Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  Moss, a tall and slim young man, was given the lead. An elektron caving ladder was dropped down the shaft, and Moss lowered himself into it. The shaft remained near vertical for around fifteen feet, then shallowed and twisted before making a sharp elbow-bend back to the vertical. With some difficulty, Moss negotiated the elbow-bend and descended the subsequent section – only to discover that the shaft then became choked with boulders. It had deaded out.

  He could feel the boulders shifting beneath his feet, but there seemed no further possibility of descent. So he began to re-ascend. Just below the elbow-bend Moss lost his footing on the ladder, slipped down a little – and found himself wedged.

  He could not bend his knees to regain purchase on the rungs of the ladder, which were anyway greasy with mud. His arms were pinned close to his body by the sides of the shaft, and his hands scrabbled vainly for grip on the slick limestone. The ladder seemed also to have shifted across the space of the shaft, perhaps dragged by the movement of the boulders at the shaft’s base, further blocking upwards progress. The fissure had him fast – and with each movement he made, his entrapment tightened a fraction.

  ‘I say,’ he called up to his friends in the chamber, some forty feet above him, ‘I’m stuck. I can’t budge an inch.’

  His friends presumed that the problem could be solved by dropping Moss a line and hauling him free. But they only had a light hand-line with them, rather than a belay rope. The line was lowered and Moss somehow managed to secure it around himself. But when hauling began, the line snapped. It was lowered again, refastened. It broke again. And then again. The ladder itself could not be hauled up for fear of further jamming Moss.

  Moss’s panic rose. Every twitch of his body caused him to slide very slightly deeper into the shaft. He was indeed stuck – and he was also suffocating. With each breath Moss slightly depleted the limited oxygen supply in the shaft, and slightly increased the carbon dioxide content. Because carbon dioxide is heavier than oxygen it began to fill the shaft from its base upwards. The air became more and more foul, first in the shaft and then in the chamber above it.

  By this time the alarm had been raised above ground, and what was at the time one of the largest cave-rescue attempts in history began. Radio bulletins were sent out on the BBC, and teams from the RAF, the National Coal Board and the navy, as well as individual civilian cavers, scrambled to the scene. Neil’s father, Eric Moss, rushed to Castleton but was unable to proceed far into the cave. He waited nearby, stricken with fear, unable to assist. The shaft in which Moss was stuck was around 1,000 feet from the entrance, and all rescue equipment and personnel had to be moved awkwardly through the obstacles just to reach the top of the pot. Heavy oxygen cylinders were wrestled through the Mucky Ducks and pushed by head and hand along the boulder passage. Two young men hauled a twelve-volt car battery to provide energy for light. Soda lime was carried in to absorb the build-up of carbon dioxide. Hundreds of yards of telephone line were threaded through the system to link the fissure to the outside world. Three volunteers who tried to descend the shaft with a stronger rope lost consciousness and had to be pulled out themselves. A fourth man managed to get to the rope around Moss’s chest, but pulling on the rope only worsened his already-tortuous breathing. By this point Moss had mercifully lost consciousness, stifled by his own exhalations.

  One of the people who heard the news about Moss’s plight was an eighteen-year-old typist from Manchester called June Bailey. Bailey – who was an experienced caver and very slender of figure – rushed to Castleton to try and help. She made the difficult journey to the shaft and agreed to attempt a rescue. She was instructed to break Moss’s collarbones or arms if necessary, in order to free his shoulders from the stone’s grip and allow him to be pulled out. While an RAF doctor up to his waist in mud hand-pumped oxygen down the shaft, Bailey tried to reach Moss – before she, too, was driven back by the fetid air.

  On the morning of Tuesday, 24 March, Moss was officially declared dead. When Eric heard the news, he requested that his son’s body be left in the shaft rather than that others endanger themselves trying to retrieve it.

  Eric wished for a burial of a kind, however. So he sought permission from the coroner to have Moss’s body sealed in the fissure that had killed him. Cement powder from the local works was carried into the cave, mixed with water from the thigh-deep lake, and then poured down the pot, entombing Moss in perpetuity. This section of Peak Cavern is now known as Moss Chamber.

  ~

  It is full dark by the time Sean and I get back to the cottage. We hose down and then hang up our hazmat suits in the cool air of the garden, one on each wing of the totem pole. I whistle a song from Rubber Soul by the Beatles while we work.

  Sean tells me about how he once climbed a wooded slope in Burrington Combe, opposite Aveline’s, and found an entrance to a chamber, the aperture big enough for him to put his head into but too tight to admit his body.

  ‘I called out into it,’ says Sean, ‘and the chamber answered, singing a different note back to me.’

  I am sleeping in the attic room. It runs the length of the house. Head-height beams of crooked elm brace the space, tunnelled by boring beetles into galleries I cannot see. Each gable end has a small oak-framed window set into it, through which cool night air moves. Books stand in tall piles on the floor because the whitewashed plaster walls are too sloped for shelves. Before sleep I read Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead. I copy out a few sentences from early in the book:

  For the first time in millennia, most of us don’t know where we will be buried, assuming we will be buried at all. The likelihood that it will be among our progenitors becomes increasingly remote. From a historical or sociological point of view this is astounding. Uncertainty as to one’s posthumous abode would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of people a few generations ago.

  Tawny owl cries float into the room from the woods around. That night I dream of being slowly absorbed by calcite, a varnish creeping over me, setting me in my place.

  I am woken by cries from the garden. Dawn light. Through the gable window I can hear Louis running in the garden. I look out. He is barefoot and in his pyjamas, standing at the chicken coop.

  ‘Mum! How many eggs do we need for breakfast?!’

  The newspaper that morning reports that geologists have discovered buried seas of water in the Earth’s mantle. Four times as much water might be locked up there in a mineral called ringwoodite as is currently held in all the world’s oceans, rivers, lakes and ice put together.

  ~

  Over the days that follow, Sean and I move from place to place in the Mendips. Sean is teaching me undersight – how to see the underland’s subtle entrances, its disguised extents. The heat persists, building but not breaking. The earth longs for rain but we do not, for rain will rush through the cave systems, making them too dangerous to enter.

  Up on wooded ground, where the bracken grows above head height and an old pine plantation has run into what feels like wildwood, we follow deer paths to a small escarpment, at the base of which a cave mouth beckons us under the stone. Ferns mark the entrance, hooped with bramble. Ivy climbs the cliff. A red admiral basks where light falls, slowly opening and closing its wings. Scrambling under the escarpment, we enter an alarming space. A scree-slope tilts to a flat lower chamber. Big blocks of rock hang from the rift’s fractured roof. We descend to the chamber, and crouch there.

  This is clearly a strong place – and it has drawn humans to it for thousands of years. Ritual depositions have happened here: the bodies of humans and animals were thrown or placed into the rift, probably during the Neolithic. Bronze Age relics have also been found, and at some point in the sixteenth or seventeenth century the stone near the entrance was marked with red painted figures. They are thought to be protection marks – apotropaic inscriptions made to avert evil. Are they designed to stop evil from entering this underland space, I wonder down there in the rift, or to stop it getting out?

  A
nother day, near the highest point of the Mendip plateau, Sean and I walk what is known as ‘gruffy ground’. ‘Gruffy’ means ‘rough’, ‘rugged’, and gruffy ground is the relic landscape of lead-mining activities dating back more than 2,000 years. Small-scale Roman mining left behind hundreds of small heaps of tailings; in the eighteenth century these were reheated to melt out any residual lead ore. This double working of the landscape has left the ground humped with small hills of toxic slag, over which grass has thickly grown, shunned by grazing animals which sense its contamination.

  We walk that lush and poisonous little valley to a viewpoint. The air is lightly hazed. Sean picks out the landmarks: the Bristol Channel, the rise of Dartmoor to the south-west, Hinkley Point nuclear power station squat on the coast, and below us the spreading flat-lands of the Somerset Levels, where we know – through the startling precision of tree-ring dating – that in 3807 BC Neolithic people cut and split oak into planks, bound them together, supported them with cross-poles, and laid them as a trackway over marshland, joining high ground to high ground.

  Kites turn above us, and above the kites turn buzzards. A telecoms mast relays signals through the air, through our bodies. Down in the Levels a fire is burning from within a stand of willows, and its smoke plume rises straight up in the still air. The sun beats on us. I close my eyes, see red and gold tendrils.

  ‘It’s way too hot above ground,’ says Sean. ‘Let’s go somewhere cooler.’

  So we do. It will be one of the most unnerving spaces I have ever entered.

  ~

  Over field and down into bower of elder and old ash, moss plushing rock to soft gold-green. Follow the stream bed through gorse and bracken, setting fieldfares flaring to the west with chatter and crackle. Swallows skimming meadows on the fly, blowy warmth in a north-east wind. On and into the deep-set hollow, a last nod to the sun – to the light falling through leaves in nets, to the buzzard drifting over – and then we are down a hole in the stone-cold soil, worn to a swallet by the run of a stream, into the earth’s gullet, into the black bite of a polished stone-vice set carelessly and wondrously with the spirals of ammonites and the bullets of belemnites, and down into trouble.

  Sean leads, lowering into a six-foot shaft. I follow, drop into darkness, and find him on his knees. There is just space for the two of us hunched together here. Ahead of us is the shoulder-wide entrance to the ruckle.

  ‘This is a space granted by collapse,’ says Sean quietly, admiringly.

  A ruckle is a group of boulders that have caved against one another, blocking a section of passage, but through the gaps of which a path might just be traced. Ruckles are delicate, unpredictable structures. Without disturbance, a ruckle might hold its position for tens of thousands of years. But an earth tremor might shake it into a new order in an instant. Or a human touch might cause a boulder to move, shifting the whole stack, trapping foot or hand – or just, terribly, locking one in.

  Crouched in that bare space, my heart hammers warning in my ears. I reach out and place a hand on the black rock of the first boulder, and the cold volts into me like a current, surging up my arm, petrifying me.

  The stone of the ruckle is beautiful, I think – a dark limestone, glittering in the torchlight like ice – and then I see that even the air in the spaces between the boulders seems somehow to shine, so that it is, really, impossible not to move on into the ruckle.

  And there is a hint as to how to navigate the maze – for hanging from the first boulder is a line of white nylon cord. This is an ‘Ariadne’s thread’, left by earlier cavers and named after the ball of wool that Theseus was given by Ariadne to unravel behind him, laying a track back to safety as he twisted down the dark passageways of the Minotaur’s lair.

  ‘After you,’ whispers Sean to me, gesturing with a wave of his hands towards the cord, and giving as much of a bow as he can muster from that cramped position.

  ‘No, please, really, after you,’ I whisper in reply, bowing back.

  Sean rolls his eyes and leads off, easing head first through an opening little more than twenty inches wide. His feet vanish. I follow.

  On and in and down, sliding through each black mouth of each new turn in the ruckle, following the white thread, bending body to fit space, curling against the cold stone, trying to push as little as possible against any boulder, trying somehow to evaporate myself such that I become a gas that can flow through this place without touching a surface. But instead I am aware of my clumsy bag of bones and blood, of the need to lever myself onwards with elbow and knee, to push off with foot and pull on with fingers, and each touch of rock feels a risk, a tap that might spring the trap of the ruckle – until at last Sean eases through a gap and I hear him sigh in space, and I slide through to join him in a chamber big enough almost to stand in, and the roof above us is solid once more.

  ‘Hell,’ I say, breathing hard.

  ‘Yes,’ says Sean.

  To our left is a passageway cinching to a shoulder-width black circle. Ahead of us, drawing my eye and tightening my throat, two leaning ten-foot slabs of black rock, more marble than limestone, run off into shadow, angling towards one another.

  This is a bedding plane, formed when the rock was being laid down as sediment on a seabed. Strata movement has prised the sides of the plane apart millions of years later, water has worked to burnish an absence between them, and our onwards route is into this deep time space, this deep time vice.

  We enter the bedding plane with trepidation, leaning back on the lower angle of stone, and sliding ourselves onwards into the darkness, the upper plane tilting out and over us. There is no danger of collapse here but the sense of confinement is severe. We submit ourselves to the bedding plane, until at last it tightens to a silted-up sump that is not the end of the passage for water, but is surely the final affordance for our stubborn, unshrinkable human bodies.

  In that vanishing point, neither of us speaks. Language is crushed. We are anyway too busily engaged building structures within ourselves that might house our spirits, for the pressure here is immense, a weight of rock and time bearing down upon us from every direction with an intensity I have never experienced before, turning us fast to stone. It is a fascinating and terrible place, and not one that can be borne for long.

  We return to the edge of the ruckle, knowing we must pass back through it – and there lies the end of our thread, our white clue. Without it we could hardly retrace our route through the boulder labyrinth. It would be like memorizing a fifty-word tongue-twister on the way down and then reciting it in reverse on the way back up.

  I lie down to lead, I follow the thread, and each tiny room in the ruckle opens onto the next as it should, in turn, in order. I pass through the last of the gaps, and as I lift myself into the entry shaft I feel the snap of the black stone’s jaws at the empty air below my toes, and then I am out of the swallet and into the hollow, and warm air is rolling around me, and my bones grow again in the storm of light and ferns furl their green over and into me and moss thrives on my skin and leaves teem in my eyes, and Sean and I sit laughing, knowing for those few moments that to understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.

  We emerge from the hollow, step clear of the elder and the ash. The sunshine is so thick I want to lie belly up in it, floating as if in a salt-rich sea. After the bedding plane, our sight lines are huge. Silhouetted on the horizon above us are two round grassed domes.

  Sean points up at them. ‘Those are some of the Priddy Nine Barrows,’ he says.

  These are hay-making days in the Mendips, and there is the ripe reek of cut grass in the air. Where hay has been lifted and black-wrapped as bales, aftermath already shows as green shoots in the gold stubble. Sean and I walk together uphill towards the barrows from the cave of the ruckle, along a holloway with sides fifteen feet high from bed to hedge top.

  A charm of goldfinches flitters away, the birds’ high song glittering around us. I am moved by the generosity of colour and spac
e in this ordinary land. Here in the Mendips I have seen how thin the border is between the upper and lower worlds, and how hard it can be to pass in either direction.

  The holloway leads to a gap in a stone wall, then out onto a meadow over which a warm westerly blows. The burial barrows lie in a line along the slope. Sean and I cross the meadow, happy in each other’s silence and glad of each other’s company. We reach the first barrow and lie there in the long grass, backs to the hill’s back, sun hot on skin.

  Meadowsweet, knapweed, scabious. Everything is shiveringly strange. Flies on the grass blades are exotic as tigers – eyes of a thousand ruby hexagons, wings of the finest filigree. We lie so still that a grasshopper lands inches away, and I watch its drumsticks quiver as it drags leg over wing case, stridulations streaming out. I think of the makers of these barrows, choosing this high place as their site of burial. The construction of the kists, the casting of the collared urns, the burning of the bodies, the building of the barrows.

  Eight of the nine barrows were excavated in a single week by the Reverend John Skinner and his men in 1815, the exhumation motivated by a combination of antiquarian interest and grave robbery. All were found to contain at least one cremation. One of the barrows held the wealthiest burial found anywhere in the Mendips: a woman who had been pregnant, missing her pelvis but buried with beads of amber and faience, a copper awl and an elaborate dress fastening. Twenty-four years after he plundered the Priddy Nine Barrows, Skinner would shoot himself in the face. It is thought that his friends succeeded in concealing his suicide, thus allowing his body to be buried in the consecrated ground of his Somerset parish at Camerton. We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most . . .

  Sean tells me a story. Modern archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age barrow in a Mendips wood find the remains of a woman placed in a funerary urn. The barrow had already been ruptured by deep ploughing when the cemetery was planted with trees early in the twentieth century, but the urn somehow survived. The archaeologists disinter the urn, and study the remains of the woman that it holds. Once their work is done, one evening while white moths flit in the shadows of trees, they rebury the woman’s remains in a replica urn. As they do so one of them speaks a blessing at the graveside – a reburial ritual performed across the space of several thousand years, spoken out of respect and also, perhaps, out of apology.