Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  ‘Enough of this,’ snaps Lina. ‘We have an appointment to keep in the Salle du Drapeau.’

  ~

  Among the people with whom urban exploration brought me into contact was a Californian called Bradley Garrett. Bradley saw cities more vertically and porously than anyone else I knew. To his eyes, the city was full of portals – service hatches, padlocked doorways, manhole covers – that lay unseen in plain sight. The usual constraints on urban motion – enforced by physical barriers, legal proscription or internalized notions of property rights – didn’t tend to restrict Bradley. To him the city’s accessible space extended far down into the earth (sewers, bunkers, tunnels) and far up into the air (skyscrapers, cranes), with the street level only serving as a median and somewhat tedious altitude.

  We first met each other early one afternoon at London Bridge. Bradley had thick-rimmed black glasses, a goatee and moustache, and chin-length dark brown hair that he banded back into a ponytail. His speech mixed West Coast dude-isms with the gnarly syntax of cultural theory. ‘London Bridge is hollow, like all big bridges,’ he said, tapping his foot on a utility hatch set into the pavement about two-thirds of the way along the bridge. ‘There’s a control room at the north end; if you get into that, you can cross the Thames inside the bridge. It’s neat. Come, I’ll show you.’

  At the north end we hopped a low iron gate and descended a staircase that led down the bridge’s flank. Set into the flank was a steel security door sporting a chunky yellow padlock. The door looked as if it could withstand a lightsaber attack, and wore various notices explicitly forbidding entrance. Bradley pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket, murmured to himself as he sorted between them, chose one, leaned close and the hasp of the lock clicked open. He ushered me inside and shut the door with a soft clang behind us.

  ‘That’s some bunch of keys you have there,’ I said. Bradley flicked on a head-torch. We were in a control room of some kind. Zinc venting, ducts and multicoloured wiring lashed with cable ties leading out of the room along a crawl space. Two wall-mounted dashboards with analogue switches and twist dials.

  ‘So – if you follow this ducting south out of here down the crawl space, then you’re fully inside the bridge,’ Bradley said. ‘Keep going all the way over the river, and you reach a much bigger control room at the south end. Hit the exit bar on the emergency door there from the inside, and you can let in who you want. When we made a film about exploring a few years ago, called Crack the Surface, that’s where we held the premiere. We had eighty-six people, a generator, a screen, a projector and a whole lot of beer. It was a great party!’ We slipped back out and Bradley locked up. Two passing men in suits gave us puzzled looks but didn’t break stride.

  Bradley’s disobedience towards the usual rules began early. He grew up in a rough neighbourhood in Los Angeles, and was stabbed in the belly as a teenager. ‘It grew me up, that stabbing,’ he said. ‘Got me out of trouble, oddly. Made me long to get out of those streets, to somewhere more open.’ In 2001, aged nineteen, he co-founded a skateboard shop in the city of Riverside. He sold out to his partner two years later, and used the money to study maritime archaeology in Australia. Then – in search of some seriously empty space – he moved back to northern California and began working for the US Bureau of Land Management, specializing in the archaeological heritage of Native American groups. Then he moved to Mexico, spending three summers as an archaeologist excavating a post-classical-era village, and camping on the edge of a cenote – one of the flooded sinkholes that plunge into Mexico’s natural limestone underland.

  ‘It was such a place to live, Rob,’ Bradley said as we walked through London. ‘Bats came pouring out of the cenote in their hundreds at dusk each night, and pouring back just before dawn. The leathery noise of their wings kept time for me. That cenote was understood by the local indigenous people to be an access point to the Mayan underworld, to Xibalba. In Mayan, Xibalba means “place of fear”. The whole limestone underworld of Mexico is a massively devotional terrain. Down there, where the water levels have risen, you sometimes swim past sunken altars, entrances to religious chambers that have been cut out of the stone.’

  He described Xibalba to me as it was represented in K’iche’ Maya myth. Even within the wider context of torturous underworld myth-zones, Xibalba sounded like a brutal realm. It was heavily staffed by demons with names like ‘Flying Scab’ and ‘Stabbing Demon’. Just to reach Xibalba, you had to cross a river filled with scorpions, a river filled with blood and a river filled with pus. If you were lucky enough to make it that far, you were then tested in the six deadly Houses of Trial, including ‘Bat House’, filled with flesh-eating bats, ‘Razor House’, filled with unpredictably moving blades, and ‘Jaguar House’.

  ‘You can probably guess what that one was filled with,’ said Bradley.

  After Mexico, Bradley moved to London, where he wandered over disciplinary boundaries into cultural geography. Studying for a doctorate, he became fascinated by urban exploration, and decided to immerse himself ethnographically in its subculture. His research method was nothing if not committed. He spent four years embedded with a group of London-based explorers only ever identified by aliases (Patch, Winch, Marc Explo), with whom he learned the ropes, and ticked off the London ascent and descent classics including Battersea Power Station, Millennium Mills and the buried river of the Fleet.

  Two years later, Bradley’s group merged its efforts with another exploring team to form the London Consolidation Crew, which soon became known for the audacity and ambition of its exploits. The intensity of their activity increased and the rats inside them grew, fed regularly on adrenaline. In that time Bradley took part in more than 300 trespass events in eight countries. In America, he climbed a Chicago skyscraper in a storm and gained astonishing photographs of a city bathed in black cloud and blue light, with lightning strikes fissuring down from the clouds into Lake Michigan. In the Mojave Desert, he accessed a boneyard of decommissioned aeroplanes: climbing over barbed wire to gain entry, then hiding in the landing gear of 747s and military cargo-carriers while security patrols passed by. ‘It was,’ he noted drily, ‘a vast playground and a long night.’

  I was somewhat sceptical of Bradley at first. But as I came to know him, I grew to like and admire him enormously. He cut a broad swathe through life and he drove deep. He was generous, unpredictable, fearless, loyal – and a great deal of fun to be around.

  The rest of that day Bradley and I spent together in London took us often into the capital’s invisible city. We accessed the network of steam tunnels that runs beneath the Barbican. We lifted a manhole cover to drop into the course of the Fleet, one of London’s so-called ‘ghost rivers’, with the aim of reaching the Fleet Chamber, a Bazalgettian structure near the river’s outfall into the Thames. And in a north London park, we crawled under fencing, pulled away a heavy iron lid to reveal a shaft in the grass, and descended a rusted black ladder into darkness.

  Twenty feet down we flicked on our head-torches – and whistled at what we saw. Dozens of brick archways extended in series away from us, the dips between them holding wide rungs of still water. The iterated forms of the archways and the reflections of the water created the illusion of infinite regress. The echoes of our whispers bounced back to us. We had entered a mid nineteenth-century reservoir, built to serve as a water depot for London and now drained almost dry. The once-drowned structures were still intact, the brick as clean as if it had been built yesterday. It possessed the functional elegance of major Victorian infrastructure, and was as beautiful in its way as the Roman cisterns at Misenum and the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.

  We walked the reservoir end to end and side to side, our voices booming. Above us in the shadows hung the ceiling vaults, made of tens of thousands of yellow-brown bricks. At the far end of the reservoir we sat for a while. Bradley smoked and set music going: a drum-and-bass track called ‘Stresstest’ that boomed off the bricks. We got out just before midnight. There were scattered cl
ouds, underlit pink and orange by the city’s light, with stars visible between them. Three figures moved slowly through the trees to our east, scanning the grass with yellow beams, looking for something lost.

  After that first day together, Bradley and I became good friends. His pursuit of a number of the ‘ghost stations’ of the London Underground, and the track-trespass that this required, as well as a number of other incidents, placed him in the sights of the British Transport Police, who decided to make an example of him pour encourager les autres. He was arrested, his flat was searched, his computers and phones seized, and eventually he was placed on trial on a charge of conspiracy to commit criminal damage. I acted as a character witness during his trial – which concluded with Bradley being granted conditional discharge and facing no further charges, a public relations disaster for the Transport Police, and six-figure legal costs for the taxpayer.

  Bradley and I made a number of exploration trips together, and while planning these trips we communicated by postcard, on the grounds that this open form of correspondence – readable by anyone who cared to pick our postcards up and flip them over – was the most secure way to be in contact, given the authorities’ interest in Bradley. No security agency still steams open letters or reads people’s postcards; instead they watch text and WhatsApp conversations, and packet-sniff emails.

  Travelling with Bradley both deepened and heightened my sense of landscape, and of the built environment in particular. We found our ways into many strange sites and places. As well as a daredevil adventurer’s streak, Bradley had an archaeologist’s interest in contemporary forms of obsolescence, and a natural historian’s interest in how the wild returned to abandoned places.

  One night we set out to climb a transporter bridge in Newport, ascending the supply staircase and then inching out along its trunk-thick cables strung above the dark river. With a young explorer who called himself Darmon – who specialized in accessing high-security underground sites in high-risk territories including Russia and China, who had been beaten up by authorities in both countries, and who sourced his interest in the underland to the Roman coins his father, a farmer, had ploughed up in his fields on the banks of the upper Thames when Darmon was a child – we climbed a twelve-foot iron gate to access the jackdaw-haunted ruins of an abandoned Victorian castle that spread across acres of hillside above the Irish Sea. We tended to sleep out on these trips, under hedges or farm trailers – or just not to sleep at all. I came to associate time away with Bradley with adrenaline, alcohol and extreme fatigue.

  One trip with Bradley took us into the abandoned slate mines of a Mid Wales valley. We accessed the mine by a narrow adit, which led us to the top of a quarried cliff. I set up a top rope in the darkness, and we abseiled down the cliff to its base. From there a tunnel brought us out at the base of a great flooded chamber. Black water lapped the slate at our feet – and from seventy feet above us, through an opening in the rock, a shaft of golden sunlight lanced down into the chamber like an annunciation beam.

  What that sunbeam gilded was far from sacred, though – for through the same opening that let in the light had been pushed, over more than forty years since the closing of the mine, hundreds of wrecked cars. Generations of locals looking to dispose of their defunct vehicles without paying a scrappage fee had driven the cars up the hill and through the gap.

  The result was an avalanche of vehicles, a carchive, a slewing slope of wrecks that dropped into the chamber and continued into the black water as far as we could see. The oldest cars were the furthest down, and on the lowest stratum, a blue Cortina estate was poised as perfectly as a glacial erratic atop the moraine, with a moss-green Triumph Herald both its pivot and its point of repose.

  ~

  The approach to the Salle du Drapeau – the Room of the Flag – is the only time I feel real fear in the Parisian catacombs.

  It is early evening in the upper city by the time we get close to the room. On the surface, people are leaving offices, walking home through dusk streets, boarding trains and buses, stopping for drinks in bars.

  Down in the invisible city we are heading north-west along a tunnel with no side turnings, the ceiling of which is dropping steadily lower. I walk with bent neck, then with hunched shoulders, then I have to lean at the waist, and then at last I have to drop to my knees and can only crawl forwards.

  Ahead of me, past Lina, the tunnel seems to cinch to a dead end. I wait for Lina to admit that she has at last led us the wrong way.

  Lina says nothing. The yellow of the limestone ahead glows in her torchlight. She shrugs off her pack, pushes it behind her, loops one of its straps around one of her ankles, and then eases herself head first into what I can now see is a tiny floor-level opening, perhaps eighteen inches high, where I thought the tunnel ended.

  My heart shivers fast, and my mouth dries up instantly. My body does not want to enter that opening.

  ‘You’ll need to pull your pack along with your toes here,’ says Lina. Her voice is muffled. ‘And from now on don’t shout or touch the ceiling.’

  Fear slithers up my spine, spills greasy down my throat. Nothing for it but to follow. I lie flat, loop pack to foot, edge in head first. The clearance above is so tight that I again have to turn my skull sideways to proceed. The clearance to the sides is so scant that my arms are nearly locked to my body. The stone of the ceiling is cracked into blocks, and sags around the cracks. Claustrophobia grips me like a full-body vice, pressing in on chest and lungs, squeezing breath hard, setting black stars exploding in my head.

  Drag-scratch of bag behind me, pain already in the leg to which it is looped from the effort of pulling it. Movement is a few inches at a time, a worm-like wriggle, gaining purchase with shoulders and fingertips. How long does this tunnel run like this? If it dips even two inches, I’ll be stuck. The thought of continuing is atrocious. The thought of reversing is even worse. Then the top of my head bumps against something soft.

  Ahead I can just see, by cocking my neck back, that the underside of Lina’s rucksack is jammed against the dipping edge of a block in the ceiling. The pack is jerking around, trying to get free, she must be hauling at it with her leg, but it looks as if it could loosen the block at any moment, bring the ceiling down.

  ‘Easy, easy!’ I shout and she shouts back, telling me not to shout. Pop – and the bag comes free, slithers on.

  I shuffle forwards towards the pinch when suddenly – what the fuck? – I can feel the stone around me, the stone that encases me, the stone that is measuring me up like a coffin, starting to vibrate. A faint shudder at first, but clear and now growing in strength and noise. The ceiling, the unstable ceiling, is humming with tremor. The vibrations are passing through the stone and my body, then on into the stone beneath me. The rumbling rises to a thunder and I can hear clacks and clicks among the rumblings and I remember the spectre-architecture, the faint grey outline of the upper city on this page of the map: train lines arcing in, joining like tendons and running together into Montparnasse station.

  These are trains above us, we are directly underneath the Métro and overground lines, and it is decades of train-judder that has left the ceiling unstable here. I want to shout but mustn’t, want to retreat but can’t, so I just keep inching forwards, stone dust in the mouth, finger-scrabble against the rough rock, hauling the bag behind, all in silence, just the rumble of the trains rising and falling away, heaving breath, drumming heart, and then after five minutes of that sick-making fear, the space widens and lifts and then we can kneel again, and then we can stand, and then we can walk and then we are close to the Salle du Drapeau.

  ~

  A flooded tunnel leads towards a chamber. Orange light on the water, washing and rocking although the water itself is still. Cries come from through the doorway, and there is the sound of music: the Jam’s ‘Going Underground’, growing in volume, booming down the tunnel. I smile in recognition at the music, bridge onto ledges on either side of the flooded tunnel, and reach the doorway. I
t opens into a high-sided room, the roof twenty feet or more above us. The space above makes my head feel as if it is helium-filled, floating. A big tricolour flag is painted high on one of the walls. And there are people standing up to greet us: embraces for Lina, shakes of the hand for me and Jay, welcoming smiles for us all.

  We have found our way to a different kind of Wunderkammer here, one filled with music and hospitality. There is a table spread with food and drink: fruit, baguettes, wheels of Brie and Camembert, bottles of spirits, cans of beer. A boxy CD player sits in the middle of the table, wired up to two small speakers.

  The Jam changes to Bowie’s ‘Underground’.

  ‘Ça c’est le cataboum!’ says one of the strangers, pointing at the music box, nodding in time to the beat.

  White fairy-lights are strung around the room. It is all deeply surreal – as if we have stumbled into a postmodern mead hall, far underground. A plastic glass of vodka is pressed into my hand and I knock it back gratefully. Burn in the belly, and the time in the train-rift instantly softening around its edges. My glass is refilled with brown rum from a label-less bottle. I catch myself grinning. I feel grateful for this place, for the juxtapositions of the catacombs, tilting from terror to warmth in the twist of a tunnel.

  Introductions are made. There are two French cataphiles who go by handles I do not catch, and a Canadian named T, who is an old friend of Lina’s, works as an au pair during the day and comes down into the catacombs often at night. All three are wearing Indiana-Jones-style leather hats, and one of the Frenchmen has a whip in his hand.