptive, restful attitude so as to have an opportunity to become aware of all that surrounds you. She advises listening even when there seems to be no sound: "To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves." She exalts the human capacity not merely to look but also to see. To this end, she advocates allowing one's eyes to travel slowly from one side to another of, say, a body of water, as a way of savoring its breadth. "This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reality," she writes. "By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one's head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become!"

--Mrs. Gurdon, a Journal contributor, is the author of "The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction."

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