Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  The fjord forks into a Y, one arm cutting north-east and the other almost due north. As we cross the mouth of the northern fork, I see in the distance a glacier, the Karale, curving down to the tideline. To its west a smaller glacier is visible. It has retreated back above the water and ends in an arch of ice that I guess to be several hundred yards across. The arch shines with the blue light of old ice, and out of it comes a powerful melt-stream, rushing down to the sea.

  ‘Geo and I once made it to the Karale from Kulusuk in two days by dog sled,’ says Matt. ‘We covered eighty kilometres each day, in desperate conditions. The weather was atrocious, and the sea ice was rotten. Many times Geo or I had to probe ahead of the sled with a harpoon, testing the ice’s resilience so we didn’t go through.’

  We follow the north-eastern arm of the fjord. As we approach the fog-bank at its end, the water thickens with a mash of shrapnel ice and the odd berg sliding out with the tide. A mile short of the fog-bank, under a peak that rears from close to the water’s edge, amid a boulder field of pale erratics, we find enough flat ground for our tents. There is a stream from a snowfield that offers fresh water. Upslope, there are tussocks of bilberry beginning to come into fruit. Directly over the fjord from us rises the sheer wall of a sharp peak, struck by a bolt of the chocolate rock.

  We are within a few yards of the fjord edge and the rock is a continuous sloped curl of gneiss, running for hundreds of yards along the fjord shore, glittering with lines of quartzite and black mica.

  Small blue bergs drift and click offshore.

  ‘I’d like to die and be reborn as a boulder here,’ I say. ‘It’s one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever been.’

  ‘It’ll do us,’ says Matt.

  ~

  An hour short of dusk on the evening of our arrival, the fog-bank disperses to reveal the calving face of the Knud Rasmussen. The face runs the width of the fjord, curving out from the easterly shore to a sharp forwards point, then turning out of sight to the west.

  The sea around the calving face is stained brown with silt, in contrast to the milky green of the outer water. The silt wells up from the melt-streams that are pouring out unseen below the fjord’s surface. Birds gather on the silt blooms, feeding on their richness. They are the only scale-givers at this distance, and they are small as flies. Now and then birds near the face burst up, circle and mingle, then resettle on the water. Ten or twelve seconds later the noise of a minor calving reaches us.

  The calving face gives a transect of the glacier’s depths. Crevasses fissure downwards for hundreds of feet. There are rounded shafts: extensions of the moulin melt-systems. I can also see, even at this distance, the strata of the ice – its sedimentary formation. Whiter, wider bands thin out to blue and layerless ice far below.

  The face is a Gothic city being pushed into the sea. Towers, belfries, chimneys, cathedrals, finials: all are going over the edge. Tunnels, crypts, cemeteries: all will be shattered into bergs. I think of the weight of the upper bodies pressing down in the cemetery of Saints-Innocents, until at last the dead crash through into the spaces around the curtilage of the burial site.

  ‘That calving face is the terminus for ice that fell as snow far up on the Great Ice, tens of thousands of years ago,’ says Helen.

  Where the freshest calvings have happened, the ice is bluest. These marks of rupture seem not scar but revelation. This is the first sunlight that ice has seen for tens of thousands of years.

  A ringed seal surfaces offshore, glances over at us, dips again and disappears in the milky green water. What must a calving event look like to a seal? I wonder. What must it sound like?

  ‘There are certain glaciers that are held to be clearly malign around here,’ says Matt. ‘There’s one that Kulusumi people just won’t go near, because it has a reputation for hostility. If you have to cross near it, you don’t speak, eat or even look at the glacier while making the crossing, because it calves so far below the waterline that it can kill you from beneath without warning. They call this puitsoq, “the ice that comes from below”.’

  In the lee of a boulder above the camp, I find a loose cache of thousands of individual dwarf willow leaves. They are brittle and black-brown, lying to a depth of three or four inches. They must have been accumulating there for years, gathered by the wind, frozen each winter and thawed again each summer. The vein lines are still visible on each leaf. I pick up a handful, rustle them through my fingers. They are weightless and sharp. In this dry air, with so little topsoil, deterioration rates of organic matter are decelerated. Time moves variously in this landscape, from the catastrophic suddenness of calving events to the patient process of leaf drift.

  A berg glides past us, shaped like the eaves of a house. Seventeen gulls are perched on its ridge, all turned to windward.

  ~

  Living by the Knud Rasmussen is like moving in next door to a thunderstorm. Each day we climb and explore further into the surrounding landscape. Each evening we return to our tents by the glacier. All day and all night the ice bellows, cries, echoes. There is no apparent connection between the air temperature and the activity of the calving face. Some of the loudest roars come in the dead of night, the coldest time, rousing us from our sleep with fears of polar bears.

  ‘You think this is dynamic?’ says Matt one morning. ‘The Helheim glacier near Semersooq is now flowing into the sea at around thirty-five metres a day. That’s one of the fastest glaciers in the world.’

  The glacier is named after the underworld of the dead in Norse mythology: Helheim, ‘the Realm of Hell’, ‘the Hidden Place’, buried beneath the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil. Our word ‘hell’, like the Icelandic word helvíti, comes from deep in language history: from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic noun *xaljo or *haljo, meaning’underworld’, ‘concealed place’, itself from a Proto-Indo-European root *kel- or *kol-, meaning at once ‘to cover’, ‘to conceal’ and ‘to save’.

  Around Greenland, some glaciers are retreating as they melt, while the flow rate of others is increasing, causing the upper ice to diminish. The softening ice cap is estimated to have lost around a trillion net tons in only four recent years. Lubricated by the moulins, many more tons of ice and meltwater are pouring into the fjords and the outer ocean, helping global sea levels to creep up, increment by increment.

  One hot morning on a rest day, I lie on the slabs of gneiss where they run into the tideline, watching the ice through narrowed eyes, hoping I might see a calving event rather than only hear its aftereffects. But nothing moves that morning. I close my eyes and listen to the landscape – listen in a way I rarely do, letting each sound play and single itself out from the weave like a bright thread, trying to infer its source from its sound. I am trying to hear this landscape’s undersong – the substrate sounds of a given place, the ambient murmur that goes often unheard or at least unlistened-for.

  We cannot see behind ourselves, but we can hear behind ourselves. From all directions, sound flows in.

  Glittering gull cries.

  Crack of bergs beached on the tideline nearby, as the warmth of the sun pops ancient air bubbles.

  Crockery clink of ice shards in the water, the lapping hush of slush-ice nudged by the incoming tide, the sloshing wallow of a bigger berg rolling as melt or current shifts its weight.

  A waterfall on the far side of the fjord, crashing from a high cirque in a steady rush of sound, like corn being poured from a hopper.

  Below it all, below even this undersong, a bedrock of something like white noise that I cannot granulate with my human ears – a distant hiss or hum that makes the finer sounds audible.

  Bang! A gun-blast rips through the fragile weave and echoes back off the walls and water of the fjord. I jerk around. Matt is standing on a tideline rock. He fires each of the weapons twice in turn into the fjord to clear the barrels. Bang! Bang! His shoulder jerks back with each recoil. Water sprays up as if a big fish has breached. The reports are shockingly loud. The sound of each shot ta
kes fifteen or twenty seconds to dissipate.

  ~

  It happens that afternoon when we are all together, standing near the tents and talking inconsequentially, enjoying the lethargy of the rest day.

  A shot-like snap begins it, whip-cracking across the fjord and the mountain walls.

  ‘A hunter?’ I say.

  But it isn’t a hunter, it is the glacier, and the sound of the crack marks the fall of a bus-sized block of ice from high on the calving face. We do not see it fall but we see it swill back up and bob.

  Without that outrider of the main event, we might have missed what followed – an event that, as Helen puts it later, ‘rarely occurs under witness’.

  ‘There!’ shouts Bill, but we are all already looking there, where the first block fell, for it seems that a white freight train is driving fast out of the calving face of the glacier, thundering laterally through space before toppling down towards the water, and then the white train is suddenly somehow pulling white wagons behind it from within the glacier, like an impossible magician’s trick, and then the white wagons are followed by a cathedral – a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural sideways-collapsing edifice – and then a whole city of white and blue follows the cathedral as we shout and step backwards involuntarily at the force of the event, even though it is occurring a mile away from us, and we call out to each other in the silence before the roar reaches us, even though we are only a few yards from each other, and then all of the hundreds of thousands of tons of that ice-city collapse into the water of the fjord, creating an impact wave forty or fifty feet high.

  And then something terrible happens, which is that out of the water where the city has fallen there up-surges, rising – or so it seems from where we are standing – right to the summit of the calving face itself, a black shining pyramid, sharp at its prow, thrusting and glistening, made of a substance that has to be ice but looks like no ice we have seen before, something that resembles what I imagine meteorite metal to be, something that has come from so deep down in time that it has lost all colour, and we are dancing and swearing and shouting, appalled and thrilled to have seen this repulsive, exquisite thing rise up that should never have surfaced, this star-dropped berg-surge that has taken three minutes and 100,000 years to conclude.

  Twenty minutes later and the fjord is calm again.

  The tide swills gently in rock pools. Lap of water on gneiss, pop of melting ice, sun glittering on the margins of the water, sedge-grass flicking in the wind.

  The obscenity might never have occurred.

  The berg has settled in the water as a sloping blue table, hundreds of square feet in area. Gulls land on this new territory in their dozens, shake out their wings, tuck one leg up into their breast feathers for warmth, hunker down.

  I startle a single sanderling from a fold of bronze gneiss.

  The next day at the tideline I find a small iceberg, rounded and dark blue, stranded in a rock pool. It is a relic of the dark star. I am just able to lift it. I carry it in both arms, cradling it, calling to the others. It numbs my hands and chest. It feels far heavier than it should. I stumble uphill towards the camp and place it on top of a boulder by the tents.

  The sun shines through it. Air bubbles inside it show as silver: wormholes, right-angle bends, incredible zigzags and sharp layers.

  That night an Arctic fox comes to our camp, a playful blue shadow.

  The little berg takes two days to melt. It leaves a stain on the dark rock that won’t vanish.

  ~

  Ice, like oil, has long disobeyed our categories. It slips, slides, will not stay still. It confuses concepts, it confounds attempts to make it mean. In the 1860s, when glaciology was emerging as a science, the discourse of glaciers was riven by the dispute over whether ice should be classified as liquid, solid, or some other kind of colloid-like matter altogether.

  It is unsurprising that ice should have proved so ungraspable to human habits of meaning-making, for ice is a shape-shifter and a state-shifter. It flies, it swims and it flows. It changes colour like a chameleon. Ice crystals at 30,000 feet set halos and parhelia shining around the sun and the moon. Ice falls as snow, as hail, as sleet; it crystallizes as feather and it gleams as mirror. Ice erases mountain ranges, but preserves air bubbles for millennia and is tender enough to bear a human body unriven for centuries. It is silent, and it creaks and thunders. It sharpens eyesight, and it breeds mirages.

  We are now experiencing ice as a newly lively substance. For centuries, the polar regions were conventionally imagined as inert: the ‘frozen wastes’ of the north and south. Now, in the context of a warming planet, ice has become active again in our imaginations and landscapes. The ‘frozen’ poles are melting and the consequences of their melting are global. The Russian expression for ‘permafrost’, вечная мерзлота, translates as ‘the eternally frozen ground’ – the name looks increasingly inappropriate. Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic are now front-line territories, in which the fate of ice will shape planetary futures.

  A ‘glacial pace’ used to mean movement so slow as to be almost static. Today’s glaciers, however, surge, retreat, vanish. The recession of Himalayan glaciers threatens the livelihoods and lives of more than a billion people in Asia, who depend on the water that is seasonally stored and released by these ice rivers. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is breaking up, disassembling itself into bergs and sheets that drift unbiddably. Mapping cannot keep up with the shrinkage of the sea ice. Globe-makers can no longer confidently cap their globes with white. Ice has become dirty, in the sense of Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.

  In indigenous cultures that live adaptably in close contact with ice, it has always been an ambiguous entity, and the stories told about glaciers have often blurred boundaries between human and non-human activity. Glaciers appear in these stories as actors – aware and intentful, sometimes benign and sometimes malevolent. In Athapaskan and Tlingit oral traditions from south-western Alaska, for instance, as the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank documents, glaciers are both ‘animate (endowed with life) and animating (giving life to) landscapes they inhabit’. In languages from this region, special verbs indicate the living power of what in English might be classified as passive landscape presences. These verbs recognize in the ice both its actions and, vitally, its powers to act. Linguistic anthropologists refer to the ‘enlivening’ influence of such verbs: their deep-level acknowledgement of a sentient environment which both listens and speaks recalls Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wish for a ‘grammar of animacy’ that might acknowledge the autonomy of plant life.

  Over the years of my time travelling on or near glaciers, I have read in translation dozens of the stories told about glaciers and ice across northern indigenous cultures. Many of them concern the dangerous underland of ice – a kingdom into which one might fatally plunge. A ubiquitous story tells, with regional variation, of a traveller ‘falling through ice’ (either through thin sea ice or into a crevasse) who is assumed to be dead, but then surfaces from this netherworld bearing tales of visions, hardship and survival. It is almost exactly the sequence of events and motifs that recurs in the most famous modern Western glacier-story of the underland, Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void. All of these stories relate to miraculous resurrections from depth. We had witnessed our own ‘surfacing’ on the day of the calving – except that it was ice itself, rather than any human agent, that had been to depth and then returned to the light.

  In the days that follow the calving I reflected often on our response to it – the way our shouts turned from awe to something like horror as that shining black pyramid lurched up out of the water, sea streaming from it. My stomach lurched too as the ice came up: the sublime displaced by a more visceral response to this alien display. I have often sensed the indifference of matter in the mountains and found it exhilarating. But the black ice exhibited another order of withdrawnness,
one so extreme as to induce nausea. Camus called this property of matter its ‘denseness’. Confronted by matter in its raw forms, he wrote, ‘strangeness creeps in’:

  perceiving that the world is ‘dense’, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman . . . the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.

  I recognized a version of that ‘denseness’ – that ‘absurdity’ – in Greenland to a degree that was new to me. Here was a region where matter drove language aside. Ice left language beached. The object refused its profile. Ice would not mean, nor would rock or light, and so this was a weird realm, in the old, strong sense of weird – a terrain that could not be communicated in human terms or forms. I thought back to Merlin, to the fungi and their buried kingdom of the grey – that shivering, slithering underland into which he had helped me look.

  Greenland was a place where matter leaked through the usual screens. When the black-star calving had happened, the leak had turned into a torrent. Later I would find that torrent again, far down in the blue light of the moulin.

  ~

  Big climbing days of glacier and peak come and go. The willow leaves turn from yellow to orange. One morning we leave our tents to find a first frost, starring the earth in its hollows.

  We try the nameless mountain that rises behind the camp. From below, foreshortened, it seems a single slabbed face, thousands of feet high. It reveals itself to be more involved, though: abundant in features hidden from beneath. It has a glacial corrie at its heart. It has set-back shoulders that hold little lakes and permanent snowfields.

  We climb it in seven pitches over seven hours, Helen M leading strongly, with scrambling and way-picking on mellower ground between the pitches. In the closed couloirs and on the slabs, I feel no nerves. On the ridges, fear squeezes my heart.