Underland Read online

  UNDERLAND

  A Deep Time Journey

  ROBERT MACFARLANE

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York | London

  Is it dark down there

  Where the grass grows through the hair?

  Is it dark in the under-land of Null?

  Helen Adam, ‘Down There in the Dark’, 1952

  The void migrates to the surface . . .

  Advances in Geophysics, 2016

  Contents

  First Chamber

  1 Descending

  PART I SEEING (BRITAIN)

  2 Burial (Mendips, Somerset)

  3 Dark Matter (Boulby, Yorkshire)

  4 The Understorey (Epping Forest, London)

  Second Chamber

  PART II HIDING (EUROPE)

  5 Invisible Cities (Paris)

  6 Starless Rivers (The Carso, Italy)

  7 Hollow Land (Slovenian Highlands)

  Third Chamber

  PART III HAUNTING (THE NORTH)

  8 Red Dancers (Lofotens, Norway)

  9 The Edge (Andøya, Norway)

  10 The Blue of Time (Kulusuk, Greenland)

  11 Meltwater (Knud Rasmussen Glacier, Greenland)

  12 The Hiding Place (Olkiluoto, Finland)

  13 Surfacing

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  FIRST CHAMBER

  The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.

  Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. Somewhere down on lower ground an unseen fire is burning, its smoke a column. A child drops stones one by one into a metal bucket, ting, ting, ting.

  Follow a path through fields, past a hill to the east that is marked by a line of nine round burial barrows, nubbing the land like the bones of a spine. Three horses in a glinting cloud of flies, stock-still but for the swish of a tail, the twitch of a head.

  Over a stile in a limestone wall and along a stream to a thicketed dip from which grows the ancient ash. Its crown flourishes skywards into weather. Its long boughs lean low around. Its roots reach far underground.

  Swallows curve and dart, feathers flashing. Martins criss-cross the middle air. A swan flies high and south on creaking wings. This upper world is very beautiful.

  Near the ash’s base its trunk splits into a rough rift, just wide enough that a person might slip into the tree’s hollow heart – and there drop into the dark space that opens below. The rift’s edges are smoothed to a shine by those who have gone this way before, passing through the old ash to enter the underland.

  Beneath the ash tree, a labyrinth unfurls.

  Down between roots to a passage of stone that deepens steeply into the earth. Colour depletes to greys, browns, black. Cold air pushes past. Above is solid rock, utter matter. The surface is scarcely thinkable.

  The passage is taken; the maze builds. Side-rifts curl off. Direction is difficult to keep. Space is behaving strangely – and so too is time. Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.

  The passage turns, turns again, narrows – and leads into surprising space. A chamber is entered. Sound now booms, resonates. The walls of the chamber appear bare at first, but then something extraordinary happens. Scenes from the underland start to show themselves on the stone, distant from one another in history, but joined by echoes.

  In a cave within a scarp of karst, a figure inhales a mouthful of red ochre dust, places its left hand against the cave wall – fingers spread, thumb out, palm cold on the rock – and then blows the ochre hard against the hand’s back. There is an explosion of dust – and when the hand is lifted its ghostly print remains, the stone around having taken the red of the ochre. The hand is shifted, more dust is blown and another pale outline is left. Calcite will run over these prints, sealing them in. The prints will survive for more than 35,000 years. Signs of what? Of joy? Of warning? Of art? Of life in the darkness?

  In the shallow sandy soil of northern Europe, some 6,000 years ago, the body of a young woman – dead in childbirth along with her son – is lowered gently into a grave. Next to her is laid the white wing of a swan. Then onto the wing is placed the body of her son, so that the baby is doubly cradled in death – by the swan’s feathers and his mother’s arms. A round mound of earth is raised to mark their burial place: the woman, the child and the white swan’s wing.

  On an island in the Mediterranean 300 years before the founding of the Roman Empire, a metalworker completes the design of a silver coin. The coin’s face shows a square labyrinth with a single entrance on its upper edge and a complex path to its centre. The walls of the labyrinth – like the rim of the coin – are slightly raised and polished to a sheen. Tooled into the labyrinth’s centre is the figure of a creature with the head of a bull and the legs of a man: the Minotaur, waiting in darkness for whatever comes next.

  Six hundred years later, a young woman sits for a portrait painter in Egypt. She has dressed most handsomely for the sitting. She has strong dark eyebrows and wide dark eyes, almost black. Her hair is pulled back from her forehead by a metal band topped with a gold bead, and she wears a golden scarf and brooch. The painter works with hot beeswax, gold leaf and coloured pigments, layering them onto wood. He is creating the young woman’s death image. When she dies it will be wrapped into the bands of cloth used to mummify her corpse such that it takes the place of her real face. As her body decays beneath its swaddling, the portrait will remain un-aged. It is well to do such things early, when one looks most glowing. Her body will be placed in a necropolis – a city of the dead built at the entrance to a sunken depression of desert, in a buried chamber lined with limestone and covered with quartzite slabs to deter grave robbers, close to vaults that hold the mummified corpses of more than a million ibises.

  Beneath a plateau in southern Africa, late in the nineteenth century, miners crawl through miles of narrow tunnel – cut deeper underground here than anywhere else on Earth at this time – lugging ore from a sunken reef of gold. Some of these men, who have migrated to the area in their thousands to work, will die soon in rockfalls and accidents. More will die slowly of silicosis from breathing the rock dust down there in the killing dark, year after year. Here the human body is largely disposable in the view of the corporations that own the mine and the markets that drive it: a small, unskilled tool of extraction to be replaced when it fails or wears out. The ore the men bring up is crushed and smelted, and the wealth it yields lines the pockets of shareholders in distant countries.

  In a cave in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas not long after Partition, a young woman meditates sixteen hours a day, for seventy- five days. She sits stone-still while meditating, save for her mouth, which moves as she murmurs mantras. She emerges most often at night; when it is cloudless the Milky Way can be seen spilling across the sky above the peaks. She lives on water drunk with cupped hands from a sacred river, and on foraged wild berries and fruits. The mantras, the solitude and the darkness bring perceptions that are new to her, and she experiences a profound change in her vision. When at last she completes her retreat she feels vast as the skies, old as the mountains, formless as starlight.

  Thirty years ago a boy and his father use the claw of a hammer to prise up a floorboard in a house they are soon to leave. They have made a jam-jar time capsule. Into the jar the boy has placed objects and messages. The die-cast metal model of a bomber aeroplane. The outline of his left hand traced in red ink on plain paper. A self-description for whoever finds the jar – Quite tall for my age, very blonde hair, almost white. Bigges
t fear, nuclear war – written in pencil on a notebook page. A stopped watch with luminous hands and dial, around which he likes to cup his hands to see the numbers glow. He pours a handful of rice into the jar to absorb moisture, screws the jar’s brass lid tightly shut, puts it in its hiding place and nails the floorboard back down.

  Deep in an extinct volcano a tunnel network has been bored above a crustal fault known as Ghost Dance. Access drifts incline through tilted strata to level out in a repository zone, organized into emplacement corridors. The intent is to inter high-level nuclear waste in these corridors: radioactive uranium pellets encased in iron, then encased in copper, then buried above the Ghost Dance fault to pulse out their half-lives for millions of years to come. The timescale of the hazard is such that those responsible for entombing this waste must now face the question of how to communicate its danger to the distant future. This is a risk that will outlast not only the life of its makers but perhaps also the species of its makers. How to mark this site? How to tell whatever beings will come to this desert place that what is kept in this rock sarcophagus is desperately harmful, is not of value, must never be disturbed?

  And on a muddy ledge, two and a half miles into the cave system of a mountain in which they have become trapped by flood waters, twelve boys and their football coach sit in utter blackness, conserving the batteries of their phones, waiting day after day to see if the waters will rise or fall – or if by miracle someone will come to rescue them. With each passing hour the oxygen in their chamber is reduced by their breathing, and carbon dioxide levels increase. Above the mountain the monsoon clouds build, threatening more rain. Outside the mountain thousands of rescuers from six countries gather. At first they do not know if the boys are alive. Then they find handprints in mud on the walls of a chamber two miles into the system. Hope is given. Divers push further and further along the flooded passageways. Nine days after entering the mountain, the boys hear sounds coming from the river that flows past their ledge. Then they see lights glowing in the water. Bubbles seethe up. The lights rise. A man breaks the surface. The boys and their coach blink in the beam of his head-torch. One of the boys raises a hand in greeting, and the diver raises his in reply. ‘How many of you?’ asks the diver. ‘Thirteen,’ one replies. ‘Many people are coming,’ says the diver.

  So these scenes from the underland unfold along the walls of this impossible chamber, down in the labyrinth beneath the riven ash. The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.

  Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives).

  Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions).

  Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets).

  Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.

  I

  Descending

  We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it, caught in the shining jaws of a limestone bedding plane first formed on the floor of an ancient sea.

  The underland keeps its secrets well. Only in the last twenty years have ecologists succeeded in tracing the fungal networks that lace woodland soil, joining individual trees into intercommunicating forests – as fungi have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. In China’s Chongqing province, a cave network explored in 2013 was found to possess its own weather system: ladders of stacked mist that build in a huge central hall, cold fog that drifts in giant cloud chambers far from the reach of the sun. A thousand feet underground in northern Italy, I abseiled into an immense rotunda of stone, cut by a buried river and filled with dunes of black sand. Traversing those dunes on foot was like trudging through a windless desert on a lightless planet.

  Why go low? It is a counter-intuitive action, running against the grain of sense and the gradient of the spirit. Deliberately to place something in the underland is almost always a strategy to shield it from easy view. Actively to retrieve something from the underland almost always requires effortful work. The underland’s difficulty of access has long made it a means of symbolizing what cannot openly be said or seen: loss, grief, the mind’s obscured depths, and what Elaine Scarry calls the ‘deep subterranean fact’ of physical pain.

  A long cultural history of abhorrence exists around underground spaces, associating them with ‘the awful darkness inside the world’, in Cormac McCarthy’s phrase. Fear and disgust are the usual responses to such environments; dirt, mortality and brutal labour the dominant connotations. Claustrophobia is surely the sharpest of all common phobias. I have often noticed how claustrophobia – much more so than vertigo – retains its disturbing power even when being experienced indirectly as narrative or description. Hearing stories of confinement below ground, people shift uneasily, step away, look to the light – as if words alone could wall them in.

  I still remember as a ten-year-old reading the account, in Alan Garner’s novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, of two children escaping danger by descending the mining tunnels that riddle the sandstone outcrop of Alderley Edge in Cheshire. Deep inside the Edge, the embrace of the stone becomes so tight that it threatens to trap them:

  They lay full length, walls, floor and roof fitting them like a second skin. Their heads were turned to one side, for in any other position the roof pressed their mouths into the sand and they could not breathe. The only way to advance was to pull with the fingertips and to push with the toes, since it was impossible to flex their legs at all, and any bending of the elbows threatened to jam the arms helplessly under the body. [Then Colin’s] heels jammed against the roof: he could move neither up nor down and the rock lip dug into his shins until he cried out with the pain. But he could not move . . .

  Those passages took cold grip of my heart, emptied my lungs of air. Rereading them now, I feel the same sensations. But the situation also exerted a powerful narrative traction upon me – and still does. Colin could not move and I could not stop reading.

  An aversion to the underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ a ‘downwards violence’. A bias against depth also runs through mainstream conventions of observation and representation. In his book Vertical, Stephen Graham describes the dominance of what he calls the ‘flat tradition’ of geography and cartography, and the ‘largely horizontal worldview’ that has resulted. We find it hard to escape the ‘resolutely flat perspectives’ to which we have become habituated, Graham argues – and he finds this to be a political failure as well as a perceptual one, for it disinclines us to attend to the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal that support the surface world.

  Yes, for many reasons we tend to turn away from what lies beneath. But now more than ever we need to understand the underland. ‘Force yourself to see more flatly,’ orders Georges Perec in Species of Spaces. ‘Force yourself to see more deeply,’ I would counter. The underland is vital to the material structures of contemporary existence, as well as to our memories, myths and metaphors. It is a terrain with which we daily reckon and by which we are daily shaped. Yet we are disinclined to recognize the underland’s presence in our lives, or to admit its disturbing forms to our imaginations. Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving.

  We are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an o
ngoing occurrence experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of joint – and so is place. Things that should have stayed buried are rising up unbidden. When confronted by such surfacings it can be hard to look away, seized by the obscenity of the intrusion.

  In the Arctic, ancient methane deposits are leaking through ‘windows’ in the earth opened by melting permafrost. Anthrax spores are being released from reindeer corpses buried in once-frozen soil, now exposed by erosion and warmth. In the forests of Eastern Siberia a crater is yawning in the softening ground, swallowing tens of thousands of trees and revealing 200,000-year-old strata: local Yakutian people refer to it as a ‘doorway to the underworld’. Retreating Alpine and Himalayan glaciers are yielding the bodies of those engulfed by their ice decades before. Across Britain, recent heatwaves have caused the imprints of ancient structures – Roman watchtowers, Neolithic enclosures – to shimmer into view as crop-marks visible from above: aridity as X-ray, the land’s submerged past rising up in parched visitation. Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.’ In north-west Greenland an American Cold War missile base, sealed under the ice cap fifty years ago and containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical contaminants, has begun to move towards the light. ‘The problem,’ writes the archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure, outlive us, and come back at us with a force we didn’t realise they had . . . a dark force of “sleeping giants”’, roused from their deep time slumber.