Underland Read online

  ‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink.

  There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd – crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin. The extinction of a species or an ecosystem scarcely matters in the context of the planet’s cycles of erosion and repair.

  We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.

  When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.

  ~

  The oldest of underland stories concerns a hazardous descent into darkness in order to reach someone or something consigned to the realm of the dead. A variant to the Epic of Gilgamesh – written around 2100 BC in Sumeria – tells of such a descent, made by Gilgamesh’s servant Enki to the ‘netherworld’ on behalf of his master to retrieve a lost object. Enki sails through storms of hailstones that strike him like ‘hammers’, his boat trembles from the impact of waves that attack it like ‘butting turtles’ and ‘lions’, but still he reaches the netherworld. There, however, he is promptly imprisoned – only to be freed when the young warrior Utu opens a hole to the surface and carries Enki back out on a lofting breeze. Up in the sunlight Enki and Gilgamesh embrace, kiss, and talk for hours. Enki has not retrieved the lost object, but he has brought back precious news of vanished people. ‘Did you see my little stillborn children who never knew existence?’ asks Gilgamesh desperately. ‘I saw them,’ answers Enki.

  Similar stories recur throughout world myth. Classical literature records numerous instances of what in Greek were known as the katabasis (a descent to the underland) and the nekyia (a questioning of ghosts, gods or the dead about the earthly future), among them Orpheus’ attempt to retrieve his beloved Eurydice from Hades, and Aeneas’ voyage – led by the Sibyl, protected by the Golden Bough – to seek counsel with the shade of his father. The recent rescue of the Thai footballers from their lonely chamber far inside a mountain was a modern katabasis: the story seized global attention in part because it possessed the power of myth.

  What these narratives all suggest is something seemingly paradoxical: that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation. Our common verb ‘to understand’ itself bears an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it. ‘To discover’ is ‘to reveal by excavation’, ‘to descend and bring to the light’, ‘to fetch up from depth’. These are ancient associations. The earliest-known works of cave art in Europe – taking the form of painted ladders, dots and hand stencils on the walls of Spanish caves – have been dated to around 65,000 years ago, some 20,000 years before Homo sapiens are believed to have first arrived in Europe from Africa. Neanderthal artists left these images. Long before anatomically modern humans reached what is now Spain, writes one of the archaeologists responsible for the dating of this art, ‘People were making journeys into the darkness.’

  Underland is a story of journeys into darkness, and of descents made in search of knowledge. It moves over its course from the dark matter formed at the universe’s birth to the nuclear futures of an Anthropocene-to-come. During the deep time voyage undertaken between those two remote points, the line about which the telling folds is the ever-moving present. Across its chapters, in keeping with its subject, extends a subsurface network of echoes, patterns and connections.

  For more than fifteen years now I have been writing about the relationships between landscape and the human heart. What began as a wish to solve a personal mystery – why I was so drawn to mountains as a young man that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them – has unfolded into a project of deep-mapping carried out over five books and around 2,000 pages. From the icy summits of the world’s highest peaks, I have followed a downwards trajectory to what must surely be a terminus, exploring the storeys of place that lie beneath the surface. ‘The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned,’ wrote William Carlos Williams in a late poem. It has taken me until the second half of my life to understand something of what Williams meant. In the underland I have seen things I hope I will never forget – and things I wish I had never witnessed. What I thought would be my least human book has become, to my surprise, my most communal. If the image at the centre of much that I have written before is that of the walker’s placed and lifted foot, the image at the heart of these pages is that of the opened hand, extended in greeting, compassion or the making of a mark.

  I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright’. The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the cave walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from within the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.

  ~

  Shortly before beginning the journeys recounted here, I was given two objects. Each came with a request, and it was a condition of the gift of these objects that I agreed to fulfil those requests.

  The first of the objects is a double-cast bronze casket the size of a swan’s egg, which sits heavy in the hand. It is a kist and what it contains is toxic. Its maker wrote his demons down on a sheet of paper: his hatreds, fears and losses, the pain he had inflicted on others and the pain others had inflicted on him – all that was worst in his mind. Then he burned the paper and sealed the ashes inside the casket. Then he double-cast the casket, giving it a second layer of bronze to increase the strength of the containment. That outer layer of bronze became pitted and encrusted in the process of its casting, such that it seemed to resemble either the surface of a planet or the weather above it. Then he drove four iron nails through the casket’s centre, cutting off their ends and filing them flush. It is an exceptionally powerful object, which possesses a ritual intensity of creation. It could have been fashioned at any point in the past 2,500 years, but it was made only recently.

  I was given the casket on the condition that I disposed of it in the deepest or most secure underland site that I reached – a place from which it could never return.

  The second of the objects is an owl cut from a slice of whalebone. It is a talisman and what it connotes is magic. The minke whale from which the owl was taken had washed up dead on the shoreline of a Hebridean island. One of its rib b
ones was smoothed into cross-sections, each less than half an inch thick and six inches high. One of those cross-sections was then cut into the form of an owl with four bold strokes of a blade: two strokes for the eyes, and two for the wing lines. It is an exceptionally beautiful object, which possesses an Ice Age simplicity of making. It could have been fashioned at any point in the past 20,000 years, but it was made only recently.

  I was given the owl on the condition that I carried it with me at all times in the underland, to help me see in the dark.

  PART ONE

  Seeing (Britain)

  2

  Burial

  (Mendips, Somerset)

  The bones of a child lie in darkness on a ledge of limestone. Sunlight has not seen this child for over 10,000 years. In that time, calcite has flowed like silver varnish from the rock around, chrysalizing the body.

  A January day in 1797 and two young men are out rabbit-catching in the Mendip Hills of Somerset. They flush out a rabbit on the slope of a ravine. The rabbit runs and finds refuge in a jumble of boulders. The men are hungry; they want the rabbit. So they pull away some of the rocks – and are ‘surprised with the appearance of a subterraneous passage’. They enter the passage, which leads them steeply into the limestone of the scarp and then opens into a ‘large and lofty cavern, the roof and sides of which are most curiously fretted and embossed’.

  Winter sun follows them down the passage and lights up the chamber. It is, they see, a charnel house. On the floor and ledges to their left are scattered bones and complete skeletons, ‘lying promiscuously, almost converted into stone’. The relics shine with calcite, and dusting some of the bones is red ochre powder. A single large stalactite hangs from the chamber’s ceiling which, when struck, rings like a bell, its peal echoing in the cave-space. The stalactite has reached down and begun to absorb one of the skeletons; embedded in it are a skull, a thigh bone and two teeth with the enamel still intact.

  Also present in the cave are animal remains: the teeth of a brown bear, a barbed spear-point made from a red deer antler, and the bones of lynx, fox, wildcat and wolf. Votive objects have been interred here, too: sixteen periwinkle shells pierced so that they will hang spiral-outwards when worn against the body as a necklace; and a nest of seven pieces of fossil ammonite, the ends of their arcs rubbed smooth.

  The human bodies, it will later be established, are more than ten millennia old, and among them are children and infants as well as adults. All show signs of chronic malnutrition. The adults stood little more than five feet tall. The children’s molars were scarcely worn. Slowly, it becomes clear to those who study this mysterious place – now known as Aveline’s Hole – that, far back in the Mesolithic, the cave was used as a cemetery over a period of around a century. Much of the world’s water was then still locked up by glaciation. Sea levels were much lower. What we now call the Bristol Channel and much of the North Sea did not exist; one could walk north from the Mendips to Wales on dry land, or eastwards over Doggerland to France and the Netherlands.

  The evidence from Aveline’s suggests a shifting group of hunter-gatherers taking that area of the Mendips as their home range over two or three generations, and using the chamber as their mausoleum. These people – whose lives were short and unthinkably hard, who suffered from paucities of food and energy – made the effort and took the care to carry the bodies of their dead to this difficult hillside site, to place them within the chamber, to leave significant objects and the bones of creatures with them, and to open and then reseal the entrance with each new burial.

  These wandering, hungry people wished for a secure location in which to entomb their dead – a place to which they could return over time. No comparable cemetery is known to have been established in Britain for another 4,000 years.

  We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.

  ~

  ‘Mendip is mining country,’ says Sean. ‘It’s also caving country. But above all it’s burial country. There are hundreds of Bronze Age funeral barrows spread across this landscape, some joined with monuments and henges into large-scale ritual complexes. In one of the barrows an antiquarian called Skinner found an amber bead with a bee trapped inside it, preserved right down to the hairs on its legs.’

  Late afternoon, early autumn, unseasonable heat. Air shimmering in the sun, car doors scalding to touch. But it is cool as a pantry in Sean and Jane Borodale’s house, set down in the shadows of a quiet side-arm of Nettlebridge Valley. Board games are piled in teetering stacks in the porch. Mint, thyme and rosemary flourish in pots by the porch. A large ammonite is embedded in the front doorstep, polished by decades of footfall. And in the garden, hanging from the outstretched wings of a towering wooden totem pole, are the flayed skins of two men.

  ‘Those are our caving suits,’ says Sean, waving towards the skins. ‘Strictly speaking, they’re chemical hazmat suits. I sourced them from eastern Europe. They’re ideal for our needs. You’ll see.’

  Sean, Jane and their two boys have lived in this fairy-tale cottage for several years. The former owner held seances here, believing she could speak through the veil to the dead. To the west of the house a wrinkled field rises up the scarp before disappearing into ash woods on the ridge line. A stream gurgles off the scarp and past the house.

  I have come to the Mendips to learn how to see in the dark. Sean knows the Mendips profoundly well, above ground and below. He is a bee-keeper, a caver, a walker and a remarkable poet. He has curling black hair and is very gentle. For several years he has been working on a long series of poems or voicings that emerge from – and in some cases are written within – the underland of the Mendips: their lead mines, iron workings and limestone quarries, their many burial sites, their Cold War bunkers and the countless miles of natural cave and tunnel that honeycomb their bedrock. Sean is compelled by the great descent stories of underworld mythology – Dante and Virgil, Persephone and Demeter, Eurydice, Orpheus and Aristaeus (the keeper of bees) – and by the associated visionary powers of darkness and blindness. The poems he writes about the underland feel to me both unearthed and unearthly. In them deep time is given utterance, earth is stirred, stone speaks. In them, too, the dead are quickened briefly back to life by the poet’s attention.

  The Mendips rise south of Bristol and west of Bath. From their southern edge on a clear day, Glastonbury Tor can be seen across the water-bearing flat-lands of the Somerset Levels. From west to east they stretch almost thirty miles, tapering down towards the sea at the Bristol Channel. Their geology is elaborate, but predominantly they are a limestone range – and limestone land, wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘is hollow . . . land; could you strike it with some gigantic hammer, it would boom like a drum, or possibly cave in altogether and expose some huge subterranean sea.’

  The first fact of limestone is its solubility in water. Rain absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, creating a mild carbonic acid – just sharp enough to etch and fret limestone, given time. This fretwork deepens into limestone’s surface perforations of gryke and clint, and also its hidden labyrinths of rift and chamber. Streams shape stone with their energy. Thermal waters rise from within the earth, biting rock into form. Limestone landscapes are rich with clandestine places. They have the unexpected volumes of a lung’s interior. Portals give access to their extensive underland: pots and sinkholes, swallets where streams vanish into their own beds. The great writer and cartographer of the west of Ireland, Tim Robinson, knows the deceptions of limestone better than almost anyone. After living on and mapping limestone for more than forty years, he concludes: ‘I do not trust space an inch.’

  ‘Let me show you the garden,’ says Sean.

  The cottage’s land drops down to the valley’s main stream. We stop at its bank. The water is so clear it can hardly be seen. Small trout fin in the current.

  ‘It’s a petrifying stream,’ Sean says. ‘There’s so much calcium carbonate dissolved in it that any twigs or leave
s snagged there soon pick up a white crust of stone.’

  Green-black damselflies dance on the current. Horseflies cruise for blood.

  ‘Look at this,’ Sean says, pointing upwards. Where the lowest bough of an old alder meets its trunk, one end of a curved metal blade protrudes. The rest of the object is lost below the bark.

  ‘It’s a scythe. Someone hooked it up on here many decades ago and forgot about it. So the tree absorbed the blade, growing around it while the handle rotted away.’

  In the vegetable garden, tucked into the lee of a blackthorn hedge, are two beehives the colour of red ochre. Sloped landing boards lead up to the dark hive mouths. Bees alight on the boards, crawl into the hives, whirr out again.

  Everywhere I look there is evidence of burial and excavation. Badger setts, molehills, bee tunnels, the engulfed scythe, the hives, the entrances to mine adits. Even the house, set back into the dolomite slope, is part cave.

  ‘I didn’t understand the Mendips until I began to explore them from below,’ Sean says. ‘Almost everything here involves the underworld somehow: quarrying, mining, caving. Bronze Age lead mining. Coal mining by the Romans. Quarries for limestone grit, so big they have a spiral ramp cut to a narrow core, in order that the lorries can get up and down, like an industrial version of Dante’s descent in The Inferno. And basalt quarries to supply hardcore for top-dressing roads.’

  A dragonfly rustles past.

  ‘Then there are the burial sites – Bronze Age bowl barrows mostly, but Neolithic long barrows too, and of course, at Aveline’s, the Mesolithic chamber. Medieval and early modern graveyards, and then our own still-growing cemeteries. This has been a funerary landscape for over 10,000 years. It’s a terrain into which we have long entrusted things, as well as from which we have long extracted things.’