Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  The man feels he has stepped into a fable. The name that will be given to this discovered city is Derinkuyu, meaning ‘Deep Well’. Its excavation is thought to have begun in the fourth century BC, and for more than a thousand years it has provided a place in which persecuted minorities might hide until trouble has passed. From a far chamber of the city, a five-mile-long passage connects this city to another such sunken city, even larger in extent. The man has stumbled into an invisible city – no, a network of invisible cities. There may be more than a hundred such settlements as yet undiscovered, sleeping forgotten beneath the surface of the landscape.

  PART TWO

  Hiding (Europe)

  5

  Invisible Cities

  (Paris)

  The map runs to sixteen laminated foolscap pages, or about ten square feet in area when I tile the pages together. I have been given it on the condition that I do not pass it on. It is not like any map I have ever seen and I have seen some strange maps in my time. The plan of the above-ground city is traced carefully but in pale silver-grey ink, such that if you trick your eyes to read only for the grey, you can discern the outline of this upper city as a spectre-architecture: the faint footprints of apartment blocks and embassies, parks and ornamental gardens, boulevards and streets, the churches, the railway lines and the train stations, all hovering there, intricate and immaterial.

  The map’s real content – the topography it inks in black and blue and orange and red – is the invisible city, the realm out of which over centuries the upper city has been hewn and drawn, block by block. This invisible city follows different laws of planning to its surface counterpart. Its tunnelled streets often kink and wriggle, or run to dead ends. Some of them curl back on themselves like whips. At junctions, three or four tunnel-streets might splay out. There are slender highways running almost the length of the tiled map, from south-west to north-east. There are inexplicably broken grids of streets, or hubs where the spokes of different tunnels meet. Coming off some of the tunnels are chambers, irregular in their outlines and with dozens of small connecting rooms.

  The invisible city exists across multiple levels of depth, each connected to the other by staircases and wells. These sites of juncture between the levels are marked on the map with orange rings (for wells with rung ladders), blue rings (for wells with sheer sides) and segmented dark blue circles (for staircases). Deeper-down layers and systems are shaded in darker inks. I learn to let my eyes go lazy, so that one level swims above another and I can perceive the different strata of the under-city.

  The map’s place names traverse a range of cultural registers, from the classical to the surreal to the military-industrial. The Room of Cubes. The Passage of the Claustrophile. The Boutique of Psychosis. Crossroads of the Dead. The Clinic of the Aliens. The Chamber of Phantoms. The Medusa. The Glazery. The Maze of Montsouris. The Bermudas. The Shelter of the Little Leaves. The Monastery of the Bears. Bunker under the Mountain. The Cabinet of Mineralogy. The School of Mines. The Chamber of Oysters. Ossa Arida. Stairways of the Ossuary. Room Z.

  Affordance is specified on the map in handwritten cursive words: ‘Low’, ‘Quite low’, ‘Very low’, ‘Tight’, ‘Flooded’, ‘Impracticable’, ‘Impassable’. More detail is occasionally given: ‘Humid and unstable region (sometimes flooded)’; ‘Beautiful gallery, vaulted and corbelled’. ‘Chatières’ – cat-flaps – mark a point of lateral transition between tunnel and tunnel, or between tunnel and chamber. Other captions gloss contact-sites between the upper city and the invisible city – ‘Hole to the sky’ – or between levels: ‘Tiny hole in the ground debouching into a dangerous lower level’. Scattered around the map are little inked skulls-and-crossbones, and laconic warnings of danger: ‘Cave-in’; ‘Open well: dangerous’; ‘Collapsing ceiling’.

  Here and there, boxed-out cartouches offer stories of individual sites. A blue compass rose with an orange northwards arrow is laid over an empty section of each page, and each page is given a district name. The typeface is a fine, seriffed font I do not recognize. The overall aesthetic is coolly contemporary, the cartography itself an elegant compression of a hard-to-map region. I admire the work of its anonymous makers. On the cover page of the map, a link is given to an ‘Encyclopedia of the Underground World’. Authorship is attributed only to a collective called ‘Nexus’ – ‘the connection or connections between the parts of a system or a group of entities’.

  ~

  What can I tell you about my time in the invisible city? That it is the longest I have ever gone without seeing sunlight. That one night, or perhaps it is one day, we listen to ‘Dig for Fire’ by the Pixies, laying a phone against the wall of a tunnel so the limestone booms the track back to us and lifts our spirits and makes me smile. That the evening we emerge, the Draconid meteor showers come, showing as silver scratches in the sky.

  And that on the day we first go down into the invisible city, castle-clouds mass over the lowlands to the north of our entrance point. Flat fields, square-steepled church towers, lines of poplars, red-tiled farms. Lowlands, flatlands. My last sight of the sun is a westerly blaze under rain clouds, part hidden by a huge cone of earth of obscure function. To the east the cloud base is low and level. Streamers of rain fall grey on a distant village and the sun sets behind that earthwork.

  Later, we push at dusk through a door in a wall marked ‘Interdit d’entrer’, slip through a hole in a chain-link fence, scramble down a cutting side to a railway line, and crunch along the tracks towards the brick arch of a tunnel. The cutting banks are tangled with acacia trees and wild clematis. Apartment blocks rise above the cutting on both sides, so tall they seem to lean over the space. Once in the railway tunnel we keep between the tracks, because what little light there is glints on the metal and shows us the way, as the floor lights promise to do in aeroplanes that fill with smoke.

  Sounds come from up ahead, and a young woman in a white dress with long blonde hair and a porcelain face emerges from the shadows, walking down the tracks towards us. She doesn’t blink or pause and so we step to left and right of the tracks and let her walk on. She passes through us in silence without breaking her stride and ghosts off towards where, in the far distance, I can just see the tunnel arch of low light through which we have come, fringed brightly with green.

  We crunch on. Ahead in the darkness is a flock of fireflies: soft orange lights bobbing in the black air. The fireflies neither advance nor retreat, and their light causes the brickwork of the tunnel to flit and shine. We draw closer and bodies gradually attach themselves to the lights, and we see that they are not fireflies but devils, for the lights are the twinned, bared flames of carbide lamps mounted on the foreheads of people milling around one side of the tunnel.

  When we are fifty yards from the people with their devil horns of light, I see a woman sit down on the tunnel floor, turn sideways, raise her arms above her head and join her palms like a diver readying to jump – then disappear feet first into the invisible city.

  ~

  Between 1927 and 1940 – the year in which he sought to flee France into the safety of Spain, only to commit suicide in a hotel room in the Pyrenean border village of Portbou – Walter Benjamin compiled one of the most extraordinary city-texts ever written. The Passagen-Werk, as it is known in German – The Arcades Project in English – is a fragmentary, unfinished meditation on the topography, history and humanity of Paris, running to more than a thousand pages at the time of Benjamin’s death. Its form may be compared to a constellation or galaxy, the individual stars of which he drew together over more than a decade, collecting notes, quotations, aphorisms, stories and reflections in dozens of dossiers that he called Konvolute – ‘convolutes’ in English, meaning ‘coils’, ‘twists’, ‘enfoldments’ – each of which was identified by a letter.

  Rather than writing a linear history of Paris, Benjamin sought to create a kaleidoscope, the crystals of which might fall into fresh patterns with each new reader, even each new reading. His book – if i
t can even be called a book, given the extent of its incompletion – was a gigantic, futile, magical attempt at historical comprehension, which understood the city’s past in part to be a collective dream and the city’s structures to possess a metaphysical aura as well as a material presence.

  Throughout The Arcades Project, scenes from Paris’s past flicker back into being. ‘It is more arduous to honour the memory of anonymous beings than that of the renowned,’ Benjamin remarked in the preliminary notes for his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’; the ‘construction of history is consecrated to the memory of the nameless’. An early experiment in what has become known as ‘history from below’, Benjamin’s Paris commemorates these ‘anonymous beings’; it is peopled by quarrymen, prostitutes, convicts, soldiers and shopkeepers, as well as aristocrats, politicians and artists. He made his book from scraps, gleaning it into existence as an archive of the stories of the city’s unsung masses rather than those of its rulers.

  Benjamin himself would be buried in a common and unmarked grave near Portbou, his cause of death given as morphine overdose, the date of his death given as 25 September 1940. The day before his suicide he had walked over the mountains from France, stopping every ten minutes on the ascent to rest his already-strained heart. His companions on the climb had to help him reach the final ridge of the crossing – but from there the party could look down into Spain and the shimmering Mediterranean, which appeared to them like a blue mirage. The next day, however, Benjamin was told that he would not be permitted onwards passage through Spain, and would instead be handed over to local French officials the following day. He knew that this meant his subsequent surrender to Nazi authorities and then, as a Jew, near-certain death. That night he killed himself with morphine tablets he had brought for such a necessity from Marseilles.

  Benjamin is commemorated at Portbou by a simple, powerful monument which itself takes the form of a series of passages. The first of these is a descent into the underland. A long rusted steel tunnel slopes into the coastal bedrock from a small square at the entrance to the town cemetery. The visitor steps into the shadowed mouth of the tunnel as if entering Hades or Avernus. At the end of the staircase, however, is found not darkness but light: a sheet of glass seals the tunnel, preventing onwards progress, but giving a view out to a glittering sea channel where the currents form a whirlpool, its spiral remade with each fresh tide.

  The work that Benjamin left unfinished at the time of his suicide is itself continually new-making. To enter The Arcades Project by one of its thousands of access points is to enter a labyrinth of passages that do not seem ever to repeat their routes. Like the city it describes, it offers a multitude of courses through its levels. It deals not in plots but in patterns, echoes, memory-ghosts and tangled subtexts. Reading it, you come to feel bodiless and boneless – able to traverse time by means of the book’s subtle chatières, its secret passages.

  It is clear that Benjamin’s imagination was strongly drawn to enclosed and underground spaces: the warren of the covered ‘arcades’ themselves, as well as the caverns, crypts, wells and cells that existed beneath Paris. Taken together, these sunken spaces comprise what Benjamin called a ‘subterranean city’, shadow twin to the ‘upper world’, and dream-zone to its conscious mind. ‘Our waking existence is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld,’ he wrote, memorably:

  the realm from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass by these inconspicuous places, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors.

  Benjamin’s obsessive tracing out of this hidden terrain was to him an endeavour of historiography as well as geography that, if completed, might offer a ‘key’ to the ‘underworld’ of the European past. He took as his precursor and partial inspiration in this project the Greek peripatetic Pausanias, who spent years on foot mapping the porous points of the Greek landscape – springs, fissures, gorges – and characterizing them as a system of portals where upper and lower realms interlocked. Benjamin was fascinated by the existence of such portal points in the city. He wrote of the need to ‘make some sign to the world one is leaving’ when a threshold to the underworld was traversed, of the ‘hatchway[s] leading from the surface to the depths’, and of the penates that ‘guard the threshold’ and ‘protect and mark the transitions’.

  The most subterranean of the convolutes in The Arcades Project is Convolute C, which contains Benjamin’s work on both the catacombs and the quarry voids of Paris. It is in Convolute C that Benjamin proposes his vision of Paris’s invisible city, filled with ‘lightning-scored, whistle-resounding darkness’. ‘Paris is built,’ he wrote there, in a passage I have not forgotten since first reading it in my early twenties:

  over a system of caverns . . . this great technological system of tunnels and thoroughfares interconnects with the ancient vaults, the limestone quarries, the grottoes and the catacombs which, since the early Middle Ages, have time and again been entered and traversed.

  ~

  Down in the railway tunnel, we reach the firefly-devils. They are standing around, smoking and talking, and all are wearing carbide lamps: carbide canisters belted at their waists with pipes leading up to the burners strapped to their heads. From the burners hiss two horns of bare orange flame, low in temperature but high in luminosity. They nod diabolic greetings to us, murmuring in French and English.

  Down at track level, where one side of the tunnel begins to rise, is a ragged hole in the ground, just wide enough to admit a person. A few yards to its right I can see the outline of what was once a similar hole, now plugged with fresh-looking concrete.

  I have come to the catacombs with two friends – let us call them Lina and Jay. Jay is a caver keen to extend his explorations into city systems. He is droll, unflappable and strong. Lina is the leader of our group and she has been here many times, sometimes staying down for up to a week at a stretch. She is passionate about the catacombs, especially about preserving and documenting their swiftly changing features through photography and record-keeping. She is a curious combination of tentative above ground and bold below. She wears scarlet lipstick, brightly coloured berets, and she ties her curly brown hair back to keep it out of trouble in the tunnels. Coming into the catacombs seems to offer her a new personality. The invisible city is a place where she can go to be herself, or other than herself. Here Lina is calm, cool and knowledgeable. I feel fortunate to be with her.

  ‘The cataflics came down and filled that one up,’ says Lina, pointing to the plugged hole at track level. ‘So we brought a jackhammer and a generator down and opened up this new one. It’s probably the safest way in right now, but we’ll plan to exit by a manhole, whenever we come out.’

  She gestures back up the tunnel. ‘Take a last look back at the light, because you won’t be seeing the sun again until next week. Let’s go.’

  Lina eases herself feet first into the ragged hole, raises her arms above her head and disappears. Jay does the same. I think of Benjamin’s practice of marking the passage into the under-city, of making ‘some sign to the world one is leaving’, and I look once to the distant arch of light, then lower into the labyrinth.

  ~

  Much of the Île-de-France sits on Lutetian limestone, which accumulated chiefly during the Eocene, when the region was for around 5 million years an area of calm bays and lagoons of seawater. Marine life thrived and died in abundance there, settling on the seabed as silt that was eventually compressed into stone. Lutetian limestone is an excellent building material: ranging from warm grey to caramel yellow in tone, durable and cuttable to a clean edge.

  All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere. Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing. Underground stone-quarrying began in earnest towards the end of the twelfth century, and Parisian limestone grew in demand not just locally but acro
ss France. Lutetian limestone built parts of Notre-Dame and the Louvre; shipped on Seine barges into the river network, it became a major regional export.

  The residue of over 600 years of quarrying is that beneath the south of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than 200 miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, organized into three main regions that together spread beneath nine arrondissements. This network is the vides de carrières – the ‘quarry voids’, the catacombs.

  Quarrying techniques changed surprisingly little over time. Shafts were driven sixty feet or so down to the limestone layers, then tunnels were cut laterally from there, following the strata. Where larger rooms were excavated, pillars of stone were left unquarried to support the ceilings. The standard tunnel was cut to six feet high and three wide: enough to accommodate a man pushing a barrow filled with stone. Dynasties of quarrymen came and went, passing down skills from father to son, extending the maze over centuries. Fatalities were relatively rare as the stone was not prone to collapse – but daily exposure to mineral dust, and the brutal grind of the heavy lifting, led to ruined lungs and bodies.

  For centuries, quarrying was ill-regulated and largely unmapped. Then in the mid eighteenth century, the extensive undermining began to have consequences for the upper city, causing subsidence sinkholes known as fontis that were reputed to be of diabolic origin. The quarry voids had begun to migrate to the surface; the under-city had begun to consume its twin. In 1774 a fonti engulfed, in a matter of seconds, pavements, houses, horses, carts and people. The site of the sinkhole was, of all places, the Rue d’Enfer – the Street of Hell. Several minor cave-ins followed, and panic spread in the city at the unknown extent of the invisible danger.