I caught myself. It was important to stay focused. I didn’t want to drown in a stream of Moscow’s turds and urine. One foot, then two, then three, so slowly I descended the iron ladder until at last the water was right beneath me, rushing past, hurtling past, with only a faint smell of treated sewage reaching up to tickle my nostrils.
Looking down I saw a circle of light: a final word from the world above, from the stars in space and the sodium lamps on earth, before I entered the Underground Planet once and for all: beyond this circle of light, there is only the uttermost darkness.
Dmitri was an experienced caver and had brought his own headlamp with him. I waded through the rushing river, following that weak light, careful, careful, making sure I always planted my feet squarely on something solid, that I didn’t step on anything that slid or shifted about underfoot. I didn’t want a mouthful of sewer.
The riverbed was full of sudden dips: I would plunge in up to my waist, and then with the next step find myself standing in a part so shallow it barely reached above my knees. At last I reached the ledge where Dmitri was sitting and scrutinising his camera equipment. I sat there for a minute, letting my eyes adjust as best as they could to the dark, trying to orient myself. I looked over at the disc of light from above: it was meagre, and yet it was enough to illuminate the walls.
We were in a large concrete tunnel. The water was turbid, muddy, grey, bleak. This was the Neglinka, an ancient river that had for many centuries been a muddy smear on the surface of the city. But two hundred years ago Catherine the Great had encased it in stone and buried it underground. Since then it had followed its subterranean course.
It was the Neglinka, yes, but it was something else besides. It was the portal to the Underground Planet.
I had arrived at last.
Vadim stood in the middle of the Neglinka, the water up to his waist. Suddenly he extended his arms and in a booming voice began declaiming:
‘Oh, Spirits of the Underground, receive the Underground Man…’
I zoned out. I was still adjusting to the fact that I was in a sewer. But I had read about this in Residential Property Shit, so I knew that it was part of his ritual: a respectful address to the subterranean planet itself before venturing into its depths.
But then he did something they hadn’t mentioned in the magazine: he burst into song. Completely unaccompanied, Vadim started belting his way through some twelve-bar blues. He had a good, strong voice, but there was a lot of echo in the tunnel, and of course, the river was very loud, so all I could make out was the end of the chorus: Diggerski Blues.
The song was long. I counted five verses, interspersed with choruses. After that he sang again, and then again – Russian pop tunes, currently on the radio, but with new lyrics, added by him, about life as a Digger in the world below. As he sang, he grew larger and larger, until he was filling the whole tunnel with his voice, his life. Then the excitement got to be too much for him. Obviously he couldn’t hold it in any longer: he stuck out a thumb, put it in his mouth and … blasted out a solo on the air saxophone.
I had to give it to him: he was pretty good on the air sax. He’d clearly had a lot of practice. The solo lasted a whole minute. When it was finished he took his thumb out of his mouth and pointed south: ‘That way leads directly to the Kremlin.’ He grinned. ‘But we’re not going there, of course.’
The next twenty minutes were spent on a photo shoot. Vadim quickly struck up the poses he preferred, just like an old pro: Vadim striding forward manfully, face set in intense concentration, kicking up shitty water as he goes, drenching the lens of Dmitri’s camera; or Vadim climbing up and then back down a small cave to make it appear as though he is descending upside down deep into the Underground Planet; or Vadim holding his chin and looking thoughtful; or Vadim striding forward, flattened palm raised at a right angle to his eyes, as if he is hunting something – a monster perhaps?
Meanwhile I stood there in the streaming sewage, watching, waiting, entirely in darkness.
It was boring.
There was a much smaller tunnel branching off from the large concrete one, so we trudged through the water for about three metres until we reached it. These walls, made of old stone, dated from Catherine the Great’s time. Vadim paused at the entrance and announced that old graveyards periodically emptied their contents into the river, that sometimes corpses could be found floating down these waters; that the tunnel was full of human bones. ‘The Neglinka,’ he declared, eyes wide, ‘is a drain of skeletons!’
He took a step forward, and then froze. I heard a strange, low, weary groan coming from the darkness. Vadim stuck his hand out, signalling for us to stop: ‘Did you hear that? What was it? What was that unearthly sound?? Is it some unnatural beast???’
We stood there for half a minute, waiting. The water rushed by, the smell of treated sewage filled my nostrils. No monster emerged from the darkness to devour us. ‘Ach, we’re all right. It’s probably just wind in the tunnel. It’s safe. We can continue.’
Now there was a new smell, methane, and it was getting stronger, overpowering the aroma of treated sewage. Vadim sloshed forward for about twenty meters, then stopped so Dmitri could take more photos. He went to a sluice, dropped to his knees, and started splashing himself in the face, laughing like a kid playing in the bath. He had his visor down, but even so, there was something alarming about the image of a grown man splashing himself with effluent. Dmitri liked it, however, and so we spent about ten minutes taking variations of this picture, then walked further, following the light from Vadim’s helmet. The tunnel was deep, then shallow. At one stage I slipped and plunged in up to my chest, but managed to correct my balance before I drowned in shit.
Ahead of us a huge pipe intersected with the tunnel, blocking off our path. Under it there was a small island of sand. I looked down. The sand was dotted with crisp bags, bits of cup, a beer bottle or two, and fragments of polystyrene. Vadim dropped to his knees.
‘And here …’ he said, ‘we find that the underground is full of treasure.’
He picked up the handle of a cup, dropped it. Then he picked up a fragment of blue porcelain. ‘Why, this is … fourteenth century … no, fifteenth century … I think it’s Byzantine. And this –’ He picked up a piece of discoloured rock. ‘Is it gold? No, no – I don’t think it is.’
Vadim continued at some length, but Dmitri wasn’t taking any pictures now. Eventually he stopped. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Well we can’t go any further because of this big pipe. So we’ll have to return to the surface. Let’s go.’
We trooped back to the large concrete tunnel. In a few minutes we found ourselves standing under the open manhole cover, looking up through that perfect circle at the luminous night sky. Probably we had walked about twenty metres in all.
The great expedition was over.