Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  Black walls of wet granite fall sheer to the sea, which from here look almost impossible to traverse around. Sharp skerries out to sea. A bay of sand, then a bay of rock.

  I am wet through from the gully, and the cold is beginning to soak deep into me. This is probably the most intimidating aboveground landscape in which I have been. It is a place for whatever self-reliance and composure I can muster.

  Scattered all around me on the beach are the spheres. They are, I now see, hollow iron net-floats from fishing trawlers – vast numbers of them, beached and rusted, like alien eggs. Between and around them is a thick wrack of plastic jetsam, repulsive in its presence on this wild coast: plastic bottles, tangles of nylon netting, fish-crate fragments.

  Far to the north-east a patch of blue shows in the clouds, and for a few seconds there is a glitter of light out on the water below. For those seconds I love that blue with all my heart, dream-dive deep into it, drown in its hue.

  ~

  Hard, slow miles along the shore. Boulder fields, scrub forest, crag. Always the cliffs rising sheer to the east, and always the waves falling white to the west.

  A pair of ptarmigan whirr off on silver wings. A snow hare stops among mossy rocks, white on green.

  Bilberries, heather, moss. But no water. No fresh water. Caught between salt to the west and ice to the east, eating snow for a dry mouth.

  Through a bay with rocks big as houses, navigating a canyon maze between them. Pop of wrack, kelp slicks.

  Hail falling.

  A boulder field so densely mossed the rock cannot be felt beneath the feet. Lichen bearding the trunks of stunted birches.

  Sleet falling.

  A bay of black-gold sand, bound by marram, angled from the base of ice-lined cliffs.

  Rain falling, then hail again.

  Forest of birch and willow with a six-foot canopy. Birch bark gleaming in the light, first buds bursting furred on the willows.

  Up and over crag and boulder to a headland shoulder, each step sore now, the wind colder. Pack heavy, head heavy, throat chilled, body older.

  Headland after headland, until there at last to the west is the bay and beyond it, perhaps, the vent of the cave. Green sea over white shell-sand in the bay. Guard-arms of rock curving out and around to either side, the bay water calm, though the outer ocean by the Maelstrom is in chaos.

  Five sharp-coned summits rising steep from the shore to the peak called Hellsegge, each higher than the last. From the top of each flows a white plume of cloud, bent flatter to the east, and there, there, set low in the belly of one is the black vault of a cave.

  ~

  Boom of waves on the offshore reefs. Two sea eagles circling, unmoved by the wind, silent. Ping ping of crow-cries sounding steel off the cliffs. Croak of a raven.

  I reach the north side of the bay below Hellsegge – named on the map as Refsvika Bay – exhausted, excited. It has taken me more than an hour to move each mile over this exceptionally obstructive terrain.

  On raised ground I find what seems a good place to pitch camp. It is exposed if the wind were to swing to the north, but that is its only serious vulnerability. Two big boulders give shelter from the west wind.

  Crucially, a deep pool of rainwater has gathered in a dip in the tundra, with a white gull feather floating at the leeward end. The eastern edges of the pool are clotted with the hailstones that fell earlier. I drink handful after handful until my skull aches from the cold.

  Underfoot is a layer of heather, moss and lichen, soft as a winter duvet. I lie full-length in it and sink down a foot, the heather rising up and leaning over me in a gesture I experience as a sheltering. I lie there for a while, looking up and out, feeling the anxieties of the day flow from me. Late light glints in the west of every raindrop held in the bones of the lichen, beading on the bosses of moss.

  Lying there I sleep, unexpectedly, for half an hour or so. Rain wakes me, a brief squall, then the wind drops almost to nothing for the first time since I set off at dawn. I pitch the tent, and put the whalebone owl in one of its corner pockets, the bronze casket in another. I have hated the casket’s weight that day, resented the burden it has added to my load. When the work of setting up camp is done, I eat Roy’s fishcakes. They are the best food I have ever tasted, no competition.

  In the Celtic Christian tradition, ‘thin places’ are those sites in a landscape where the borders between worlds or epochs feel at their most fragile. Such locations were, for the peregrini or wandering devouts of circa AD 500 to 1000, often to be found on westerly headlands, islands, caves, coasts and other brinks. This place, now, is one of the thinnest I have ever been.

  ~

  That first night at Refsvika is uneasy, broken. The weather turns again. Wind clatters the flysheet. Hail showers blow through and over, spitting on the canvas. Rain falls for hours at a time. I wake for good at five from sleep to sleet; eat, drink water from the feather-pool. The waterfalls have frozen overnight, high on the cliffs.

  There are two bays to cross to reach Kollhellaren, and in the first of them is the remains of a settlement.

  From the mid nineteenth century until the mid twentieth century, a tiny community survived at Refsvika: a handful of houses, a handful of families. There were twenty-two inhabitants in 1900, thirty-eight in 1939. They kept cows, which cropped the grass of the thin belt of land between the cliffs and the coast. The men fished the rich waters (cod in the winter and early spring; pollock and ling at other times) off Helle. When the weather was fierce, which was often, the cows were led into Kollhellaren cave for shelter. The bay was just enclosed enough to allow safe anchorage for fishing boats, even in winter storms. The community had no electricity until the final decade of the settlement, and there was no way in or out except by boat over the Maelstrom, or on foot over the mountains, a considerable journey even in summer. For much of each winter, the inhabitants of Refsvika were locked off from the world beyond.

  Between 1949 and 1951 – like many of the island communities along Norway’s coastline – the people of Refsvika were ‘brought in’: relocated with the aid of government subsidy to larger settlements, in this case to Sørvågen on the lee side of Moskenes Island. When the families left Refsvika, the houses were demolished, and most of their stones and timbers were carried by boat to Sørvågen, where they were used to build new dwellings.

  I follow the land’s curve round from my camp spot. Oystercatchers pipe alarm and scatter at my approach. Five eider ducks ride the swell out near the mouth of the bay, moving as if they are of the sea and not on it. I pass between two boulders that are covered in a yellow lichen I do not recognize.

  Movement in the corner of the eye and I see that there is a family still living in the ruined settlement: four otters, sea otters, two parents and two children, loping uphill through a boulder field, their fur still slick with sea, moving fluidly between rocks, chattering and mewing but not once looking at me. I lean against the northern boulder and watch them travel, watch them flow, watch them pour themselves one by one into a mossed hole between boulders and vanish. I am struck with happiness to have seen them there, at home in their habitat.

  I reach the first of the former houses, surviving now only as a vanishing ground-plan of stones. It reminds me of the derelict crofts and cleared villages I know from the Scottish Highlands and islands. Here, as there, moss and lichen are reclaiming the stones. Here, as there, small straight birch and slender young rowan flourish in the stones’ lee. Walking on, I count the remains of twelve houses. Few are more than a single layer of stones high, and saplings step through the interior of each. I cannot guess at the resilience of the people who lived here for so long with so little. What must it have been like to be part of a community this small, in a place this hostile?

  The bay itself is of coarse white shell-sand, flecked with fragments of whelk and mussel – and strewn with human debris. A doll’s head, two toothbrushes, shards of plastic bottles, pots and hanks of blue rope, tangles of nylon with rusty hooks,
net-webs rolled up with weed.

  Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift. Here that seems right, I think. We ghost the past, we are its eerie.

  The crags are seamed with blue ice-falls. My eye is caught by a thread of green, drawing my sight on. It is a thin path, leading between the stones, running a fine line through the moor grass, joining former doorway to former doorway and then on around the bay, picked out by the bright mosses that grow on it. It is a path made perhaps a century ago, still there as a trace in the land, now kept open by otters and others.

  I add my own feet to the path, thank it for its softness underfoot, for its elegance of route – and for its movement within time.

  ~

  A summer’s night 3,000 years ago. At this latitude, in this season, darkness scarcely exists above ground. Low tide, calm sea. A small group of figures follows the shore, stepping from rock to rock. The cave’s mouth is vast and its lower lip sits close to the waterline.

  The figures pause at its threshold. The distant roar of the Maelstrom. A sea eagle turns overhead, wing-tips near the cliffs that drop sheer to the water. The figures pass one by one into the cave – and the world changes.

  Colour thins out. Yellow of the late sun ebbing. Green is gone, grey rises. Grey of the rock, streaked with brown, streaked with red. Wet sand underfoot. White of the sand. Black of the deeper shadows ahead. Smell of damp stone. A hundred feet into the cliff and the last full light falls on a pale central buttress of rock, around which the cave-space splits. It would be a good canvas – but it is too near the outer world of waves, and eagles, too near time told in its usual ways.

  A passage to the right of the buttress rises straight ahead before ending in stone-fall. A narrow tunnel cuts away into the mountain to the south-west. And a high rift, taller than a human, shaped in cross-section like a teardrop, climbs up into the rock to the northeast, into full dark.

  The figures follow the teardrop rift, moving up between fallen stones.

  Here in the shadows, space and time spill into one another. If life exists it is the slow life of rock, it is the sea’s patient exploration of the mountain’s inside.

  Up where the tunnel wall overhangs them, the figures halt, make their preparations. Rock is to be the painter of rock. In a cup of stone they crush haematite and mix it with spit, earth and rainwater to make a red paste.

  The painting begins.

  Dip of a fingertip and a single sure red line moves across the pale slope of rock, curving down in an arc that echoes the chest and one leg of a figure that is dancing, a figure that is jumping.

  Dip again, reach, draw down in a curve to make the second leg of the dancing figure.

  Dip again, a crossed line for the outstretched arms – and on to the next figure.

  Dip, draw – single sure red lines moving over the slope of the rock, filling the slope of the stone with dancing figures.

  In the shifting light of a burning torch, and the faint steady light of the distant summer sun, the figures on the rock seem here to move – to sway with the play of shadow and flame. These are presences made to exist in the dark but also perhaps to survive it.

  Dip, drag, and a fingertip draws a line through time – to a summer’s day in 1992.

  A young archaeologist named Hein Bjerck is investigating a cave on the Lofoten archipelago’s remote west coast. The weather is fine, the sea is flat-calm – what they call on the islands transtiller, ‘oil-film still’. He and a friend have sailed around in a small boat early that morning. The cave lies under towering sea peaks. Hein and his friend are there because shell fragments found in silt on the cave’s floor have been dated to 33,000 years ago. They want to dig test-pits that might reveal the details of this site’s ancient human history: to see if they can track across this gulf of time something of the hunters to whom the cave gave shelter on this edge.

  They anchor, dinghy to shore, haul up the dinghy and climb grass and rocks to the cave mouth.

  Smell of moss, smell of stone. Pause at the threshold. Roar of waves on far reefs, the distant churn of the Maelstrom. A sea eagle turns overhead, wing-tips near the cliffs that drop sheer to the water.

  The figures pass into the mouth of the cave – and the world changes. The cave twists into the cliff. Time reverses space – the deeper in they get, the younger the cave-space. The journey into darkness is a journey to the present. The sea has taken thousands of years to win each yard of stone.

  Hein tilts his head and the light of his head-torch falls upon the west wall of the cave, slips off it again – but what was that? – flicks up again, searches, settles, finds nothing, searches again, and there, there, is a faint red line too firm and sure to have been authored by the rock itself, moving against the fall of the wall, too counter to gravity to be deposit from run-off, and there, there, is a cross-piece to match it, cutting boldly through the first line, and suddenly there, there, shimmering out of the dark is a red figure, a leaping red figure of a person – and another, and another.

  The discovery, Bjerck will say later, is like ‘a shooting star’ – unexpected, undeserved and magnificent – and it leaves him with a desperate longing to experience such a moment again, once more to be the first person in thousands of years to set eyes on these figures dancing in the dark.

  He begins years of travel up and down the western coasts, sailing and walking to cave after cave, an undertaking that moves from longing to addiction. He finds himself drawn both in his dreams and in his daily life into what he comes to call the ‘cavescape’.

  And he does find more figures, enough to feed his addiction. Red figures, always red, almost always the same simple form, leaping and dancing in the darkness of caves up and down the coasts, familiar in their shape now and yet still utterly mysterious in their making. Each time he finds them his heart leaps too and there is a collapse of time, or a coexistence of multiple kinds of time, as the figures dance and flicker in the low light.

  Dip, drag, and a fingertip draws a line through time, to a late-winter’s day in the now, and a man alone on the bay near the cave.

  I walk the last few hundred yards to the cave mouth on ground falling sharp from cliffs to the sea. No choice but to keep tight to the apron of the cliff, though the faint threat of rockfall here means my pace is hastened. Snow banks below soaked cliffs shining black with water. Bird-cries doubling off the rock. Drop to the sea and up through bare earth and grass to the mouth.

  I pause at the threshold, look back and around. Roar of waves on far reefs, the distant churn of the Maelstrom. A sea eagle turns overhead, wing-tips near the cliffs that drop sheer to the water.

  The scale of the entrance is astounding. A 150-foot-high zawn. The arc of the bay, the maw of the cave: this is an unmistakably performative space, a place for meaning-making. The cave is a slip-rift, an entrance to darkness where time shifts, pauses, folds.

  Quick clicks of water falling, drops curving silver to the eye from the granite far above. Lichen blotching the entrance orange and grey-green. A prickling in the shoulders as I cross the threshold.

  On and down the main rift, pupils widening, the light still here but the colours already falling away. A hundred feet in, the cave becomes cruciform in its architecture. Two side-rifts cut away to left and right, separated by a white bastion of stone against which the space breaks into three. I place a hand flat on the bastion and feel the cold rush fast up the arm.

  The air here thrums, sounded by sea and wind, driven into this hollow so that it turns upon itself. This space has been won by wave, by war.

  I take the left-hand rift, rising up and into the rock. Yellow-white granite to the higher side, leaning away, and leaning over me now is a darker stone, streaked with red and black, broken and veined. A teardrop shape of clear light is visible back at the bastion.

  I am here at last. Such a long, cold journey to reach
this place. I rest against the rock behind me, let my eyes adjust to the shadow, look at the wall of granite ahead.

  But there are no figures on the stone.

  None at all.

  I look again. Stare. Search.

  There is nothing here.

  All this way, all these miles, and the dancers have vanished. Were they ever there at all?

  I lean back, right back against the rock behind, let the stone take my skull’s weight, let the shadow settle into eyes that are tired of looking.

  And when I open my eyes and look again, there is – yes, there, there – the flicker of a line that is not only of the rock’s making. The line is crossed by another, and joined by a third, and there, there, yes, is a red dancer, scarcely visible but unmistakable, a phantom red dancer leaping on the rock. And there is another, and another, here, a dozen or more of them, spectral still but present now, leaping and dancing on the rock, arms outstretched and legs wide, forms shifting and tensing as I blink.

  Their red is rough at its edges, fading back into the rock that made it, blurred by water and condensation, and all of these circumstances – the blur, the low light, my exhaustion, my blinks – are what give the figures their life, make them shift shapes on this volatile canvas in which shadow and water and rock and fatigue are all artists together, and for once the old notion of ghosts seems new and true in this space. These figures are ghosts all dancing together, and I am a ghost too, and there is a conviviality to them, to us, to the thousands of years for which they have been dancing here together.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, my head begins to tingle and then my back and my chest start to shake, and I find myself crying, sobs shuddering my body in the teardrop-shaped rift, far from another human and so close to these generous figures. The dangers of the journey to reach the dancers ebb from me, the joy of their movement ebbs into me and I cry there, surprised and helpless, deep in granite and darkness, weeping for feelings I cannot name.