Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  ‘There are some of the deepest caves in Europe from surface to lowest point,’ he says. He comes to sit with us, points out on our map the entrances to the caves.

  That night there are lightning flashes far in the distance, illuminating the Canin. Lucian and I go out onto the balcony to watch the show. We can see its pitted limestone plains in the scorch-light. They look like the asteroid-cratered surface of the moon. It is unearthly and beautiful.

  We watch the storm, time the gap between each lightning bolt and its accompanying rumble of thunder.

  ‘You can hear stags bellowing from down in the valley a little later in the year,’ Lucian says after a while. ‘Such a sound – haunting and violent. It drifts up from below and echoes around the cirques.’

  Later the storm reaches us, and the rain strikes the tin roof like bullets.

  ~

  We wake to calmness and a miracle.

  A cloud-sea fills the landscape below us. The valleys are fjords and we are islanded. As we watch, the cloud surges slowly upwards, roiling higher until I have the illusion that we are sinking – an atoll shuddering down into white water. Green of the pines shows amid eddies of mist and pinnacled peaks; a Chinese scroll painting unrolls before us.

  We set off to the west on a thin path that cuts between sheer cliffs above and sheer drops below. We pass in and out of the cloud-sea as the path moves. Where waterfalls drop from the cliffs above, we must crouch and run through them, meltwater clattering on head and neck.

  Feline tracks on a snow patch. An ibex glimpsed in the distance. A pair of mating black salamanders in a moist clasp on the path’s white stones, their long toes and fingers pressed ardently against one another. More embrasures, more tunnels, every cliff riddled with them, the whole mountain range a hive, really, a terrible war-hive. We are the bees of the invisible . . .

  A flock of choughs dips far below us with pinging cries. Two chamois flee on the gallop, then stop on a boulder, looking back over their shoulders at us. Trenching is still visible in the rocks and soil, grassed over. We walk freely across a side valley, the openness of which once meant death. Coils of barbed wire are sunk in turf and stone.

  We drop off the high path and take a contouring line down into the cloud, which gathers us into its white world. At a stand of wild raspberries we stop to eat. The berries are tart in the mouth. On and down from there for hours, and as we fall the sun rises to burn off the cloud.

  Early in the afternoon we reach the valley floor, through which flows the young Isonzo. Here, where it passes over the karst of the Canin, its water is ice blue. I want to slip into it and float to the Adriatic. Lucian and I rest on a shingle beach by a deep pool. Trout shadows flip for flies, or hang wavering upstream. What did the mountaineer-mystic W. H. Murray say after being released from years spent in German and Italian POW camps? Find beauty, be still.

  A fine mist rises from the water and hangs white above the river, so that the water is clearer than the air. The trees that border the river are lush with moss and lichen. This is not a rainforest but a mist-forest, and through it runs this otherworldly river. I find a flattened, rounded black stone on the shingle, and throw it into the middle of the current. The stone rocks down through the blue water to the riverbed, where it part-buries itself in the white sand.

  THIRD CHAMBER

  Down in the labyrinth under the old ash tree with the riven trunk, a last passage is chosen, followed. It dips fast down, twists, curls, then steadies out. A gravel beach is reached, at the edge of which dark water pools to depth. The rift-roof dips to meet the water. The only means of progress from here is into the pool and on through the flooded passageway.

  So into the pool, the water black as stone and cold as snow, the cold running quick as dye to bone, no sight, no light, feel for ridges in the roof-rock and kick on, lung-air hot and red now, head-pressure rising, rising, rising . . . then up and out at last into clear air beyond, gasping in the darkness on the far side of the water. Is this what death feels like? Or birth?

  Another chamber has been entered. Stalactites run from ceiling to floor. A light is struck, lifted, shifted. The chamber walls are alive with image and story – each slope of stone bearing a scene from the underland. These are scenes of haunting and afterlife, shifting across time but echoing each other.

  A woman’s body is prepared for burial in Thessaly in the fourth century BC. Her lips are closed by a coin bearing the head of a gorgon, there to pay the ferryman who will carry her over a dark-watered river towards the realm of death. Placed on her chest are two heart-shaped leaves of gold foil, into which metal words have been etched. Together the leaves form a Totenpass – a death pass or death map. The text they bear is for her to read in the underland; it gives her directions to the dominion of the dead, where she will be placed in the care of Persephone. The text warns her of mistakes made by others, who have not navigated their way to safety in the underland and are now condemned to haunt the mortal realm eternally as spectres. You will find on the right in Hades’ halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives. Do not even draw nigh this spring . . .

  A man walks open country west of Pennsylvania in the 1860s. He carries a silver coin in his pocket and divining rods in his hands. He walks, then stops, waits, and seems to listen. He bends at the waist to bring his ear closer to the ground. Listens again. Watches the rods, waits for their twitch. Nothing. They hang limp in his hands. He walks on. The man is a medium, a geologist-spiritualist, an oil speculator. Oil is a gift given from God, limitless in its underland abundance, divinely stored for the use of mankind. One must just know where to find it. For the oil emits ‘coruscations’ – atmospheric glitterings above ground, perceptible to those few people sensitive enough to detect them. The man walks on through the grassland – and the rods in his hands begin to twitch. His spirit guides have led him at last to the place where he will site one of his Harmonial wells. He stops, listens, confirms his soundings. Smiles, kneels on the ground, takes the silver coin from his pocket and pushes the coin deep into the turf. This is where the drill bit will bite. This is where the oil will rise.

  The year is 1971 and a Soviet drilling rig squats on the sand of the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan, near the village of Darvaza. Suddenly there is a crack, then a roar, and a disc of the desert floor 230 feet in diameter shatters and collapses into the abyss that opens beneath it, swallowing rock, sand and drilling rig in a few seconds. The void migrates to the surface . . . The drilling has punctured a natural-gas cavern, the cavern’s roof has collapsed, and now poisonous fumes are pouring into the upper world. The decision is taken to ignite the gas and burn it off. It is expected that this will take only a few weeks. More than four decades later, the pit is still on fire. It has become known as the ‘Door to Hell’ and ‘Hell’s Gate’. At night its orange flames light up the desert for miles around. People travel from around the world to approach its rim and sleep within the radius of its glow.

  Early this millennium, on the sweltering north coast of Java, a lake of toxic mud has spread over four square miles of landscape, gouting out of a central crater from which a plume of foul-smelling gas also rises, and burying twelve villages. This mud volcano began to erupt ten years previously, shortly after a multinational corporation, drilling for oil in a Late Miocene stratum some two miles below ground, ruptured a high-pressure aquifer and opened a series of blowout vents on the surface – from which ever since has flowed this torrent of ancient, poisonous sludge. By some the mud volcano is seen as a consequence of corporate greed – an unnatural disaster. By others it is seen as an emanation of batin – of the submerged occult forces of the underland, of ghosts and spirits that dwell in the landscape and exist far beyond human bidding.

  A great flock of snow geese, more than 25,000 birds strong, whirls across a plain in the American west in 2016. The birds have been driven from their usual flyway by a snowstorm, and they are desperate for a place to land where th
ey might escape the wind and cold. They pass over the gleaming red-black waters of a flooded former open-pit copper mine. It seems to offer refuge, so first one goose dips its shoulders and then ten birds follow that single bird and then 10,000 birds follow those ten birds, draining down in a welter of wings and honking cries to the pit, where they settle, shrug their feathers, and drink gratefully. But the gleaming water – 45 billion gallons of it – is toxic because of the mining that has taken place here: highly acidic and contaminated with heavy metals. Thousands of the birds die and become a new surface, hundreds of floating acres of dead geese, dark-barred and white-winged, folded over one another in the pit.

  The same year, a man dressed hood to toe in white stoops to pass through a narrow doorway, braced by a frame of steel, and into the darkness of a chambered tomb. The wall is made of rough concrete and is more than two feet thick; it is known as the Sarcophagus, and the space it encloses is the Reactor Cavern. The man, who has a camera slung around his neck, moves on through the cavern, his torch-beam lighting his surreal surroundings. He sees bent wedges of fallen steel, twisted girders, contorted piping, control panels slumped and dripping. This is a space that has been reorganized by a force beyond imagining. There were once seven rooms here, stacked on top of one another, but they are no longer in the same places or in the same order . . . A stalactite of lava runs from ceiling to floor, thicker in girth than the chest of a human, formed of molten rock, rubber and uranium: to stand by it for a few minutes is to die. The man has forty minutes at most in the Sarcophagus before he is overexposed. In what was once a control room he stops, raises his camera, and takes a slow-shutter-speed photograph.

  Later, he develops the image. It should be an image of darkness. But down through the image falls a scatter of white points of dust, like static or a fine snowfall. These points are not dust, though – they are the imprints on the photosensitive film of pure energy, the radioactivity that was swarming invisibly around him in the Sarcophagus, swarming through him. They are the dazzling radio-autographs of uranium, plutonium and caesium – burning points of light that ghost the eye.

  PART THREE

  Haunting (The North)

  8

  Red Dancers

  (Lofotens, Norway)

  Looking across the bay to the northern shore – and there by the glimmering birches is a figure standing dark on rising ground, where no figure should be.

  Two oystercatchers flicker over the water between us with quick cries of alarm, catching my eye as they fly.

  Looking back across the bay to the northern shore – but now by the birches there is nothing there, no one at all.

  ~

  Days earlier, sailing the Vestfjorden in worsening weather, due to make landfall at Moskenes an hour before dusk. Sunlight pools to the south, then is soaked up in shadow. Small snow-squalls blow in and blot out sight from the boat. Snowflakes hum in the air with angry speed.

  Impossible islands grow to the west. I glimpse a long band of black and white; crag and snowfield between low grey cloud and high grey sea. Gleams of light on the snow, in the gullies and the shallower flanks. So much more snow than I have expected to see – and the peaks themselves even steeper and sharper than I have anticipated. The long band of land widens as we approach.

  Mountains shade into view, developing out of the squalls like photographs. A scatter of red-walled, black-roofed houses. Thousands of cod, frozen hard, hanging by their slit throats in ranks from A-frames of wood, clacking in the wind. The squalls thickening to an easterly blizzard and a buzz of worry building in my belly.

  Later I will remember the days that followed mostly as metals. Silver of the pass. Iron of the bay and its clouds. Rare gold of the sky. Zinc of the storm in its full fury. Bronze and copper of the sea to the south as I escape.

  ~

  ‘Look out for them,’ Hein says to me in Oslo. ‘There are more of them there, without doubt, more figures on that shore.’

  Pause.

  ‘But first you’ll need to get over the Wall safely. I only ever went there by boat, the long way round, in the summer. You’ll be walking there, in winter.’

  Smile.

  ‘Have you ever thought of taking up smoking? It’s never too late to learn!’

  Pause. Smile.

  ‘Smoking can be a good survival skill in a landscape like that.’

  ~

  The majority of European prehistoric cave paintings are located in the chambers and shelters of south-west France and northern Spain. As you move further north from this region, the quantities of such art decline and their age also decreases. Above sixty degrees north, relatively little exists.

  The main reason for this scarcity of painted art at higher latitudes is that much of this landscape was buried under glaciers until the end of the last Ice Age. Twenty thousand years ago, when the seventeen-foot-long red aurochs was being painted in the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux, in what is now the Dordogne, all of Scandinavia and most of Britain and Ireland were still glaciated. As the ice slowly retreated, it left behind a shattered landscape scoured of life. Northwards human colonization of this barren terrain happened only slowly.

  Geology also has a role to play in the rarity of surviving northern-latitude painted cave art. Cave chambers form the most secure gallery sites for such art, and such chambers form most naturally in limestone: Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira – all of the most celebrated prehistoric artworks were made in and on limestone. Limestone has the added curatorial power of often running a film of transparent calcium carbonate over wall paintings, which then sets and acts as a preservative varnish, mitigating degradation of the pigments. Northern Europe is sparser in limestone than Spain and France, though, and richer in igneous and metamorphic rocks. Where caves or overhangs form in such rock types, they do so by the erosive forces of ice or seawater and as such tend to be shallower and rougher-sided. Their interiors lack the inviting canvases of water-smoothed limestone. A jagged granite cavity does not offer the same pictorial possibilities as a limestone chamber pillared with stalactites. Arctic-latitude prehistoric rock art does exist in Europe, including the astonishing concentration of work at Alta in far northern Norway, where more than 6,000 images – predominantly petroglyphs – depicting reindeers, bears, humans, hunting scenes and the aurora borealis were made between c.7,000 and 2,000 years ago on glacier-polished rock. But painted art – far more vulnerable to damage and weathering than incised imagery – is scant.

  Some of the most striking painted rock art from these northern landscapes is found in the decorated sea caves of Norway’s western coastline. To date, twelve sea caves have been discovered to contain such art, dispersed over a 500-mile distance from Nærøy in the south to the Lofoten archipelago in the north. All of these caves are located in remote areas, often on wild coasts where peaks fall sheer to the ocean. All of them have been smashed into sea cliffs or crags by the hammer strength of wave action over many millennia. Some of the caves could – at the time of their painting – have only been reached by boat, requiring hazardous navigation of the exposed coasts of islands and peninsulas.

  Together these ‘painted caves’ contain around 170 simple stick figures, arms and legs wide as if dancing or leaping: mostly human, but with occasional human-animal hybrids, and one image of a single hand. All the figures were made using red iron oxide pigment, and all were daubed using fingers or brushes. Dating the art is challenging, but the most secure estimates – based in part on the radiocarbon dating of artefacts found in the caves, including an arrowhead of polished slate, a seagull leg bone with a drilled hole that may have been used as a flute, and a great-auk amulet – place the making of the figures to somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.

  These painted figures are, then, Bronze Age peri-Arctic artworks, made in some of the harshest country in the world by hunter-gatherer-fisher people who moved along an isolated coastline, surviving there only by the gift of the Gulf Stream’s warmth. Their lives would have been short, arduous, and
might reasonably be thought to have left little space for the creation of art.

  Yet the red dancing figures exist.

  One of the remotest of these painted caves lies near the western tip of the Lofoten archipelago: the island chain that extends for almost 100 miles into the Norwegian ocean at a latitude of around sixty-eight degrees. The cave’s modern name is Kollhellaren, which translates roughly as ‘Hole of Hell’, and it lies near the tip of the island of Moskenes, on its uninhabited north-western coast.

  There are two ways to reach Kollhellaren. One way is on foot, over what is known as the Lofoten Wall – the precipitous ridge of peaks that runs down the centre of the island chain, and that in winter can be traversed only by means of a small number of passes. The other way is by boat, rounding the tip of the archipelago, and passing through the notorious Moskstraumen, one of the strongest whirlpool systems in the world, about which Edgar Allan Poe wrote his 1841 short story ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ – in which the whirlpool is figured as the portal of a tunnel leading to the core of the Earth. The Old Norse name for a maelstrom was bluntly pragmatic: havsvelg, ‘ocean-hole’ – a hollow in the sea into which everything flowed.

  Two entrance points to the underland, therefore, lie close by one another: a mouth of rock and a mouth of water, locked off by fierce mountains and fierce seas.