Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  Never again shall I celebrate such a Mass in a setting that was so closely united to the Divine Sacrament . . . In this vast cave we must have looked more like insects than human beings. And yet – our souls were on fire. We were so far from our surroundings, or if we sensed them at all it was because they had lost something of their material quality and become vast and luminous.

  Loubens’s avid striving after underland knowledge is not, of course, a recent invention. Classical sources record the use of pine cones or wooden cups as marker objects – floated into disappearing streams and rivers in the karst, their reappearance watched for elsewhere – in order to trace the submerged flow-patterns of the landscape. It is in the modern period, though, that these practices of deep-mapping have reached their most extreme and hazardous expressions.

  In the Picos de Europa of northern Spain, forty years of expeditions have been spent trying to forge the connections that would result in the completion of the Ario System, which in theory might extend almost 6,000 vertical feet. The project – shared across generations of cavers from many countries – is known as ‘The Ario Dream’, and its aim is to create the world’s deepest through-trip, whereby one might abseil into a chasm amid mountain peaks, and then emerge several days later into the twilight of a gorge. The Ario System is so extensive that its exploration requires expedition-style caving, where base camps and advance camps are established far underground as sites where equipment can be cached and sleep can be taken in tents – just as mountaineers attempting Everest move between successive camps while they gain height. Cave-diving skills are key to the Ario expeditions, for the further reaches of the system are flooded. Divers push on into the blackness with fine margins for error – often turned back by chokes or deadings-out – entering unmapped areas of the mountain’s interior that are referred to, in an echo of nineteenth-century imperial cartography, as ‘blank space’. George Mallory famously answered the question of ‘Why climb Everest?’ with ‘Because it’s there.’ Extreme cavers jokingly modify Mallory’s answer when asked why they risk their lives for an ultra-deep cave system, with the words ‘Because it’s not there.’

  Among the driving ambitions for many of these speleonauts are connection and completion: to prove through-flow and join-up. In The Darkness Beckons, Martyn Farr tells the story of the four years that the cave divers Geoff Yeadon and Oliver ‘Bear’ Statham spent trying to connect Kingsdale Master Cave and Keld Head in the Yorkshire Dales: two chambers a mile and a quarter apart, linked by a series of submerged passages. The route became known as the Underground Eiger in recognition of its severity. Visibility in the very cold water was poor due to its silt content, and there were few air pockets where the men could surface to swap oxygen cylinders. Early in their exploration of the system, Yeadon and Statham found – and recovered – the body of a diver who had died there five years earlier. The two men finally completed the traverse successfully on 16 January 1979 – a remarkable achievement in desperate conditions. Eight months later Bear Statham took his own life in his pottery workshop in Sedburgh. He put on a full-face diving mask and regulator, connected it up to the gas supply for his kiln, then lay down on his sofa and died.

  Many of the longest submerged systems are entered via modest pools that rise in open ground. There is one such system entered via a small lake called the Blautopf in Germany; another in central Norway known as the Plura that has claimed the lives of two divers. And in the Northern Cape of South Africa, on the fringe of the Kalahari Desert, is Boesmansgat, or Bushman’s Hole. There, what seems little more than a pond offers entrance to a flooded chamber 885 feet deep.

  Fewer than twelve people in history have dived below a depth of 790 feet using scuba equipment. Such ultra-diving exerts an awful toll on the bodies of those who survive, including lung damage and hearing loss, and the fatality rate among those attempting such depths is high. In 1994 a young cave diver called Deon Dreyer died deep in the Boesmansgat system. His body was not located until ten years later, embedded in silt on the chamber floor. Painstaking plans were made to retrieve his corpse, in order to bring closure for his grieving family. But the lead diver on the retrieval dive, a British man called Dave Shaw, became tangled in his own safety cord while seeking to place Dreyer’s body in the silk bag he had brought down with him for that purpose. Shaw’s breathing and heart rate increased as his anxiety rose. Dreyer’s neck had become softened by his decade in the water, and when Shaw sought to move Dreyer’s head, it loosened from his body, then detached completely and floated past Shaw, turning to gaze at him through blackened goggles – the moment caught on Shaw’s head camera. Shortly afterwards Shaw himself succumbed to asphyxiation brought about by carbon dioxide build-up.

  Four days after Shaw’s death, divers returned to the cave. To their amazement, they found Shaw’s body floating near the roof of the chamber, with his torch hanging beneath him, still on. Illuminated in its beam was Dreyer’s headless corpse. Shaw had – after death – achieved what he set out to do and retrieved the body of his predecessor from the blackness.

  For years I could only understand these pursuits of shadowed water, blind rivers and terrible depths as fierce versions of the death drive – fiercer even than what drove the most fearless mountaineers. The language of extreme caving is often openly mortal and tacitly mythic: stretches of passageway ‘dead out’, one reaches ‘terminal sumps’ and ‘chokes’, the furthest-down regions are known as ‘the dead zone’. But over time I saw that – as with extreme mountaineering – there was another aspect to the thanatos at work. Divers and cave divers often describe their experiences in terms of ecstasy and transcendence. ‘I have had such beautiful moments in the water,’ says the British diver Don Shirley, who dived below 790 feet in Boesmansgat. ‘You are absolutely, completely in a void, like being in outer space . . . You get to the point where there is no God, no past, no future, just now and the next millisecond. It’s not a threatening environment – just total serenity.’

  The free-diver Natalia Molchanova similarly described her time below the surface as self-dissolving. Molchanova was one of the first people to free-dive the Blue Hole, a 390-foot-deep sinkhole in the Red Sea containing ‘the Arch’, an opening in the sinkhole’s wall that runs through to open ocean. More than a hundred free-divers and scuba divers have allegedly died in the Blue Hole, drawn into its depths by complex longings. Molchanova dived the Blue Hole on a single breath, safely: an astonishing achievement. But on an August day in 2015, she dived recreationally off the coast of Ibiza to between 100 and 130 feet – a shallow dive for someone of her rare abilities and experience. She did not resurface, and her body has never been recovered.

  ‘I have perceived non-existence,’ Molchanova wrote in a poem called ‘The Depth’:

  The silence of eternal dark,

  And the infinity.

  I went beyond the time,

  Time poured into me And we became Immovable.

  I lost my body in the waves

  . . . Becoming like its blue abyss

  And touching on the oceanic secret.

  Only once in the course of my years in the underland did I approach a flooded labyrinth, and there I had an experience that helped me comprehend a fraction of the serenity of which Shirley spoke. The labyrinth ran under the centre of Budapest, on the Buda side of the river, and I entered it in the company of a Hungarian geologist, caver and climber called Szabolcs Leél-Őssy. Budapest is built in part on limestone, and its invisible city contains both mine networks and cave systems caused by the upwelling of warm, dissolving water. On a hot summer night with insects singing from the street trees, Szabolcs and I slipped through a gap in a heavy steel gate, unlocked a door set into bedrock, followed a tunnel that had been blasted into the limestone, and emerged into a flooded cave chamber below the city. The chamber – which was more than 450,000 cubic feet in volume – was the access point to a submerged network of tunnels below the city. It was from here that, for years, cave divers had set out to map Budapest�
��s underwater maze.

  Szabolcs and I lowered ourselves into the water at the edge of the chamber, and we floated there convivially for a night-hour in that lost space below the city. When I recall the experience now it feels dream-like. The water, rising as it did from far within the earth, was a steady 27°C. I had the sense of great depth opening below and around me in the darkness, but felt no vertigo, only occasional swoops of the spirit. The water was uncannily clear and my limbs moved in it as though they were another’s.

  ‘Here,’ said Szabolcs at one point, ‘I am at peace within the rock.’

  Our conversation was occasional. There were long periods of silence. I have rarely felt more relaxed than in that amniotic space.

  ‘Before we leave, you should see the true entrance to the maze,’ said Szabolcs. He sculled across to a distant wall of the chamber. I followed. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Sink, and open your eyes. The water will not harm them.’

  I took a series of deep breaths, lifted my arms above my head, joined my legs, expelled the air from my lungs in a rush of bubbles, and slowly sank. At a depth of ten feet or so, the weight of water building on skull and skin, I fanned my hands to keep myself steady, and opened my eyes. Pressure pushed gently against my eyeballs. Ahead of me in the water was the black mouth of a tunnel entrance, leading away into the rock, more than wide enough to engulf me, its stone edges smooth. The pull of the mouth through that eerily clear water was huge. Just as standing on the edge of a tower one feels drawn to fall, so I experienced a powerful longing to swim into the mouth and on, until my air ran beautifully out.

  ~

  High on the Carso, deep in beech woods: Lucian and I approach the entry to the Abyss of Trebiciano on foot through the forest. Cicadas hiss in the acacias. Long-tailed birds I cannot name cut over the path. My body crackles with nerves about what lies ahead, beneath. I am also fascinated by what I might see and where I might reach. In one pocket I have the whalebone owl. In the other I have the bronze casket, in case the abyss discloses itself as the place for its disposal.

  Sergio is waiting for us in the woods. We smell him before we see him: tobacco smoke in the air, and then Sergio himself, leaning up against the wall of a hut. I guess him to be around seventy years old. He is short and broad-shouldered, he wears a flat cap and smokes a briarwood pipe, and he is both gatekeeper and guide to the abyss.

  Sergio first descended the abyss as a young man growing up in the post-war Carso. That experience gripped him, and the river at the base of the abyss became his lifelong obsession. For fifty years he has been involved in the mapping and exploration of the Timavo.

  ‘How many times have you been down the abyss?’ I ask Sergio.

  He shrugs, considers the question. ‘Maybe . . . 400 times?’

  ‘Why?’

  The question puzzles Sergio. He thinks for a while. Lucian helps translate his answer.

  ‘For many years, there was nothing else to do. Also, for eighty years after its discovery in 1841, this was the deepest known cave in the world. Now we study it, come to know the river and its . . . behaviour. Our work here is not considered important by the authorities or by scientists, but still we go on. Here in the abyss we make . . . romantic science.’

  He smiles. Then he says, ‘Allora,’ and leads us into a hut.

  On the walls are nineteenth-century aquatints of the region, and orange caving suits hung on pegs. Banks of monitoring instruments bleep quietly to themselves. Sergio unrolls a cross-section sketch-map of the Carso, flattening it on the desk. My chest tightens as I look at it. It shows the path of the Timavo under the limestone, from the point at which it cuts into the earth at Škocjan, to its outflow in the Adriatic. The abyss is marked, and Sergio follows it with his finger: a twirling, jinking line dropping down and down through the stone to reach what looks like a substantial chamber, within which runs the Timavo.

  ‘Allora,’ says Sergio. He is a man of few words, and most of those words, I learn, are allora: ‘now’, ‘let us begin’.

  We leave the hut and walk through woods of sweet chestnut and beech. It is cool in the shade. We climb to the rim of a wide, earthed-up doline. The doline is filled with spindly trees from its base, some of them forty feet high. They have few radial branches and their canopies form a sea-surface far above us, casting everything in green light that reminds me of Epping’s pollard groves. From the doline’s rim, a path winds down past blocks of limestone, to a brick hut at the lowest point of the crater. The hut is built over the entrance to the abyss.

  It is, Sergio explains, relatively new. One day after a period of heavy rain some years previously, he came to the doline to find the previous hut in pieces. All four walls had been flattened by a blast, and the roof had been blown off. At first he thought someone – an opposing caving club, perhaps – had detonated a bomb inside the hut. Then he realized the true cause. The Timavo had risen with such speed that the spate-water, ascending the doline faster than the air above could escape it, had caused the hut to act as a pressure prison until, like an overfilled balloon, it had simply burst.

  Sergio opens the hut door, and shows me to what seems like a shower cubicle, but with no visible shower head. The flooring is brown textured tiles, there because at times the Timavo still comes boiling up this far in its fury. The tiles make the clean-up job easier.

  There is a hatch set into the floor, close to one wall.

  ‘Allora,’ says Sergio, lifting the hatch.

  My stomach flips. It is another door into the dark, another portal to the underland – this one leading to a water-carved pipe of stone that runs through rock to a wild river. The usual fears rush at me like bats, flocking and tangling.

  ‘See you on the other side,’ says Lucian, who has decided to stay above ground.

  We begin our descent. Progress is made by ladder, platform and down-climbing. Many of the ladders are missing rungs. There are places where I must swing out on a single stanchion, then grope down for footholds, the shaft falling away beneath me, sucking at me. I clip on and off to what safety points there are. Then come little stances, lateral passageways, sections of tight shaft. The sense – now familiar to me – grows of the surface becoming distant, otherworldly, of the rock building in mass and depth.

  Sergio moves slowly but steadily, each step and drop and squeeze familiar to him. I can hear his lungs wheezing ahead of me. Mud lines on the walls mark the high-water levels of the Timavo in its different floods.

  I cannot now say how long the descent took. An hour? Two? Time was irrelevant because there was nothing to keep it except for the hammer-beat of heart and the heaving of lungs.

  Far into the descent, Sergio stops, looks back up at me, and holds a finger to his lips and a hand to his ear. I can hear nothing.

  ‘Quiet,’ he says. ‘Very quiet.’

  I breathe as lightly as I can, hanging by one arm and with my legs braced against either side of the shaft. And then, yes, I can hear it – a distant roaring sound, a hum of white noise, rising up the shaft towards us, washing at our feet and ears.

  ‘The river,’ says Sergio.

  We push on down, the roar growing in volume. The shaft takes one of its abrupt sideways jumps, we squeeze around a corner, and the floor of the tunnel falls away again beneath us in a natural trapdoor that gives onto pure blackness. Sergio gestures that I should lead.

  ‘Allora.’

  He points down at the door into the dark. I turn to face the rock and lower myself through the gap, my feet pedalling for holds below. I have an awareness of great space around me, startling after the confinement of the shaft. The roaring sound is motorway-loud now. Something, a surface, is coming up to meet me in the darkness. I jump back and thump, softly, into sand.

  Black sand.

  A dune of black sand, with gold grains amid the black. And dunes beyond that, rolling away.

  Sergio appears beside me.

  Eyes adjust to the space, head-torches probe for information. Rock above and behind me, curving away ov
erhead. Black sand dunes curving ahead of me, rising up to my left, falling away to my right.

  Boulders, huge boulders, embedded in the sand to our right but not to our left. The roaring coming from somewhere far to the right, and the air full of sand, fine black sand, that we breathe in and that swirls slowly in the light-beams.

  My light-beam meets stone in the distance – the opposite wall of this vast chamber. I look upwards and around: the ceiling domes into the dark, and near its apex I can see the shadowed entrance to a shaft of some kind, impossible to reach from the ground, a single thick stalactite hanging from the rock by its mouth.

  We are terranauts and we have dropped through the roof of this chamber onto another planet – dropped into an underland desert of fine-grained black-gold sand. I shake my head in wonder and fear. Sergio stands quietly beside me. He has seen this place do this to people before.

  Then he reaches up to switch off his head-torch, and I do the same, and for a few minutes we stand there on that soft sand, in that thick dark. Around us, intensely, is the mystery of Mithras, the god of stone.

  Then Sergio strikes a match to light his pipe, and the dark organizes itself instantly around that tiny bright fire. The smell of tobacco spreads. The pipe-bowl glows. Sergio waits, then smokes with pleasure and patience.

  ‘Allora,’ he says after a while. ‘To the river.’

  I lead, navigating by sound and slope. We move between the dunes of black sand, ascending at first to the centre of the chamber in order to outflank the crags that fall away to our right. The landscape through which we are passing is, I realize, only a temporary iteration of a dynamic terrain. These boulders are shifted and these dunes are re-sculpted by the river each time it floods. We trudge down the face of a black dune, and then pass through a narrow cleft between limestone boulders fallen from the roof, each twelve or more feet high.