Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  He pauses.

  ‘Fast-forward to the nineteenth century, and a booming Trieste, made a free port by Maria Teresa, but critically short of water, sent out a series of expeditions to try and locate the missing river and supply the city. They did find it – but buried far underground. During the First World War, both the Austrians and the Italians burrowed into the limestone here, digging trenches and enlarging caves for use as hospitals, munitions dumps, and so on – and not just here, but across the Julian Alps and the Dolomites. The same during the Second World War. And in the course and aftermath of that war, too, both sides repaid their sufferings with awful interest, killing and pushing enemy troops and supposed collaborators into sinkholes, or foibe as they are known round here.’

  He frowns.

  ‘We have cave systems here with living glaciers in them, we have caves containing an unmentionable species of blind orange beetles – the Anophthalmus hitleri, which is menaced by extinction because of its popularity with neo-Nazi collectors – and we have caves in which wine is left to rest with, it seems to me, mostly indifferent results.

  ‘And here, the earth itself is tidal. Truly! The rock here reacts to the draw of the moon, just as the water of the ocean does. Gravitational attraction pulls and then releases the limestone; the Earth’s crust has spring tides, neap tides. Of course, they are tiny compared to marine tides. The tidal range of the sea can be up to sixteen metres; the tidal range of limestone up to two centimetres. Nevertheless, here the underworld surges and relaxes beneath your feet without you feeling it. There are symposia of earth tides held at Trieste University.’

  The Adriatic glitters in the sky.

  ‘And perhaps above all we have the fascination, no, the obsession, with mapping the complete flow of the Timavo – which they sometimes call here the River of the Night.’

  ~

  The Timavo rises as the Reka in pine forests on the southern side of Mount Snežnik, the Snow Mountain, on the border of Slovenia and Croatia. Its waters gather in the flat farmed valley land around Illirska Bistrica, and then wander, in idle half-mile loops, over impermeable flysch bedrock until, at the village of Škocjan, the flysch meets limestone and – in a geological conjuring trick – the Reka disappears.

  The Škocjan canyon, where the Reka plunges into the underland, is a site of exceptional force. Here, over millions of years, water has cut one of the largest known underground canyons in the world. The river crashes through an immense arch in a limestone cliff and drives on through collapsed sinkholes hundreds of yards in diameter – their air filled with microclimates of mist and spray, their vertical sides offering nesting grounds for falcons and growing grounds for oak saplings and pink cyclamen – until the vigour of its fall cuts a tunnel steeply down into the limestone, just as the limestone begins its own rise up to the plateau of the Carso. The Reka-Timavo runs underground for around twenty-two miles before emerging again near Duino and debouching into the Adriatic, mingling fresh water with salt.

  ‘The Timavo River flows from the mountains, falls into an abyss and then, after flowing about 130 stadia underground, springs beside the sea,’ wrote Posidonius of Apamea, around 100 BC. The Škocjan ‘abyss’ was sufficiently famous to be marked on both the Lazius-Ortelius map of 1561 and Mercator’s Novus Atlas of 1637. Systematic exploration of the river’s hidden extent began in the late 1830s, in part to address Trieste’s thirst for drinking water. A well expert called Ivan Svetina pushed into the canyon at Škocjan, reaching what he described as the third waterfall – and in so doing he began the first golden age of the Timavo’s exploration, lasting until 1904.

  These early attempts to follow the starless river were industrial in nature. Safety paths were chiselled into the stone of the canyon sides, spidering up the cliffs – vertigo-inducing even to look at from beneath – so that escape would be possible if the water level began swiftly to rise in the canyon. Boats were used to enter the further reaches, but boats were risky – hard to bring back against the current, liable to be overturned. The chambers, cataracts and channels were christened as each was reached – Hanke Channel, Martel’s Chamber, the Rudolf Hall, the Müller Hall, Dead Lake, the Silent Cave – until, in 1904, further progress was stopped for almost a century by a siphon: a fully flooded tunnel that, the explorers discovered, was too long to be swum on the reserves of a single human breath.

  The next breakthrough did not come until 1991, when underwater respiration technologies, and the development of cave diving as an ultra-high-risk pastime, meant that the route could be forced further. In September that year, two Slovenian divers were able to swim a siphon close to Dead Lake, which opened into a wealth of new passages and chambers, where the Timavo both ran as a river and pooled as a lake. Now diving teams travel from around the world each summer to attempt to push further along the buried waterway from those points where it can be accessed. They establish base camps in the darkness, waiting days and weeks for optimal conditions – then dive into the ink.

  ‘The Timavo is a dream,’ remarks one of its young contemporary explorers, a member of the Adriatic Speleology Society called Marco Restaino, ‘a dream we are trying to bring into being metre by metre.’ That dream produces obsession in its votaries, who are known as grottisti. These groups of grottisti are competitive with one another, but also understand that in order to realize the shared grail-quest – full continuous mapping of the Timavo’s route and flow – they must cooperate and piece together their knowledge.

  There are a few places on the Carso plateau where it is possible to reach the starless river from the surface. Almost all of these access points involve serious caving. Almost all are ‘owned’ by differently aligned groups of explorers and cavers, who control local access to the Timavo, and whose relationship with its flow mixes cartography, adventure, science and a compulsive kind of dreamwork that would surely have fascinated Freud (who visited one of the great caves close to Škocjan, where his attention was unsurprisingly caught by the tumescent stalactites and stalagmites, and also by the subconscious of the grotto-keeper, Gregor, who lived in this profusely phallic underland and had named each stalagmite – ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’, ‘the Eiffel Tower’ – for a place or object about which he had been told by visitors to his cave).

  One of the places where the Timavo can be reached is a collapsed sinkhole in the beech woods near the village of Trebiciano. There a narrow water-worn shaft drops 1,000 vertical feet from the base of the doline in a continuous passage, just wide enough at its narrowest points to admit a human body, down at last to a cathedral-sized chamber through which the Timavo rushes. It was in part to attempt a descent of the Abyss of Trebiciano – as it is comfortingly known – that I had come to the Carso.

  However the Timavo is reached, the work of exploration is dangerous, difficult and dark. After heavy rain, the Timavo can flood at times up to 200 feet above typical height, killing anyone caught in a chamber or tunnel, or driving air under huge pressures up the shafts that drop to the river. Despite the efforts of the grottisti over more than two centuries, only around 15 per cent of the underground flow of the Timavo is presently known.

  Contemplating the activities of these Timavo mappers – most of whom are men – it is hard not to see in their devotions and their rituals something of the practice of a religious cult, with the starless river their occult god.

  ~

  ‘I want to show you a strong, sacred place – very much part of this region’s underland,’ says Lucian one morning.

  We set off on foot through sloped scrub from a road-head near an abandoned farmhouse, a mile or so in from the sea. Thorns snag our ankles as we walk. We crush wild marjoram and thyme underfoot, loosing their scents. Grasshoppers crackerjack away from each pace. Lizards skitter off, tails drifting over the dust behind them. The air vibrates with heat. There is no footpath but Lucian works his way confidently uphill, contouring south-east as we climb. We cross a train track, its rails glinting. Not far short of the treeline Lucian leads us to
what seems, amid that barrenness, a green oasis: acacia trees and grass growing from a shallow sinkhole in the hillside.

  ‘Few people know this is here,’ says Lucian. ‘I like the fact it lies within plain sight of the train line and the main Venice–Trieste road, but is invisible to all but a handful of those who pass it.’

  We push between two of the trees that together form a gateway to the site, follow a set of stone steps down – and there in the base of the sinkhole is the entrance to a cave. At the threshold are several carved limestone pedestals and column bases, one of which is part of the living rock.

  We enter what is unmistakably a votive space. Two long central stone benches or altars span the cave’s width, with single cubes of stone placed between them. On the sides of the cave are two carved limestone reliefs; both show a human figure grasping a bull with one hand and with the other driving a knife into its chest.

  ‘What is this place, Lucian? What does all of this mean?’

  ‘This is a Mithraeum – an underground temple devoted to the god Mithras,’ says Lucian. ‘Mithras was the god of the legionaries, little known in the pantheon and now hardly remembered, I think. He was born from rock – a true deity of the underworld in that sense – and the cult of his worship took place in subterranean spaces all over the empire. This was one of them, and it was probably used for more than 300 years, until it was abandoned around 400 AD. When they first excavated this place they found hundreds of coins and dozens of oil lamps and jars.’

  We sit together on one of the benches. Flies dance where the light falls over the cave mouth.

  ‘People still come here faithfully, as it were,’ says Lucian. ‘I once found a wooden box of coins, some of them very old, tucked behind a stone at the back. I left them, of course. They’d vanished by the time of my next visit.’

  Mithraism was a so-called mystery cult that spread across the Roman Empire from the first to fourth centuries CE, standing as a provocative counterpoint to early Christianity, which perceived in it a ‘diabolical counterfeit’ to their own emerging rituals. Its mysticism is itself mysterious, for so little survives in terms of sources to help us illuminate its beliefs and practices. What we know of it is largely reverse-engineered from the inscriptions and artworks found in Mithraic temples, and from the fleeting references that exist in classical literature.

  We know that Mithraism was centred on Rome, but that its temples existed throughout the empire, all the way to London – where in 1954 the remains of a Mithraeum were discovered under Wallingford Street, in what is now the basement of the Bloomberg building. Among the items found there during the excavation was a miniature gladiator’s helmet carved from amber.

  We know, too, that Mithraism was an underground cult in several senses. Politically, it kept itself secret and out of view, its initiates greeting one another with encrypted signs of recognition. Theologically, it worshipped a god who had emerged from the rock itself. Topographically, its distinctive temples were almost all located below ground: the cellars of houses, natural caves or specially built vaults; sacred chambers known as spelea (caves) or crypta.

  Sitting there with Lucian, I understand what he means by this as a ‘strong place’. People have been stopping here to rest and to make offerings for nearly 2,000 years. Many of its earliest visitors were legionaries, travelling back from a distant conflict zone towards Rome or home, or leaving Italy for a distant posting. Such people surely would have been in need of faith.

  Lucian and I rest companionably in the cool, listening to the landscape’s undersong: clack of the train track, road-hum below it, buzz-saw of grasshoppers from the scrub.

  ‘Mithraism was a soldier’s religion, and a male religion,’ says Lucian. ‘Only men could become initiates.’

  Thinking of the diver-explorers of the Timavo as modern Mithraists, striving in their below-ground sanctums, seeking new spaces, new disclosures, I am reminded of the historically gendered nature of the underland. As far back as the classical katabases, it is often men who descend heroically to the underworld to retrieve women who have been trapped, taken or lost: Orpheus seeking Eurydice, for instance, or Heracles following Alcestis. Mythologically, the underland is often a place in which women are silenced or pay brutal prices for the mistakes of men. Ariadne helps Theseus negotiate the labyrinth but is abandoned by him and then, in some stories, killed by Artemis. Creon threatens to entomb Antigone alive to punish her for burying her brother, Polynices, and to disempower her politically; she hangs herself in desperation. Hades imprisons Persephone and then compels her to return annually to his domain, even after she is saved by Demeter.

  Yet there are also shining modern counter-examples – women who are rewriting these ancient archetypes with courage and expertise. The Dark Star expeditions in Uzbekistan, exploring a system that may yield the deepest known cave, have been pioneered by female cavers, who cross subterranean lakes and rifts filled with blooms of blue ice. Female palaeoanthropologists have led the Rising Star expeditions in the Bloubank dolomites of South Africa, excavating early hominin burial sites. Each of these women has had to pass through an opening less than a foot wide in order to access the fossil remains, and the group has become known as the Underground Astronauts. The microbiologist and caver Hazel Barton collects microbes in extreme subterranean environments in order to research antibiotic resistance; tattooed onto her left bicep is a map of the Wind Cave in Dakota, the site of much of her research. She is drawn by the unknown as much as any modern Mithraist. ‘When you’re in the cave, you . . . get a feeling for what it felt like to stand on the moon for the first time,’ Barton says. ‘You’re the first person ever to see it. There are very few things that give you that sense of exploration any more, where you can go and find unknown land that people didn’t know existed.’

  Lucian and I leave the cave. The sun falls hard as bronze plate upon us. On the coast below is the colourful sprawl of an industrial harbour zone, with yellow blocks of shipping containers and a series of red cranes leaning over the water.

  ‘It’s a shipyard specializing in cruise liners,’ says Lucian. ‘They turn ships out like Fiat Pandas down there.’

  Rasp of grasshoppers, burr of bees, scent of herbs. We walk on towards the tinfoil sea.

  ~

  The Timavo is only one of many starless rivers and flooded underlands to have beckoned people into them, sometimes fatally. ‘A peak can exercise the same irresistible power of attraction as an abyss,’ wrote Théophile Gautier in 1868, and the reverse is also true.

  The fallen angel of French speleology is a man called Marcel Loubens, who was seized from a young age by what the British caver James Lovelock called ‘a passion for depth . . . He wanted to go deeper and further into the rocky heart of the earth than any man had been before.’ Under the tutelage of the father of modern French cave exploration, Norbert Casteret, Loubens led numerous mid twentieth-century explorations in the Pyrenees, which were at that time considered ‘the Himalayas’ of the caving world.

  In the summers of 1951 and 1952 Loubens took part in the expeditions to descend the chasm of Pierre Saint-Martin, a shaft of water-worn limestone that, from its modest mouth in the western Pyrenees, drops more than 1,100 feet to its base. The Saint-Martin chasm proved to be the entry point to what was thought then to be the deepest-reached cave system in the world – a series of chambers leading down at last to an underground river – and it became the focus of intense speleological activity. In 1952, to speed up the movement of people up and down the shaft, an electric winch was devised and cemented in place at the mouth of the chasm.

  Loubens was one of the most committed explorers of Pierre Saint-Martin, and he volunteered to make the first winch-powered descent of the shaft himself. He clipped himself onto the wire, backed over the edge of the chasm, and called out a farewell to Casteret – ‘Au revoir, papa’ – as he disappeared from view. Then the winch lowered him down the shaft, and he saw the blue circle of sky dwindle from disc to dot, until its watching ey
e winked out. The sides of the shaft were in places polished glass-smooth by the action of water.

  Loubens made it safely to the base, and spent the subsequent five days underground, leading the exploration of the further reaches of the system, down towards the starless river, astonished by what he and his companions were discovering. ‘The show has hardly begun,’ he said to his friends as he prepared to be winched back up.

  Loubens was around thirty-five feet up when the clip that held him to the wire buckled. He cried out as he slipped from the line, fell, and then smashed into the boulder field at the base of the shaft, bouncing for more than 100 feet from rock to rock.

  When Loubens’s companions reached him, he was barely alive. Great efforts were made to rescue him, but his injuries were so many and so severe – among them a broken spine and a fractured skull – that it proved impossible to move him. He died thirty-six hours after first falling.

  Loubens’s friends on the surface used an acetylene lamp to burn onto a nearby rock the words ‘Ici Marcel Loubens a vécu les derniers jours de sa vie courageuse’, ‘Here Marcel Loubens passed the last days of his courageous life.’ Those still at the base of the gouffre buried his body beneath a pile of boulders, and marked the site with an iron cross covered with luminous paint. Loubens had fulfilled his own wish to find his resting place deep underground.

  Two years after Loubens’s death, on 12 August 1954, a young Belgian priest called Jacques Attout volunteered to be lowered to the bottom of the Pierre Saint-Martin. Using a medicine chest as his altar, and with Norbert Casteret as his server, Attout celebrated Mass in memory of Loubens. He later recalled the service, in what has become among the most celebrated passages of caving literature for its convergence of theology and geology: