We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it, caught in the shining jaws of a limestone bedding plane first formed on the floor of an ancient sea.
The underland keeps its secrets well. Only in the last twenty years have ecologists succeeded in tracing the fungal networks that lace woodland soil, joining individual trees into intercommunicating forests – as fungi have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. In China’s Chongqing province, a cave network explored in 2013 was found to possess its own weather system: ladders of stacked mist that build in a huge central hall, cold fog that drifts in giant cloud chambers far from the reach of the sun. A thousand feet underground in northern Italy, I abseiled into an immense rotunda of stone, cut by a buried river and filled with dunes of black sand. Traversing those dunes on foot was like trudging through a windless desert on a lightless planet.
Why go low? It is a counter-intuitive action, running against the grain of sense and the gradient of the spirit. Deliberately to place something in the underland is almost always a strategy to shield it from easy view. Actively to retrieve something from the underland almost always requires effortful work. The underland’s difficulty of access has long made it a means of symbolizing what cannot openly be said or seen: loss, grief, the mind’s obscured depths, and what Elaine Scarry calls the ‘deep subterranean fact’ of physical pain.
A long cultural history of abhorrence exists around underground spaces, associating them with ‘the awful darkness inside the world’, in Cormac McCarthy’s phrase. Fear and disgust are the usual responses to such environments; dirt, mortality and brutal labour the dominant connotations. Claustrophobia is surely the sharpest of all common phobias. I have often noticed how claustrophobia – much more so than vertigo – retains its disturbing power even when being experienced indirectly as narrative or description. Hearing stories of confinement below ground, people shift uneasily, step away, look to the light – as if words alone could wall them in.
I still remember as a ten-year-old reading the account, in Alan Garner’s novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, of two children escaping danger by descending the mining tunnels that riddle the sandstone outcrop of Alderley Edge in Cheshire. Deep inside the Edge, the embrace of the stone becomes so tight that it threatens to trap them:
They lay full length, walls, floor and roof fitting them like a second skin. Their heads were turned to one side, for in any other position the roof pressed their mouths into the sand and they could not breathe. The only way to advance was to pull with the fingertips and to push with the toes, since it was impossible to flex their legs at all, and any bending of the elbows threatened to jam the arms helplessly under the body. [Then Colin’s] heels jammed against the roof: he could move neither up nor down and the rock lip dug into his shins until he cried out with the pain. But he could not move . . .
Those passages took cold grip of my heart, emptied my lungs of air. Rereading them now, I feel the same sensations. But the situation also exerted a powerful narrative traction upon me – and still does. Colin could not move and I could not stop reading.
An aversion to the underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ a ‘downwards violence’. A bias against depth also runs through mainstream conventions of observation and representation. In his book Vertical, Stephen Graham describes the dominance of what he calls the ‘flat tradition’ of geography and cartography, and the ‘largely horizontal worldview’ that has resulted. We find it hard to escape the ‘resolutely flat perspectives’ to which we have become habituated, Graham argues – and he finds this to be a political failure as well as a perceptual one, for it disinclines us to attend to the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal that support the surface world.
Yes, for many reasons we tend to turn away from what lies beneath. But now more than ever we need to understand the underland. ‘Force yourself to see more flatly,’ orders Georges Perec in Species of Spaces. ‘Force yourself to see more deeply,’ I would counter. The underland is vital to the material structures of contemporary existence, as well as to our memories, myths and metaphors. It is a terrain with which we daily reckon and by which we are daily shaped. Yet we are disinclined to recognize the underland’s presence in our lives, or to admit its disturbing forms to our imaginations. Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving.
We are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an ongoing occurrence experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of joint – and so is place. Things that should have stayed buried are rising up unbidden. When confronted by such surfacings it can be hard to look away, seized by the obscenity of the intrusion.
In the Arctic, ancient methane deposits are leaking through ‘windows’ in the earth opened by melting permafrost. Anthrax spores are being released from reindeer corpses buried in once-frozen soil, now exposed by erosion and warmth. In the forests of Eastern Siberia a crater is yawning in the softening ground, swallowing tens of thousands of trees and revealing 200,000-year-old strata: local Yakutian people refer to it as a ‘doorway to the underworld’. Retreating Alpine and Himalayan glaciers are yielding the bodies of those engulfed by their ice decades before. Across Britain, recent heatwaves have caused the imprints of ancient structures – Roman watchtowers, Neolithic enclosures – to shimmer into view as crop-marks visible from above: aridity as X-ray, the land’s submerged past rising up in parched visitation. Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.’ In north-west Greenland an American Cold War missile base, sealed under the ice cap fifty years ago and containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical contaminants, has begun to move towards the light. ‘The problem,’ writes the archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure, outlive us, and come back at us with a force we didn’t realise they had . . . a dark force of “sleeping giants”’, roused from their deep time slumber.
‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink.
There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd – crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin. The extinction of a species or an ecosystem scarcely matters in the context of the planet’s cycles of erosion and repair.
We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.
When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.
~
The oldest of underland stories concerns a hazardous descent into darkness in order to reach someone or something consigned to the realm of the dead. A variant to the Epic of Gilgamesh – written around 2100 BC in Sumeria – tells of such a descent, made by Gilgamesh’s servant Enki to the ‘netherworld’ on behalf of his master to retrieve a lost object. Enki sails through storms of hailstones that strike him like ‘hammers’, his boat trembles from the impact of waves that attack it like ‘butting turtles’ and ‘lions’, but still he reaches the netherworld. There, however, he is promptly imprisoned – only to be freed when the young warrior Utu opens a hole to the surface and carries Enki back out on a lofting breeze. Up in the sunlight Enki and Gilgamesh embrace, kiss, and talk for hours. Enki has not retrieved the lost object, but he has brought back precious news of vanished people. ‘Did you see my little stillborn children who never knew existence?’ asks Gilgamesh desperately. ‘I saw them,’ answers Enki.
Similar stories recur throughout world myth. Classical literature records numerous instances of what in Greek were known as the katabasis (a descent to the underland) and the nekyia (a questioning of ghosts, gods or the dead about the earthly future), among them Orpheus’ attempt to retrieve his beloved Eurydice from Hades, and Aeneas’ voyage – led by the Sibyl, protected by the Golden Bough – to seek counsel with the shade of his father. The recent rescue of the Thai footballers from their lonely chamber far inside a mountain was a modern katabasis: the story seized global attention in part because it possessed the power of myth.
What these narratives all suggest is something seemingly paradoxical: that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation. Our common verb ‘to understand’ itself bears an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it. ‘To discover’ is ‘to reveal by excavation’, ‘to descend and bring to the light’, ‘to fetch up from depth’. These are ancient associations. The earliest-known works of cave art in Europe – taking the form of painted ladders, dots and hand stencils on the walls of Spanish caves – have been dated to around 65,000 years ago, some 20,000 years before Homo sapiens are believed to have first arrived in Europe from Africa. Neanderthal artists left these images. Long before anatomically modern humans reached what is now Spain, writes one of the archaeologists responsible for the dating of this art, ‘People were making journeys into the darkness.’
Underland is a story of journeys into darkness, and of descents made in search of knowledge. It moves over its course from the dark matter formed at the universe’s birth to the nuclear futures of an Anthropocene-to-come. During the deep time voyage undertaken between those two remote points, the line about which the telling folds is the ever-moving present. Across its chapters, in keeping with its subject, extends a subsurface network of echoes, patterns and connections.
For more than fifteen years now I have been writing about the relationships between landscape and the human heart. What began as a wish to solve a personal mystery – why I was so drawn to mountains as a young man that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them – has unfolded into a project of deep-mapping carried out over five books and around 2,000 pages. From the icy summits of the world’s highest peaks, I have followed a downwards trajectory to what must surely be a terminus, exploring the storeys of place that lie beneath the surface. ‘The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned,’ wrote William Carlos Williams in a late poem. It has taken me until the second half of my life to understand something of what Williams meant. In the underland I have seen things I hope I will never forget – and things I wish I had never witnessed. What I thought would be my least human book has become, to my surprise, my most communal. If the image at the centre of much that I have written before is that of the walker’s placed and lifted foot, the image at the heart of these pages is that of the opened hand, extended in greeting, compassion or the making of a mark.
I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright’. The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the cave walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from within the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.
~
Shortly before beginning the journeys recounted here, I was given two objects. Each came with a request, and it was a condition of the gift of these objects that I agreed to fulfil those requests.
The first of the objects is a double-cast bronze casket the size of a swan’s egg, which sits heavy in the hand. It is a kist and what it contains is toxic. Its maker wrote his demons down on a sheet of paper: his hatreds, fears and losses, the pain he had inflicted on others and the pain others had inflicted on him – all that was worst in his mind. Then he burned the paper and sealed the ashes inside the casket. Then he double-cast the casket, giving it a second layer of bronze to increase the strength of the containment. That outer layer of bronze became pitted and encrusted in the process of its casting, such that it seemed to resemble either the surface of a planet or the weather above it. Then he drove four iron nails through the casket’s centre, cutting off their ends and filing them flush. It is an exceptionally powerful object, which possesses a ritual intensity of creation. It could have been fashioned at any point in the past 2,500 years, but it was made only recently.
I was given the casket on the condition that I disposed of it in the deepest or most secure underland site that I reached – a place from which it could never return.
The second of the objects is an owl cut from a slice of whalebone. It is a talisman and what it connotes is magic. The minke whale from which the owl was taken had washed up dead on the shoreline of a Hebridean island. One of its rib bones was smoothed into cross-sections, each less than half an inch thick and six inches high. One of those cross-sections was then cut into the form of an owl with four bold strokes of a blade: two strokes for the eyes, and two for the wing lines. It is an exceptionally beautiful object, which possesses an Ice Age simplicity of making. It could have been fashioned at any point in the past 20,000 years, but it was made only recently.
I was given the owl on the condition that I carried it with me at all times in the underland, to help me see in the dark.