Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  The people who created the art of Kollhellaren more than 2,500 years ago took considerable risks just to reach the site of their making. Before even entering the cave-space, they had to cross powerful landscape thresholds.

  ~

  Winter has returned to the Lofotens when I reach them. Arctic gales have blown from the west for four days the previous week, stripping the windward slopes of loose snow, and dumping it in the east-facing gullies of the Wall as storm-slab. Avalanche risk has risen from low to moderate, and is due to keep on rising: ‘Storm-slab avalanches likely in east and south-east facing aspects, with triggering possible by high additional loads upwards of 300 metres.’ This is not the avalanche forecast I want to hear for my plan of reaching Kollhellaren and its red figures on foot.

  There are only two points close to Kollhellaren where I can cross the Wall in winter. Both present difficulties in these conditions. One is a gully that cuts up below an adze-shaped peak named Mannen. The other ascends a slabbed shoulder of peak. I consider them on a map. The gully is much steeper, but will probably hold less snow. The shoulder is a less severe slope, but looks more avalanche-prone. I decide on the gully. I like gullies. They hold you. You feel you’re likely to fall less far. They’re more comforting than ridges or shoulders, even when they’re more dangerous.

  The night before I set out for Kollhellaren, it snows steadily from dusk. I am in a tiny village called Å, at the very end of the road that snakes almost the full length of the Lofoten archipelago. Beyond Å there are only lakes, peaks and sea. I am staying with a retired fisherman called Roy. Roy broke his pelvis and leg falling onto a winch from the dock at Å six years earlier, after thirty-eight years of fishing. He accepted a state pension and retired early to take photographs.

  ‘You should not go over the Wall,’ Roy says that evening. ‘It’s not the right time of year. There is nothing over there on the west side. No houses, no people, no cell-phone signal. Just the cliffs and the sea. And snow. Why do you want to see Kollhellaren anyway?’

  I think of trying to explain: how the figures have come to fascinate me since I first heard of them years earlier. How I am trying to understand what drew their makers to that hard, strong place to leave their mark. But it seems too frail a structure of reasoning to risk exposing, just when I need my confidence most.

  ‘I just want to see the cave and its figures, and be over there on the west side for some time,’ I say.

  Roy shrugs. ‘There have always been Englishmen doing such things, since Slingsby,’ he says.

  We discuss his Indonesian holidays instead, and his relationship with an Indonesian woman that went fabulously right and then fabulously wrong for him out there. He shows me a video of the small palace of black marble and pink stucco that he built for her to house her nail-parlour business. We look at photographs: Roy straddling a moped outside the palace, with its candy-coloured horns and raked slate roof; Roy eating with his partner in a restaurant, shirtless, smiling.

  That night, I cannot sleep. I open the curtains, stand by the window and watch snowflakes rushing like fire-sparks through the light of the last street lamp in the archipelago. It is an oddly peaceful sight, but I know it means the snow on the peaks and in the gullies will be building, and that the avalanche risk will be growing.

  Early next morning, as I am preparing to leave, Roy rustles in his freezer and pulls out a plastic bag.

  ‘These are five fishcakes, made with the skrei I caught two days before, round off Helle, not so far from where you may be going.’

  My pack is already too heavy, but I push them down into the outer webbing.

  ~

  Looking back afterwards, from the far side of the Wall – though there were other hazards there, and other wonders too – I recall the crossing chiefly as a white whirl, a dissonant combination of finely granulated decision-taking and chaotic blur.

  I follow a dead-end road away from Roy’s house and out of Å, a little after dawn. The fresh snow squeaks under my boots. It has fallen softly through the night, settling to a six-inch layer. Sound is muffled. The village is asleep. Mine are the only tracks on the road.

  The gully rises from the head of a long low-lying lake called Ågvatnet that runs westwards from Å, draining a horseshoe of peaks to its north, west and south. Movement along the lake shore is immediately difficult – rocks slippery underfoot, under snow. The water of the lake is frozen to steel in its main reaches, clear only at its out-take where the current keeps the water moving. A riprap of stranded Ice-plates has been piled on the bay shores by the recent winds. Roosting on the lee crag of a rock island in the lake’s centre is a colony of gulls. Their chatter and screams are comforting in that austere valley: the convivial sound of social life. Far ahead of me, black cloud hides the peaks almost to their bases. This worries me. It will be hard to locate the correct gully.

  Slow going over snow-hiding boulders and slick rock. Trip, slip, fall, hard to get back up with the pack. Four times there are small crags to be scrambled, the hand-and footholds outwards-tilting and icy, requiring delicate, orderly movement.

  Then the land eases, opening to a wide bowl of open ground at the lake’s head that rises gently for half a mile or so to the foot of abrupt cliffs. Scrub birch forest grows here; it is hard to force a way through. Bushwhack, posthole. Low wreaths of quick-moving white cloud conceal and disclose the terrain around. There is no sunlight. Just water-streaked rock, wind chill and the occasional rumble of small avalanches. I have a strong sense of the terrain’s disinterest, which I might at other times experience as exhilaration but here, now, can feel only as menace.

  In the lee of a boulder just short of where the Wall rears up into cloud, I rest and take stock. Still no sight of the peaks themselves. Small spindrift cyclones roam the slopes. I can see the starts of three gullies ahead of me, leading up into the cloud. I know from a photograph I have been sent that only one is passable: the other two lead to sheer cliffs. Avalanche debris has gathered on the run-outs of all three gullies. I am reassured by its nature, though: it consists mostly of larger chunks of snow, rather than full avalanche fans.

  How to choose in this poor visibility? Left, right or middle? The left-hand gully seems to veer too far to the west to be correct. The right-hand gully looks truest, but also appears to narrow abruptly as it enters the cloud-line. I remember that I have the photograph of the gullies on my phone. I pull the phone out, try to read the image against the land itself. But the photo was taken in late spring; it shows black rock and a few lines of snow. It bears no meaningful resemblance to the blizzarded wall of white ahead of me.

  Rattle of rockfall.

  I choose the middle gully through a mixture of hunch and eenie-meenie-miney-mo, hoping I can reverse it and choose again if I must.

  Crampons on, helmet on, ice axe out. I move up to the gully mouth, and dig an avalanche test pit where the slope steepens. There is clearly give in the top layer: new windslab slipping over the harder, older snow beneath. Not so good. But the volume of windslab in the gully doesn’t seem enough to bury me if it does go.

  So – proceed. Just.

  Up into the gully proper now, the ground angling, the axe necessary. The snow in the gully’s throat is deeper than I expect, thigh-deep, so that I am soon wading up in a steep white river. Little avalanches are already beginning to trigger, which make me uneasy, so I wade across to the left side of the gully, where it curves up at its edge like a gutter. There at the edge it is rockier, the snow thinner and icier, so there is less chance of an avalanche. But there, too, is a more serious drop and greater chance of rockfall. That trading-off of hazards between avalanche, drop and rockfall becomes the trick of the ascent: picking the best-fit line that optimally minimizes all three.

  Time slows, swirls, repeats. Each step is hard going, the heavy pack peeling me back off the slope or jamming me into it. Spindrift hisses into my face, frets my cheeks. I murmur a mantra to myself: Take the time that needs to be taken, take the time that needs
to be taken.

  Why are you here? Why are you here? ask the rocks and the wind in reply.

  Still no sight of the pass. Is this the right gully? Then a crunch comes beneath me, a sudden drop and – bang! – hard snow punches my lungs. I am sunk to my arms. My legs are dangling in a void of some kind. Think, think: a snow crevasse. I must have dropped partially through into a fissure formed where the old snow flows over a bulge of rock. I really don’t want to drop fully through into the space beneath. I don’t know its extent, but I do know that it will be a hell of a place to get out of under these conditions. So carefully I cut, pull, swim, float myself free, as if getting out of quicksand. A long reach with the axe to gain purchase, a couple of heaves with knees and feet, and I am out and above it, and then – there! – eighty feet or so above me I can see the top lip of the gully, and clear air above it. I have chosen the right path and this is the way over the Wall.

  But thirty feet short of the top, the slope becomes more severe. It is heavily loaded with windslab, and a small cornice has formed at the rim – a frozen lateral wave of snow, perhaps five feet long, curling out and over the lip above me.

  I don’t like the look of either the cornice or the loaded slope, so I explore possibilities among rocks to the gully’s left side. But the terrain is even more serious there, perhaps just fifteen degrees off the vertical. The front points of my crampons skitter on exposed granite, and with only one axe I cannot tool my way up. The fingers on my left hand are beginning to freeze where I have been jabbing them into the snow for grip. I sense a serious fall opening below me, and so I retreat from the left-side rocks, carefully reversing the ten or so moves I have made to that point, move by move. Take the time that needs to be taken.

  So: the cornice, then. Pace by pace, diagonally up to the loaded exit ramp. Windslab falling away below me with each step, in yard-wide chunks. Avalanche a real risk with every movement now. On and up, placing each foot as carefully as if walking on thin ice over deep water, until I am just beneath the cornice. I get myself as stable in my footing as possible, kicking the front points of my crampons in deep, and then go to work with my axe on the cornice. Chunks tumble around me and away down the gully. Six or seven blows and I have cut a passage through it. I reach up into the gap, plant the axe – thunk – in the frozen turf of the ridge beyond, kick up and over and through the cornice, and haul myself onto the saddle of the pass with a whoop.

  I lie on my back, a gaffed fish, breathing heavily, and there above me, showing through the mist, is a sea eagle, low and circling, and the queasy fear in my throat is forgotten and my heart leaps to be overflown by that remarkable bird in that remarkable place. Then I think, It’s just sizing you up as lunch – and I laugh out loud at my stupidity and the land’s indifference.

  ~

  To reach and enter one of the painted caves of the Norwegian coast would have been a ‘rite of passage’ requiring ‘physical and mental ordeals’, writes Hein Bjerck, the archaeologist who discovered many of the painted caves and who I met in Oslo before coming to the Lofotens. The ordeals were several in number: firstly the journey to the site of the cave itself, and secondly the passage into the cave, crossing its two key thresholds: first the entrance mouth, and then the point at which light fails and dark takes over. Bjerck writes of the challenging short-term visits made by the artists as ‘ritual actions’, journeys to ‘the outer fringe of the human world’. He notes, too, how the surviving names for cave-sites continue to emphasize their status either as performance space or as access point to a hostile other-world: Church-Cave, Hell’s Mouth, Hell’s Hole, Troll’s Eye.

  These caves are, unmistakably, dramatic places. The Troll’s Eye is a wave-smashed tunnel around 100 feet in diameter, running east-west wholly through the rock of a small island, in which the setting orange sun is framed once a year. Bukkhammar Cave is set into a sea cliff so sheer that the mouth itself can be reached only from the water: a vault visible from the sea for miles in clear weather. Solsem Cave contains an overhanging panel of rock more than 100 square feet in area, on which is painted a monumental cruciform figure. In Fingal’s Cave, the most southerly of the painted sites, at the point where the cave splits into two main passages and deepens away into the rock, stands a sharp menhir, the front face of which is struck by the sun’s rays for a short time twice a year. And Kollhellaren itself is an immense north-facing cruciform cave, 150 feet high at its entrance, with a 600-foot-long gallery system. During the midsummer weeks, the outer reaches of Kollhellaren flood with the yellow light of the midnight sun.

  Of all archaeological specialisms, the study of prehistoric rock and cave art is among the most speculative. These acts of marking are irrefutable – but the immediate circumstances of their making are scarcely retrievable. It is hard to locate with confidence the intent or significance of individual artworks in wider webs of cultural practice.

  It is possible to say, however, that the art of the painted caves of Norway is part of a circumpolar cultural presence left by the northern populations of Eurasia during what is now called the Bronze Age; other artwork from this period includes the complex of incised rock art at Bohuslän in southern Sweden. Most of this art is located at liminal places – coastlines, riverbanks, caves; sites where, as Richard Bradley puts it in An Archaeology of Natural Places, ‘land meets sea’, darkness meets light, and worlds ‘come closest together’.

  At Bohuslän – during the same centuries that the red dancers were being painted in the northern sea caves – a densely ritualized landscape was developed in a transitional site close to the coast. There, burial cairns were built in number on higher ground above the sea. Where bedrock was exposed, worn by glaciation to offer an ideal surface for inscription, hundreds of carvings were made. Hauntingly, many of these carvings are of footprints, which leave track-lines running down the angle of the rock into which they are cut. These ghostly prints – made by beings who are not present in any form other than the impress of their feet – seem therefore to record the passage of walkers from the barrow cemeteries on higher ground, down to the sea itself – as if spirits were leaving their tombs to make a final foot-journey to the domain of the deceased. Bradley connects the stone-prints at Bohuslän and the Norse myth that the recently dead must be helped on their journey to the otherworld by the provision of ‘hel-shoes’ – specially cast soles that will allow the spirit to make its journey along ‘the path from the grave to the world beyond’.

  The painted caves of northern Norway are all, also, clearly strong transitional sites. The presence in the painted caves of at least one figure wearing ceremonial headgear suggests possible relation with the three-tiered Saami cosmos, whereby the universe is arranged vertically into three layers – the sky, the earth and the underworld. Only shamans and the dead are able to pass between the tiers, by means of an axis mundi that – in the form of a river or tree – connects the upper and lower spirit realms to the living present of the middle realm. Terje Norsted and Bjerck both propose that practices in the painted caves may have been rites of passage, permitting mortal movement – through the membrane of the stone – to the cosmic underland or overland.

  The paintings and petroglyphs of these extreme landscapes may also be understood as an early form of land art, whereby the specific place of making (the cave interior itself) is chosen not only for the pragmatic purposes of shelter and preservation, but also as part of a potent larger location that extends in radiating context both outwards (to the cliff, bay and coastline that contain it) and inwards (to the implied further depths, metaphysical and actual, of the cave’s interior). In the case of Kollhellaren, certainly, it is hard to imagine that the cave’s closeness to the Moskstraumen Maelstrom was not considered part of its power as a place of making.

  Any encounter – modern or ancient – with those painted figures will therefore necessarily be shaped not only by the confrontation with the red forms themselves on the cave wall, but also by the details and moods of the landscape beyond the point
of darkness – by the fall of sunlight or of snow, the temper of the sea, the gliding presence of eagle or the flowing presence of otter – and by the experience of reaching the caves of the dancing figures in the first place.

  ~

  My laughter up there on the pass is whipped away by a wild westerly, from which the Wall has sheltered me during my ascent. It is a hostile wind, this: low gale-force in strength. Troubling, too, given that I will be on the exposed west coast for several days to come. Visibility is fifteen yards. The ground falls fast away below me into whiteness. Hail needles rattle my jacket. The drop into the mist on unsure ground is problematic, but there is no question of reversing the gully. As I begin the descent I recall the sense of doors shutting and locking behind me that I felt in the boulder ruckle in the Mendips.

  This westerly flank of the ridge is slightly less severe than the eastern gully, though, and I feel comfortable moving down over mixed winter ground, as I have done often in mountains before. It requires probing and prospecting for a viable line: testing gullies, gathering information in the cloud from the way slopes and craglines fall in order to determine which route will dead out in a cliff, and which will take me safely lower.

  I make a long traverse down the flank, losing height wherever I can, using a tongue of snow then crossing a buttress of rock to reach the next tongue, moving with particular care on slick rock and tussocked grass, steering away from what I sense to be a big drop to my south-west.

  After twenty minutes of this tricky work, the cloud begins to thin. Lines show through the white, broken black and grey-green, hard to read except as abstract forms. A roaring builds in the air. A tear in the cloud – and there is the shoreline, 200 feet below. I can see white waves foaming on black boulders, a scatter of driftwood timbers – and, puzzlingly, hundreds of perfect spheres, dark orange in colour.

  Half an hour after that, I make sea-fall. I drop the pack, sit on a rock, take stock. I look south-west along the shore I must now follow for several miles to reach Kollhellaren.