Underland Read online

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  ‘To be human means above all to bury,’ declares Robert Pogue Harrison in his study of burial practices, The Dominion of the Dead, boldly drawing on Vico’s suggestion that humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, meaning ‘burying, burial’, itself from humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’.

  We are, certainly, a burying species as well as a building species – and our predecessors were buriers too. In a cave system called Rising Star in the limestone of South Africa a team of palaeoarchaeologists led by six women has discovered fossilized bone fragments thought to belong to a previously unknown early human relative, a species now named as Homo naledi. The disposition of this dark matter in two deep-set chambers suggests, remarkably, that Homo naledi was already interring its dead underground some 300,000 years ago.

  In burial, the human body becomes a component of the earth, returned as dust to dust – inhumed, restored to humility, rendered humble. Just as the living need places to inhabit, so it is often in the nature of our memory-making to wish to be able to address our dead at particular sites on the Earth’s surface. The burial chamber, the gravestone, the hillside on which ashes have been scattered, the cairn: these are places to which the living can return and where loss might be laid to rest. The grief of those who have been unable to locate the bodies of their loved ones can be especially corrosive – acid and unhealing.

  We give bodies and their residues to the earth in part as a means of safekeeping. Burial often aspires to preservation – of memory, of matter – for time behaves differently in the underland, where it might be slowed or stayed. Early in his profound meditation on inhumation and history, Urne-Buriall (1658), Thomas Browne describes the discovery – in the sandy soil of a field near Walsingham in the 1650s – of ‘between fourty and fifty Urnes . . . not a yard deep, nor farre from each other’. Each of the urns contained up to two pounds of human bones and ash, as well as offerings: ‘peeces of small boxes, or combes handsomely wrought, handles of small brasse instruments, brazen nippers, and in one some kind of Opale’. Browne refers to the dark interiors of these buried urns as ‘conservatories’ – that is, spaces of conservation, insulated from what he calls ‘the piercing Atomes of ayre’ that corrupt the upper world. He represents each urn as a bright chamber of memory, secured in the ‘nether part of the Earth’.

  Limestone, in particular, has long been a geology of burial – in part because it is so common globally, in part because its erosive tendencies create so many natural crypts into which bodies may be laid, and in part because limestone is itself, geologically speaking, a cemetery. Limestone is usually formed of the compressed bodies of marine organisms – crinoids and coccolithophores, ammonites, belemnites and foraminifera – that died in waters of ancient seas and then settled in their trillions on those seabeds. These creatures once built their skeletons and shells out of calcium carbonate, metabolizing the mineral content of the water in which they lived to create intricate architectures. In this way limestone can be seen as merely one phase in a dynamic earth cycle, whereby mineral becomes animal becomes rock; rock that will in time – in deep time – eventually supply the calcium carbonate out of which new organisms will build their bodies, thereby re-nourishing the same cycle into being again.

  This dance of death and life that goes into limestone’s creation is what makes it without doubt the liveliest, queerest rock I know – and the human burials it holds have sometimes echoed these vibrancies, and the multi-species makings that have brought limestone into being.

  Around 27,000 years ago, on a limestone hillside overlooking what is now the Austrian Danube, two babies, dead at birth, were placed side by side in a freshly dug round hole. Their remains were wrapped in animal hide, and the space around them was packed with red ochre, into which were mixed yellow beads of ivory. A shelter was then constructed to protect them from the crushing embrace of the earth: a scapula from a woolly mammoth, propped up as a bone shroud on pieces of tusk.

  Twelve thousand years ago in a limestone cave above the Hilazon River in what is now northern Israel, a grave was prepared for a woman in her forties. An oval hole was dug in the cave floor, and its sides were walled with limestone slabs. Her body was placed in the grave, curled against the northern side of the oval. Two stone martens, their brown and cream fur sleek in the low light, were draped over her: one across her upper body, one across her lower. The foreleg of a wild boar was laid on her shoulder. A human foot was placed between her feet. The blackened shells of eighty-six tortoises were scattered over her. The tail of an aurochs was put near the base of her spine. The wing of a golden eagle was opened over her. She had become a wondrous hybrid – a being of many beings. At last, a single large plate of limestone was pulled over the hole, closing this compound creature inside her chamber.

  On a limestone outcrop near the Somerset village of Stoney Littleton, around 5,500 years ago, a chambered tomb was constructed. It remains present in the landscape: low-slung and turf-roofed on a slope of the hill, the beckoning mouth of its main entrance marked by a vast lintel stone and two flanking door jambs of single upright slabs. Set into the western jamb is the cast of an ammonite almost a foot in diameter.

  And across ten millennia – since those first hunter-gatherer bodies were placed in the chamber discovered by the rabbit-catching boys – humans have buried their dead in the limestone uplands of the Mendips. There are some 400 Bronze Age round barrows in the Mendips, dating from around 2500 BC to around 750 BC. Most are clustered together, and most contained – until they were plundered or ploughed out – a single inhumation and the grave goods that were left with it. The bodies were typically placed in a stone-lined kist or collared urn under the dome of earth. The accompanying grave goods included pottery cups, barbed flint arrowheads, a bronze dagger, amber-headed pins, and beads of jet and shale. Their inclusion in the barrows speaks of a belief, widespread among cultures, that burial is a form of onwards journey to an afterlife where earthly items will be needed.

  ~

  Sean and I walk back up to the cottage, step over the ammonite set into the door sill and enter the white-walled kitchen. It’s a relief to be back in the cool of the house after the garden’s heat. Jane smiles in welcome.

  ‘You’re here on a good day for the cottage,’ she says. ‘In summer, it’s a dream. But in the other three seasons of the year, when the north wind blows straight down that valley, in one gable and out the other, it’s impossible to keep warm. We lose the light so fast too. By early afternoon in full winter we’re in deep shadow, cold shadow.’

  That afternoon we sit, talk, drink tea. On the table is a blue-and-white china plate, Russian in its decorative style, showing a steam train emerging from a tunnel into winter fields. Two peasant figures walk by the trackside, carrying bundles of sticks on their backs, and the train trails a rooster-plume of steam that rises up into the blue dusk sky before bending back into the tunnel mouth.

  Jane and Sean’s two boys, Louis and Orlando, are playing Minecraft on a computer in a corner of the room. I go over to join them. They are mining hard, pickaxing down towards bedrock in search of precious minerals.

  ‘We don’t want redstone, we need obsidian,’ says Louis.

  ‘We want to fight the Ender Dragon!’ says Orlando.

  ‘We’re building a portal to the Nether!’ says Louis.

  ‘Let’s go caving,’ says Sean.

  ~

  Evening light now, thick as amber, pouring east across the land.

  Over a stile, through a field thronged with yellow ragwort to where the grass sinks into a collapsed cone, sixty feet or so at its widest point. Horses in halos of flies.

  The sinkhole’s sloped sides are lush with rosebay willowherb. Its belly is scrubbed with elder. Two wood pigeons clatter away at our approach. In the lowest point of the dip is an entrance to the Mendip underland.

  A small blockhouse protects a dark mouth in the limestone. Though I have been into cave systems before, I find swallowing is
suddenly difficult, as if I have a pebble in my gullet. My scalp swarms with bees. Sean is calm, eager to get under.

  The entry is awkward – a body-bending downwards wriggle before a drop into a pot that feels locked, a closed cylinder of space. Our pupils widen to well-shafts in the darkness, until we pop on our beams. Sean leads and is off, lies down, moves head first into a small gap in shadow at the pot’s base. I watch his twitching legs slowly disappear, and when his feet have gone I drop to join him. Face forced into wet gravel, moving along by squirm, a sense of the rock as a hand pressing down first on the skull, then the back, then the whole of the body, a moment spent briefly in its grip – and then I am out and with Sean at the top of a twelve-foot notch where a waterfall has run for thousands of years, cutting this narrow channel to the rift below. We down-climb the notch, facing inwards, feet slipping on the wet rock, me going first then spotting Sean as he descends. The rift turns, turns again – and then opens dramatically out.

  We are in an awesome space. We track our beams along its roof and walls, scoring out its dimensions. The portal through which we squeezed has become a gorge, hollowed by the work of water over immensities of time. The sides of the gorge are great curves of grey limestone, cross-struck with calcite streaks like lightning flashes.

  We move on down. Car-sized blocks of stone have fallen from the roof into the torrent bed and must be clambered around. The slope steepens. The ceiling gleams with star points: stalactite blebs, catching and condensing our torchlight. And then suddenly from either side of the gorge fall two avalanches of stone, waves of boulders and rock fragments crashing down upon us – but somehow frozen in mid-sweep, cantilevered out over our heads. I see that the fragments are all glued together by calcite. Time is starting to play tricks. Movements that have been stilled for thousands of years seem as if they might recommence without warning. My nerves tingle as I pass between the hanging waves of stone. The actions of my body feel jerky, triggering.

  Up on the surface, horses flick at flies, caterpillars seethe on ragwort, the sun lowers to dusk. People drive home from work, radios on, windows down.

  Beneath all of this, Sean and I pass under two further stone arches. The gorge’s floor is slicker now. An awareness grows in us of a big drop somewhere ahead. I feel pulled on like water, as if I might flow down that slope and over the unseen edge. The acoustics change; echoes grow. Warned, we stop just short of a brink. At our feet the gorge floor falls away in a cliff, the base of which we cannot see.

  ‘This feels like the Nether to me, Sean,’ I say.

  ‘Let’s take a few minutes here,’ says Sean.

  We sit on boulders, flick off our head-torches. Afterlives of light at first, ghost-patterns on the retina: ferns and leaves. Then the darkness settles and trues, so that when I hold my hand an inch from my eyes I know its presence only from the sound and heat of breath on palm. A heavy black curtain has fallen between Sean and me, then hardened into a wall of stone, such that we are soon in different underlands altogether.

  We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in the rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit. Down here, too, the boundaries between life and not-life are less clear. I think of the discovery of the bones in Aveline’s, shining with calcite, lying promiscuously, almost converted into stone . . . I slip out the whalebone owl, feel the Braille of its back, the arcs of its wings, thinking of how it had taken flight from a whale’s beached ribs. We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land. It is mineralization – the ability to convert calcium into bone – that allows us to walk upright, to be vertebrate, to fashion the skulls that shield our brains.

  Sean flicks his light back on. Glare and blink. There is the cliff again at our feet, water streaming down its face. It is possible that we will find our way to the base of the waterfall later in the journey, so we decide to fix a rope down it now, in case we need to ascend it from below. We find a boulder and loop the centre of the rope around its back, then Sean hammers a chockstone into place with the heel of his hand to prevent the rope riding up and over the boulder when weight comes onto it. I lap-coil the rest of the rope, tie off the two ends, and after two warm-up swings – one, two, three! – hurl the coils over the edge.

  Hiss, thrum, shiver of snakes in the torchlight, whip-slap as falling rope cracks tight against stone.

  ‘Now,’ Sean says, ‘we just need to find the way down and round. There’s a side passage somewhere up to our left, according to the maps I’ve seen, but it’s a case of choosing the right one.’

  We climb back up the belly of the gorge, away from the lip, moving upstream through the ghost-torrent, probing the left-hand side of the gorge with our torch-beams. There are three visible side passages. We try each in turn.

  One spins us around in its twists before curving back at last to end in a wide window overlooking the waterfall, with an unclimbable drop below. The second is a rift entered by a squeeze that we have to repeat when the passage deads out. The third takes us far from the main chamber, and we have to count the turns in our minds, muttering them to ourselves (first left, first right, second right) so that the sequence can be reversed if we have to return – which we do.

  There is one possibility left: a small entrance near the roof of the chamber, which can be reached only by the traverse of a cascade of damp flowstone, itself set high above the gorge bed. We clamber up to the cascade’s edge, and consider the traverse. It is an intimidating crossing. We can rope up, but there is nothing to secure the belayer: one slip and we’ll both go.

  The cascade is a baroque structure. Flowstone is the name given to the calcite deposits that precipitate out of minerally saturated water as it runs over the slopes of limestone caves. You might imagine flowstone as a kind of white candle wax, gradually hardening as it runs, though it is built up over spans of time rather than by brief incandescence. Because of the gradual nature of its formation, flowstone sets into elaborate ruches and folds – elephant-skin gathers of texture, wrinkled stockings. Flowstone is very beautiful to look at and very hard to grip.

  People don’t often die caving, but it can be a hell of a job to get someone with a broken leg back up from deep in a rift. The fall from the cascade isn’t necessarily a death fall, but it is definitely a double-leg-breaker. Twenty-five feet, perhaps. We know it’s the right route, though, because Sean’s head-torch has picked out a line of marks traversing near its high point, where earlier boots have cracked the calcite to the consistency of mint cake.

  Little demons of worry bite at my stomach as we start out over the cascade. Steady steps, testing the take of each foot, like trying to walk across a slope of wet stone ropes, leaning down to touch the bosses with fingertips for balance, slowly, slowly, slowly . . . and then Sean is over and I am over and we are into the entrance near the roof of the chamber, laughing with relief – and a new region of the labyrinth is open to us.

  We let gravity lead us through it, taking always the downwards path where the tunnel splits, until the echoes tell us that our passage is approaching broad space – and then there we are at the base of the waterfall, and there is the rope we threw down earlier.

  But the rope is stuck. It has jammed behind the belay boulder and won’t run through to us evenly, making easy movement up it impossible as we climb. All we can do is tie off to it, climb, release, then tie off again. It offers some protection from a fall; better than nothing. I lead. The rock is wet; the climb has a couple of tricky moments. I am glad we threw the rope down. Sean comes up after me and we rest together at the top of the waterfall, mustering energy for the return. I am cold now, chilled to the bone by the dark, the wet and the stone.

  Up the gorge, up the notch, through the squeeze, the smell of green growing in t
he nose, up into the belly of the elder-filled dip of land, and up to the level of the fields, the horses, the swooping swallows, out of the Carboniferous and into the Anthropocene.

  Sundown on the surface. Pupils shuttering to pinpricks. Colour is preposterous, gorgeous again. Blue is seen utterly as blue, green known fully as green. We are high on hue, high on the wild noise of the wind, high on the last of the sunlight that glosses the streamers of the veering swallows, high on the huge vault of the sky and the boiling clouds it holds.

  We walk, still blinking, to the road in our orange hazmat suits. A family drives past in a shiny Land Rover, the children in the back seats swivelling their heads to look at these aliens who seem to have been dropped from high in the sky but who have in fact emerged from deep within the earth.

  ~

  The most notorious story in British caving history involves a twenty-year-old Oxford philosophy student called Neil Moss. It is still, in my experience, a story that some people in the Peak District do not like to discuss, nearly sixty years on.

  On the morning of Sunday, 22 March 1959, Moss set off as part of an eight-person exploratory trip into the further reaches of Peak Cavern, a system near Castleton in Derbyshire. The first half-mile or so of Peak Cavern is an open show-cave, into which tourists and locals have wandered since the early nineteenth century, not least to hear choral recitals sung from the ‘Orchestra’, a natural gallery of limestone set high in the ‘Great Chamber’.

  Half a mile into Peak Cavern, however, the terrain becomes far more serious. The roof of the cave drops to leave only a wet crawl-space known as the Mucky Ducks, which floods in heavy rain. After the Mucky Ducks comes a long, low rift called Pickering’s Passage, leading to a right-angled bend guarded by an eyehole of stone just wide enough to admit a human. After the eyehole comes a thigh-deep lake and beyond that a small chamber, from the floor of which descends a shaft around two feet wide at its mouth. It was this fissure that the team had come to explore, hoping it might lead further into the maze of passages under the White Peak.