Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  Bowie changes to ‘Underground’ by Ben Folds Five. Everyone cheers.

  We eat more, drink more, talk more. Hours pass. I mostly listen, relaxing after the day’s exertions, pinching myself at the weird subcultures of this underland, reflecting on the bizarre cultural recyclings that it calls out.

  Much later, Lina, Jay and I set off to find a sleeping place. We reach a zone called the Bunkers. A wide tunnel-avenue is lined with a series of hooped semicircular chambers with reinforced ceilings. They are of Second World War origin, says Lina, shelters adapted to resist bomb-fall. Early in the occupation they were used by the Resistance; later they housed high-ranking SS and Wehrmacht officers when the raids came from southern England. Now they make ideal dormitories for tired cataphiles. There, with a bunker-chamber each to ourselves, we settle down. The distant passage of trains vibrates the walls.

  Sleep takes time to arrive. Lying there with bedrock in all directions, I wonder at what will remain of our cities as the Anthropocene unfolds over deep time – the stratigraphic markers that will endure in the rock record. Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscow will largely erode into sands and gravels, to be spread by wind and water into unreadable expanses of desert. The coastal cities of New York and Amsterdam, those claimed soonest by the rising sea levels, will be packed more carefully into soft-settling sediments. It is the invisible cities – the undercities – that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock. The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence. Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids – these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.

  ~

  Two days later, we are ready to leave the invisible city. The original plan was to exit by means of a laddered manhole, which Lina has been told is presently unwelded. Its nickname is ‘the Chatière of Death’, which doesn’t endear it to me. But the directions Lina has received as to its whereabouts are vague, and we can’t locate it.

  So we return to our point of entry. Hours of tiring travel through tunnels from the far north-west of the system. Lina plots a long way round that circumvents the crawl space leading to the Salle du Drapeau. We see no one else in the course of our traverse. Once we pass a stretch of tunnel wall on which dozens of hand stencils have been made with spray cans in acid green, ice blue, nuclear yellow; punk echoes of prehistoric cave art. We come back through the Carrefour des Morts, and back at last down the Bangra, in which the water level has risen noticeably since we first crossed it days earlier.

  ‘It’s been raining up there,’ says Lina.

  I remember the thunderclouds building as I approached Paris, the rain-veils trailing over the landscape. We reach the access hole and climb, one by one, up and out into the railway tunnel.

  After days of confinement, its arched ceiling seems huge as a ballroom. The air is free of stone dust. Away to our left is a familiar arch of light. We crunch back down the track. The arch grows and brightens. Green fringes it, hanging down in long lianas, and green is a new colour again.

  ‘Look at the butterflies,’ says Lina, pointing, and there are dozens of gold butterflies filling the air of the arch, but as we approach they turn into falling acacia leaves spinning down from unseen trees, gilded by afternoon light.

  The upper world moves into view. A pigeon glides, stiff-winged, across the arch-framed sky. Steep sides of the cutting show themselves, acacia branches leaning in from the banks to drop their butterfly leaves.

  We stop at the point where the light meets the shadow, look up, and there is the impossible sun, soon to drop below the buildings that rise above the cutting sides. We speak quietly to one another. Our hair is pomaded with sweat and stone dust, our skin is pale. The air here in the open smells of cucumber and smoke. A woman is hanging white sheets out on the balcony of one of the apartments high above us.

  I hear the first bars of Emil Gilels playing the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1, one of the few pieces of classical music I know from even a scatter of notes. The notes drift down along with the leaves to gather in the cutting, and I think I am dreaming the music, but the others can hear it too and it is extraordinary to me that someone should be playing this now, here.

  We walk on. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, sit on a substation box under an acacia, long brown legs kicking as they chat and pass a joint between themselves. They nod as we pass, and we nod back.

  We scramble up the cutting side, through the hole in the chain-link fence, out by the doorway marked ‘Interdit d’entrer’. On a street corner three turns from the doorway, a woman stops us to ask if we have come from en bas, from ‘underneath’. Yes, we say, we have.

  6

  Starless Rivers

  (The Carso, Italy)

  Starless rivers run through classical culture, and they are the rivers of the dead. The Lethe, the Styx, the Phlegethon, the Cocytus and the Acheron flow from the upper world into the underland – and all five converge in a welter of water at the dark heart of Hades.

  The waters of Lethe are the waters of amnesia, from which the shades of the dead must drink in order to forget their earthly existence. The Greek word lethe means ‘oblivion’ and ‘forgetfulness’; it is countersaid by the Greek word aletheia, meaning ‘unforgetfulness’, ‘unconcealment’ and also ‘truth’. By means of the Lethe, Aeneas is able to travel to meet the ghost of his father – one of the many souls that throng the flood – in the great katabasis of Book VI of the Aeneid.

  Charon, the ferryman, carries souls of the newly dead across the Styx; he requires, for safe passage, an obol, or coin, to be placed on the lips of the deceased in order to pay for transport to the underland.

  The Phlegethon is the river of heat, of flaming fire and boiling blood, which is thought to flow in coils and spirals, descending into the depths of Tartarus, the abyss of the damned.

  The Cocytus is the coldest of the five, the river of lamentation, scoured by freezing winds, hardened in places to ice. Where the Cocytus runs, its currents call out constant cries of pain as they tumble over rapids and swirl around bends.

  The Acheron is the gentlest of the starless rivers, the river of woe, over which Charon also plies his trade. It runs so deep into hell that at times it is made synonymous with it, as when Juno says in the Aeneid, ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo’, ‘If I cannot get the gods above to change their minds, I will appeal to the River of Hell.’ Freud took this line as the epigraph to his The Interpretation of Dreams, itself an exploration of the currents and flows of a psychological underland – the starless rivers of the id that rush beneath the sunlit uplands of the conscious mind, here and there surging powerfully up.

  The reason that classical literature runs with rivers dipping into darkness is geological: so much of the landscape in which that literature was lived and written is karstic in nature. Karst – from the Slovenian kras – is a topography formed by the dissolving of soluble rocks and minerals: principally limestone, but also dolomite, gypsum and others. Karst is vastly rich in its underlands – and it is also a terrain where water refuses to obey its usual courses of action. Karst hydrology is fabulously complex and imperfectly understood. In karst, springs rise from barren rock. Valleys are blind. A river can disappear in one place and appear in quite another, where it is given a new name by its new neighbours. Lakes appear that have no watercourse running into them and no watercourse running out of them – filled from beneath as the water table in the karst rises or drains according to season and weather (the ‘vanishing lakes’ described to the Royal Society of London in 1689 by Johann von Valvasor, a native of what is now Slovenia). Sinkholes and shafts pock karst landscapes like gaping mouths, making karst dangerous to traverse by night or in snow. Below the surface – if karst can be said to have a surface – aquifer
s fill and empty over centuries, there are labyrinths through which water circulates over millennia, there are caverns big as stadia, and there are buried rivers with cataracts, rapids and slow pools.

  In karst country, there may be violent collapses of the land, as in Taipei where circular sections of road disappear, as if a monster has stomped its foot down at an intersection. The distinctive topography of karst has developed its own distinctive languages of form and absence: a ‘doline’ (English) is a funnel-shaped sinkhole; an abîme or gouffre (French) is a water-worn shaft that can plunge thousands of feet; a cenote (Spanish) is a collapsed sinkhole, often flooded; an okna (Slovenian) is a point where water has worn a passage through rock that can be seen through, as if creating a ‘window’ in the stone.

  Guizhou and Yunnan in China; the Nullarbor Plain of Australia; great areas of North America, including much of Florida; the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico; the White Peak, the Mendips, the Yorkshire Dales and the Forest of Dean in England; the limestone gorges and highlands of central and southern France – these are all karst landscapes. In the Philippines a tidal river runs for more than twenty-four miles below the karst, six miles of which are navigable by boat. In Waitomo, New Zealand, a subterranean river is lent light by the constellation of glow-worms, Arachnocampa luminosa, that live on the cave roof and speckle its stone with galaxies of blue stars amid the stalactites.

  And where the north-east of Italy borders Slovenia, there rises a long elevated plateau of limestone known in Italian just as Il Carso, the Karst. Far beneath the wind-scoured, sun-beaten rock of the Carso runs a river called the Reka in Slovenian and the Timavo in Italian – a river of rapids and meanders that in places flows more than 1,000 vertical feet below the light.

  ~

  I come to the Carso from Mantua. In a crypt below the cathedral of that city is kept the Grail, a relic containing Christ’s blood, caught where it ran from the spear wound he sustained during crucifixion. Twice in the history of Mantua the Grail was buried and lost, twice it was unearthed. Now it is kept in the cathedral crypt, in an iron strongbox with eleven different locks, each lock openable by a different key and each key kept by a different cleric.

  From Mantua, I cross three rivers to reach the Carso.

  The Adige is a silver-grey snake, steaming in the heat. Its currents speak as lazy spirals. Steam coils up from the meanders where the sun boils it. Two storks beat their way westwards. Hops and honeysuckle in the hedgerows. Graffiti on the walls. A man pedalling a dusty road on a bicycle too small for him, so that his knees poke out at sharp angles. Brown earth and a sense of sea out of sight to the east, there in the sharpening of the light.

  The Piave is heavy with silt from the mountains, moving with a pewter simmer, more stone than water to the eye. A sense of high peaks out of sight to the north, there in the darkening of the sky. Maize fields. Wild acacia groves in the lost ground under flyovers. Pale doves lifting in flocks off turned brown earth. Abandoned factories with pantile roofs, buddleia filling the window frames. Farmhouses lost in ivy. Everything wearing the heat like a cloak.

  And the Isonzo, which marks the approach to the karst. Round pebbles of limestone, blue water that seems to glow from inside itself and the white of a flock of dozens of egrets moving eastwards over a green-rowed vineyard.

  Near the Isonzo I leave the train at a small station, where no one else gets on or off. Waiting for me at the end of the platform, waving, is Lucian. Lucian and Maria Carmen live high on the karst above Trieste, in a house on a sinkhole’s edge.

  ‘Come!’ says Lucian, embracing me. ‘How wonderful to see you here at last!’

  We drive past the fourteenth-century castle of Duino, perched on its pale stone headland above the Gulf of Trieste, where Rilke began writing his mystical Duino Elegies in 1912. Later, in Switzerland, after recovering from depression triggered by the First World War, Rilke would complete those elegies in what he described as a ‘limitless tempest’ of creativity. There he would also begin his great work of the underland, Sonnets to Orpheus, dedicated as a Grab-Mal, or ‘grave-marker’, to a young woman called Wera Koop, who had died at the age of nineteen. ‘Ancient tangled deeps / all founding root,’ begins the seventeenth sonnet, ‘the hidden seeps / never to be sought.’

  Not far beyond Duino we turn uphill and start the ascent to the plateau of the Carso. Lucian’s little car snorts with the effort of scaling the switchbacks that climb the limestone from sea to high ground.

  ‘You’d think she’d be used to it by now,’ says Lucian, leaning forwards and patting the dashboard affectionately.

  The roof tiles of the older houses we pass are weighted down with chunks of limestone. ‘We’re in the path of the bora here,’ explains Lucian laconically, waving a hand at the stone-tamped roofs. ‘It’s the wind that rushes down off the peaks – a katabatic wind, gravity-fed. It blows at up to 200 kilometres per hour round here. It can drive people mad, set dogs howling for days, and take the roof off a house like a tin opener. Though I must say it’s very good for drying clothes in its milder moods.’

  Maria Carmen meets us at the door, and immediately flings her arms around me.

  ‘Robert! Il Professore! Welcome to our house!’

  The porch smells of pomegranates. Maria Carmen holds me at arm’s length, inspects me, releases me. She is Argentinian. She wears red and black by preference, and her favourite creature is the roseate spoonbill, followed closely by the flamingo and the scarlet ibis. She mistrusts formal qualifications, preferring to judge people on their capacity for empathy. She and Lucian fell in love in the middle of their lives. Now they live together on the karst with a silver-grey cat called Raffy.

  Lucian is a translator, devoid of ego, and generous to the point of impracticality. He has such kind eyes. He is quadrilingual in Spanish, French, English, Italian and moves between these languages without hesitation, like a train smoothly switching tracks on the points. He once sailed around the Horn, and was part of a number of expeditions to Patagonia. His own boat is in dry dock, and needs work, but if he ever finds the time and money to replace the buckled teak deck, his dream would be to sail her to the foot of a scarcely climbed Patagonian peak of 3,000 feet, and ascend it from sea level through a belt of tangled southern beech and swampy undergrowth that he expects to pose more of an obstacle than any glacier. He has the charts of the tip of Patagonia pinned above his working desk: channels and island groups, there for daydreaming when the word-grind gets too much.

  ‘He has to give to others,’ says Maria Carmen to me in a whisper one day during my weeks there. ‘It is what he has to do – but he does not think about himself enough.’

  Maria Carmen works in social care. ‘She receives so little back, but goes on giving so much,’ Lucian confides to me one day while we are out walking.

  Lucian is a nineteenth-century explorer stuck in a twenty-first-century economy, Maria Carmen is a natural altruist in a needy culture, and together they are two of the gentlest people it is my good fortune to have met.

  Lucian and Maria Carmen’s house faces south-westwards towards the Adriatic, but the sea is just out of sight, visible only as silver light above the stands of oak and pine that flourish on the downslope of the Carso. There is an orchard of apricots, in which yellow crocuses bloom.

  The house is cool, its windows shuttered against the heat, its roof tamped down against the bora. The bookshelves are glass-fronted wooden cabinets, filled with climbing, caving and sailing books in several languages. We eat lunch in the shade of an oak tree: tart Slovene apples, hard cheese, and potatoes that Maria Carmen has grown. Wild cyclamen flower on the sloping edges of the sinkhole. We throw our apple cores over its edge.

  ‘The sinkhole gets hungry,’ says Lucian.

  Raffy the cat curls around my ankles like mist.

  ‘I am not really from anywhere,’ says Lucian after we have eaten, ‘but I suppose I am most of all from the Carso.’

  His father served as a young tank commander at the time of the
Normandy landings. ‘He got to France two weeks after the initial landings – and in some ways he had the time of his life: he was nineteen, in charge of a tank and spoke fluent French. You can imagine how the locals welcomed him!’

  After the war, Lucian’s father was posted to Trieste, where he met a young Italian woman. They married the year after in London and he moved into the long-established family business of making briar pipes. Their holidays were taken in Trieste and Lucian grew up walking the Carso, beginning slowly to fathom its secrecies, both dark and light.

  ‘What I learned as a child is that you have to watch where you put your feet round here,’ Lucian says. ‘Metaphorically as well as geologically. There is much violence in the past of this region – and so little of it is spoken about. Rivers disappear and so do stories, only to rise again in unexpected places.’

  Lucian has been working for years on a history of the Carso and its depths, a text which he seems to regard as potentially limitless and almost certainly unfinishable. ‘It’s taken me the best part of two decades to come to realize how little I know about what this landscape hides,’ he murmurs, rather more to himself than to me.

  Dog-rose tangles through the understorey of their garden, blossoming pink and white. Bees swim in the blossoms. I think of the strange lines Rilke wrote to the translator of his Elegies: ‘We are the bees of the invisible. Frenziedly we gather the honey of the visible, to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible . . .’

  The air is stony. Birds skim between oaks.

  ‘The Carso is, to my mind, the archetypal “underland”, to use your term,’ says Lucian. ‘Here we have caves, 10,000 caves, in which humans have lived, worshipped, healed, killed, sought protection from one another and from the world, wrought terrorism, and dug for ice. In prehistory, people built forts here – but they also retreated literally into the hillsides. The Romans constructed cave temples dedicated to the underground god Mithras. And you’ve also – you’ll be delighted to hear – come to one of the mouths of hell: the Romans declared an entrance to Hades nearby, at the point where the River Timavo dives underground at Škocjan.’