Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  Clink of my karabiners against the rock. Sergio’s rasping breaths. Hush of footfall in fine sand. Stone dust in the light of our torches. The growing noise of the river. A moon landing. The night ascent of a desert peak.

  The sand changes character abruptly, darkening and dampening. This is the river’s most recent high point. We pick our way through a boulder field, slipping on wet sand to a small cliff.

  The noise is now so loud that we can hardly communicate. There is a cleft in the cliff and I lower myself through it and climb down onto hard-packed silt-sand and here is the starless river – a living river, whole and forceful, pouring out of an arch of rock to my left, bending towards me where it has cut a bay, and then cornering again and disappearing to my right, thunderously over rapids.

  The sound of this starless river is like none I have ever heard. It has volume. Its volume has hollowness. Each sound has its echo, and each echo its interior.

  I drop my pack. Sergio leans up against the rock, tamps fresh tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, relights it. The beam of my head-torch gives depth to the water, which is silver and silty, and – my God – I see there are creatures in it, white forms moving through the silt-clouds in the slower water of the bay. The rock arch of the tunnel out of which the river tumbles has – like the mouth of the Budapest labyrinth – an incredible draw, and I feel the urge to swim here in this starless river with the white forms. I tell Sergio I plan to do so, and begin to undress. He looks at me for a while, judging how to respond, then he simply shakes his head once, firmly.

  I cannot swim like a fish but I wish I had an owl’s eyes to see in the dark, or that I could somehow send my sight upstream and downstream from here, to the mouth of hell at Škocjan and to the blue water of the Gulf of Venice. I understand that this is not the place to leave the bronze casket; it is a site of transit not of storage.

  I step down to the edge of the water, to the bay where the white forms move, my torch-beam probing the water, and as I approach the edge the forms shrink back and away from me. I kneel and drink two stony mouthfuls of the starless river, and wash my face of the fear-sweat of the descent.

  I clean my karabiners of mud in the starless river because I want the snap-gates to work sharply on the ascent. I think of the winter floods here – the river rising in volume so massively that from that rock arch ahead it fills the chamber, lifting the sand in a billowing black water-cloud, compressing the air and forcing it up through the shaft down which we have come, up which we will return.

  There is an iron stake driven into a notch in the rocks by the bay. Sergio comes close, shouts into my ear above the roar, and he tells me that a team of French divers were working from here recently, that they spent a week down here in the chamber, pushing further upstream each day until the risk became too great. The most distant point they reached was almost 1,000 feet upstream from where I stand: a triviality, an immensity. I am awed and bewildered at the thought of their persistence. ‘Conquistadors of the useless,’ Lionel Terray once called climbers – but this is another order of futility altogether.

  ‘Allora,’ says Sergio.

  We climb the dune-slope back to the point where we dropped through the roof of the chamber. There, by the chamber wall, is a small yellow inflatable rubber dinghy – a Marine 285 with two plastic oars shipped tidily inside it, like something you might buy from a beachfront shop.

  Sergio flashes his head-torch beam along the dome of the chamber, settling on the shadowed shaft in its summit I saw earlier.

  ‘When the cave floods,’ he says, ‘the explorers . . . seek the higher parts. They . . . sail this’ – he nudges the dinghy with his foot. ‘They float up, catch the stone, and they climb the chimney.’ He nods upwards at the cave ceiling.

  He shrugs. ‘It is very dangerous. They do not want to fall. Of course they must . . . know the flood, so that it does not fill this place and kill them.’

  He shrugs again.

  ‘Still they do it.’

  Pause.

  ‘I have escaped . . . when the water is rising. It pushes you up. It is very powerful, like being in a . . . storm.

  ‘Allora,’ Sergio says for the last time, and moves towards the trapdoor in the rock up out of the chamber, and we climb up to the beeches and the bees of the invisible, where Lucian is waiting for us. My eyes are wild as I clamber from the hatch.

  ‘You look as if you’ve been on another planet,’ Lucian says.

  ~

  Over the days that follow, Lucian and I track the course of the Timavo above ground and below: an overland dowsing of this subterranean river. We follow it to where it shows itself and to where it dives back down. It is livelier than any river I know in its disregard for the usual rules of behaviour, and in its happiness in darkness. At the end of each day, sleep feels speleological: a nightly descent, a resurfacing each morning.

  Close to where the Timavo first plunges underground, we walk to Mušja jama, a 150-foot-deep fissure in the limestone into which more than a thousand Bronze and Iron Age artefacts were thrown over a period of around 400 years, from the twelfth to the eighth centuries BC. It is clear from the archaeological record that the fissure was a major sacred site, and that people came here from as far afield as central Italy and the Pannonian plain, bearing objects of power – socketed axes, spears, swords, helmets, drinking vessels – which were broken or burned before they were ritually cast into the abyss.

  Another afternoon Lucian takes me to the springs of the Timavo, where the river gushes green out of the rock into a parched land of scrub. The springs astonish me, as springs always do. This is water that fell first as rain on high ground, then made the long journey through the underland, to emerge here – filling pool after pool with its energy and colour, before tumbling away seawards.

  Life has gathered around the springs. Groves of cypress and pine cast shade. Damselflies jewel leaves. The air is scored by birdsong. Emerald frogs plop into the water from the bank.

  An ancient basilica was built here some 2,000 years previously to mark the spring site. Water flows through its narthex and nave. Water is part of its architecture of worship. A votive Roman capital stands above the channel, and its banded dedication reads ‘To the God Timavo’.

  ‘They’ve dived near here, of course,’ says Lucian, indicating the stone arch out of which the Timavo surges, ‘trying to force a way upstream underwater from the cave just up there. They couldn’t get very far, but about eighty metres down they found stalactites in flooded chambers that are now well below sea level, but filled with fresh water from the pressure of the river system.’

  We sit by the edge of the springs, take our shoes off, hang our feet in its coolness. I think of other spring sites I know: the power of everyday miracle they share, and the sense of the earth’s interior that they open into. The Wells of Dee on the Cairngorm plateau. The spring sites I had seen in the Occupied Territory of the West Bank. And Nine Wells Wood, less than a mile from my home, where a circle of springs flow from the chalk.

  ‘There is, surely, a power of peace to springs,’ I say to Lucian.

  Lucian shakes his head. ‘Not always. This, here, was a front line during the White War – the First World War, Rob,’ he says. ‘The battle raged right through where we are sitting. It was a death zone. Countless men died here: the springs themselves were swapped back and forth. None of these trees around us is older than a century, because they were all clear-cut to open fields of fire.’

  Two nights later Lucian, Maria Carmen and I go down at dusk to the Adriatic coast, near the Duino Castle, close to the point where the Timavo has its final outflows at sea level. The stones of the beach still hold the day’s heat. They are smooth and pale. Some are tinged with purple and have the patterns of fossil plants pressed into them. A white yacht trundles towards Venice on the night breeze.

  The moon is low and full in the sky. It has risen early. The tides of the earth move imperceptibly below us. Lucian and I wade out and launch ourselves in. Salt in
the mouth, the sea soft and warm to the touch. I turn shore-parallel and stroke north towards a rocky headland. The moon is a silver tunnel mouth.

  Then I am startled to feel, writhing around my legs, the cold currents of another kind of water. It is the blue fingers of the starless river, born as snow on the Snežnik, plunging underground to crash through its dark chambers and black rapids, and then at last surging out here to surface under the moon. It is a moment of wonder that will be matched and more on the converse by what Lucian and I will find up in the mountains.

  7

  Hollow Land

  (Slovenian Highlands)

  We almost pass it by.

  Late afternoon, late summer: harvest time in the mountains to the north of the Carso. Smell of woodsmoke, meadow. Wooden cabins with steep eaves speaking of heavy winter snowfall. An old man sitting in a chair drawn up to a western gable end, eyes closed, catching the last of the sun. Long-handled scythes leaning against walls, cut grass on the blades. Cyclamens in the shade, purple fungi poking through leaf litter under the beeches. Apple trees here and there, lit by small yellow fruit. The land’s surface dimpled with grassed-in sinkholes. It is one of the most peaceful landscapes through which I have ever walked.

  Then we follow, because we are curious as to where it leads, a side path that turns away from the open ground of meadows and cabins, curving gently through beech and oak, and then angling up, the trees thinning in number but growing in height, poplars now, their leaves hissing in the wind.

  We walk the path in innocence because we do not know what is at its end, and through the poplars we can see golden reefs of cloud massing out over the sea, black on their undersides. The sun is warm on our faces, the rich smell of the meadow grass is thickening to rank – and then there is the first of the marks, cut deeply into the pale bark, and there is the edge of the chasm.

  In front of us a sinkhole drops into blackness. Its sides are buttresses of grey limestone, softened by moss. The mouth of the sinkhole is twenty feet across at its widest point. To look into it is to feel the beckoning lurch of an unguarded edge. From the upper slopes of the mouth grow sapling beech, perched on ledges, leaning over the drop. Ferns flourish in stone niches.

  Gouged into the trunks of the bigger trees around the sinkhole are swastikas. Some are old, because the bark has begun to heal them. Some are fresh; made that year, perhaps, or the year previously. The wood in the cut-lines is still pale. Some of the swastikas have themselves been scored through by knifepoint. The bark is a conflict zone of mark-making.

  Nailed to the trunk of a beech near the lip of the sinkhole is a metal sheet, two feet or so high, and blotched with algae. Written on it in black ink is a long poem in Slovenian, entitled ‘Razčlovečenje’. At the bottom of the poem is scrawled the word ‘PAX’.

  ‘Its title means something like “Dehumanization”, or “Becoming Unhuman”,’ says Lucian quietly. ‘My Slovenian isn’t good enough to read the rest properly.’

  He points to the last line of the text, which has been added with an asterisk: a postscript to the main poem.

  ‘This, though . . .’ He pauses. ‘This is a curse of some kind. A curse or warning against anyone who might try to destroy or harm the poem.’

  The warning has not been heeded. Parts of the poem have been scratched by blade or stone, in an effort to erase the words. Other words have been written across its text – and they in turn have been scored through. In a top corner, another swastika has been cut into the metal, bright and fresh.

  I feel a sudden horror reaching up and out of the sinkhole to coil around my heart. Something terrible has taken place here, and continues to reverberate.

  ‘Look,’ says Lucian, pointing north through the canopy. There are thunderheads over the peaks now. Rain is drifting in heavy ropes far to the west. There is a distant sense of fury. Out over the ocean the gold light has become a slick yellow.

  What happened here? The mouth of the chasm says nothing. The trees say nothing. Leaning over the edge of the sinkhole, I can see only darkness beneath me.

  ~

  Earlier, Lucian and I leave his house in the Carso and travel north towards Slovenia, where the limestone rucks into sheer peaks and deep river valleys. Visible to the north are the spires of the Julian Alps, a towering limestone range where some of the most severe fighting of the so-called White War – the series of battles at the border of Austria-Hungary and Italy – took place between 1915 and 1918. There is, Lucian says, a peak high in the range he wants to reach that has been tunnelled out by war – as so many of the mountains across the front were hollowed during the conflict, for the purposes of taking shelter and of giving death.

  At the Julians our plan is to separate, and from there I will walk east for three days into Slovenia, over the shoulder of Triglav, the highest mountain of the region, and down to the blue lake of Bled – though the forecast is for snow on Triglav, which would make such a journey on foot hard. Before reaching the Julians Lucian wants to show me some of the higher ground of the Slovenian karst, where extensive beech forests shelter wolves and bears, and where, Lucian says, a cave system contains an extraordinary presence.

  Maria Carmen and I embrace as I leave their house on the Carso. I thank her for all that she has given me. She holds me at arm’s length by the bowl of dried pomegranates in the porch.

  ‘Robert, you are . . . a, a, a bellissimo animate!’

  ‘Maria Carmen, that is about the nicest thing anyone has ever called me,’ I say. ‘If I had business cards, I’d print that on them as my profession. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.’

  As we drive north, gaining height on switchback roads, I ask Lucian if I was right to have heard her comment as a compliment.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘the highest of compliments. Maria Carmen regards animals as far more impressive than humans. To her, heart and kindness are more important than any honorifics or degrees.’

  We follow the shore-road of a lake called Doberdò. It is completely dry: a grassy meadow through which bare limestone shows in places, several acres in extent.

  ‘Doberdò is what I think in English is called a “turlough”,’ says Lucian, ‘an intermittent lake that wells up from underneath and within the rock when the rains come and the water level rises – but that drains dry in the summer months.’

  The roads are lined with cypress trees, planted in commemoration of the dead of the armies that fought here in the course of two world wars. The trees have elegant boles shaped like candle flames, burning green.

  ‘Neither of the world wars has ever really left this region,’ says Lucian. ‘Brush fires in the Vipava Valley caused unexploded First World War ordnance to go off last summer. You could hardly have a better metaphor for the politics of this area.’

  We pass through Nova Gorica, a border town. ‘TITO’ has been sprayed twice on the exit road in blue paint, reversed on either side of the central line so that it can be read by drivers coming in both directions.

  The road rises to a pass and then drops down to a bridge over the Isonzo. The Isonzo runs bluer than any river I have ever seen. It is the blue of Cherenkov radiation, beautiful and chilling.

  Lucian pulls over in a lay-by above the bridge.

  ‘A century ago it would have been death to try to go from here to there,’ he says, pointing to the bluffs of limestone that rise to either side of the bridge. I realize that the rock of the bluffs is unnaturally textured: perforated with squared-off holes and portals.

  ‘It’s Swiss cheese, this stone,’ says Lucian. ‘Warrened by war. The high ground is a honeycomb of gun emplacements, access tunnels and chambers. The low ground is all trenches and foxholes. They burrowed into the mountains; they made a war-machine of the landscape. You’ll see even more of this from the First World War when we get up into the Julians, where the snow was heavier and the fighting, if possible, more desperate.’

  I have, again, a powerful sense of this landscape as one in which geology both produces and confi
rms ways of feeling. Here in this hollow terrain of the karst, historical memory behaves like flowing water, disappearing without warning, only to resurge under new names, in new places, with fresh force. Here in this topography of cavities and clandestine places, dark pasts get hidden, then brought to the light again.

  We have entered a contested frontier region – part of the Julian March, the name given to the border zone of what are now Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and even Carinthia. Cultures and languages have mingled productively here, but this is also where groups perceiving themselves to be of different ethnic or national identities have visited appalling persecutions upon one another. Traces of conflict are still scored into the physical terrain (trenches, mass graves, monuments), archiving and perpetuating a modern human geography of violence and displacement.

  We climb higher. The reflected light off the sea still silvers the sky to our south. There are cheerily coloured beehives, ranged in rows in fields set back from the road. Wild-flower meadows, small vineyards.

  We cross a wide pass between high peaks. Beech and pine have thickened in the lower ground, and I can smell resin in the cooler air. A sense of mountain communities and forest wilderness grows. The extent of the woods here makes a nonsense of human frontier lines. Beeches march over borders.

  Dapple of shade. Pools of light. A glade, a meadow, a hut. Caves everywhere visible in the cliffs, hidden in the forests. Dips between trees where sinkholes have collapsed, filled, regrown. Big slides of light tilt down hillsides. The upper ridge of one mountain is holed by a window-like gap running right through it, the ancient relic of a long-vanished river. Through the window I can see blue sky and clouds, framed by stone: a surrealist’s canvas.

  Where the treeline breaks against cliffs, distant beech trunks stand smooth against the rock. Two winters previously, western Slovenia was struck by a severe snowstorm that coated millions of trees in ice, leaving them so heavy that their root systems were unable to bear the weight of their frozen canopies. Millions of trees died, toppled by the burden of their own crowns.