Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  Another valley is sheer-sided on its eastern flank, with 400-foot-high white cliffs rearing almost from the road. Plumb in the centre of one is a cave mouth, and out of that mouth roars a silver river which plummets to a plunge pool at the cliff’s base. Rainbows drift in the spray.

  I have never seen a feature like it. It defies all the usual geological and fluvial rules. Rivers are not meant to issue from the centre of cliffs. But then the earth is not meant to have tides, and mountains are not meant to have windows – and caves are not meant to grow glaciers.

  We find the glacier-cave sunk high in the mountains, where the beech trees grow to sixty feet or more and the canopy is so thick we can hardly see the sky. We follow a thin contouring path, knotty with tree roots, through the forest. The air is heavy, hot.

  As we walk, Lucian explains the glacier’s existence to me, but I can hardly believe what he is saying to be true. A flowing river of ice at this height, in this heat? There is no lying snow for many miles around.

  ‘This cave system is a mile in length, nearly 400 metres deep, and it perforates an entire mountain from one side to another,’ says Lucian. ‘The free movement of wind along the cave system, combined with the chill of the rock itself, keeps the temperatures within the system well below freezing. Snow gathers in the cave mouths in the winter, blown deep into it by the northerly winds, and – hey presto! – over thousands of years, the snow becomes a long thin glacier, winding within the mountain.’

  The ground begins to fall away to the left of the path. We are soon on the edge of a huge doline, perhaps 150 feet across. The far side is near vertical, but our side slopes at fifty degrees or so, and a thin track switchbacks down into the chasm, where a cave mouth gapes.

  With each hairpin of the path, the air chills around us. I have never before experienced such a precipitous temperature gradient. Thirty degrees Celsius at the doline’s edge becomes twenty-five degrees Celsius within sixteen vertical feet, and so it drops as we drop, and though we pushed first through tepid air, soon an evening cool is around us, and then as we approach the cave mouth, 100 feet down, the air prickles cold as metal in the nose, our breath feathers in front of us and then we pass into a fine silver mist – the breath of the glacier itself.

  The steep temperature gradient produces a steeply raked ecology. The trees shrink in size with each turn of the path, from towering beeches to bonsai pines near the cave’s belly, clinging on in the arctic temperatures. By the entrance to the maw, where the temperature rarely rises above freezing, there is only moss and lichen matting – a low polar tundra. The smells at this depth are wholly different from those of the Carso and the forests; instead of heat, herbs, resin and stone, here is moss, winter and ice.

  Lucian and I scramble down a short slab of rock, cross the threshold of the cave and step into darkness. I glance back up through the mist to see a crescent of blue sky still visible, meshed with beech branches. I remember the arch of light left behind as we entered the Parisian catacombs. I sense movement in the cave’s far corner: a creature of some kind, big and powerful.

  Cold is burning my ears and fizzing in my teeth. Underfoot is a hard crust of rocks and debris – lichen, twigs, bones – fallen from the sinkhole’s sides, oddly fixed to the touch. Then between two lying branches I see a gleam of blue-black metal. I kick at it with my toe, feel my foot skid. Not metal – ice.

  ‘We’re on it,’ I call out. ‘Lucian, we’re on a glacier! It exists!’

  Lucian doffs an invisible hat, mock-bows.

  Treading carefully now, we move on towards the furthest reach of the cave. The mess of the threshold thins out, and we are walking on blue-white ice that slopes away and down to the corner where the creature lurks.

  The creature is a sinkhole in the ice – a vertical shaft cut down into the glacier by the action of meltwater. The ice slopes towards the sinkhole and so too does the light, as if pulled into it. We approach it with care – this black hole set within blue-black ice – conscious of our unsteady footing, of how easy a slip would be. A few yards from its edge we stop and regard it briefly, shivering and chilled.

  Returning to the rock slab down which we have earlier climbed, we hear a call.

  ‘Živjo! Hello! You want some help?’ A man is at the top of the slab and he reaches an open hand down to help us up the final tricky moves, one after the other. A woman is standing on flat ground above the slab, wrapped up against the cold in an ankle-length sheepskin coat. Her chest bulges and squirms, and then a little poodle pokes its head out from between the lapels of the coat, yapping at us.

  ‘That’s a fine hot-water bottle you have there!’ I say.

  ‘We keep each other warm!’ she replies, stroking the dog’s head, laughing.

  An eagle spiralling far above looks down through the sunlit green-gold canopy, past tall old beech trunks, past the lichen that hangs in wisps from the lower branches, past the gentians that bloom blue amid the leaf litter, down the sides of the sinkhole, past the sloped band of tundra and the bonsai pines, to where Lucian and I stand talking with the man, the woman and her poodle in the mouth of the ice cave, all of us laughing now.

  ~

  It is late afternoon, elsewhere in the upland beech forests, when we come to the place of horror.

  We pass through the meadows by the wooden cabins, we follow that footpath up through the woods, past the trunks of the trees with their swastikas scored into them, and we come to a halt at the sinkhole’s edge, where the text on the sheet of metal is nailed to the beech, as the clouds build over the sea.

  Between 1941 and 1945 the limestone of southern central Europe – from the Cansiglio plateau below the Dolomites, across and down into what was then Yugoslavia – became the site of a brutal conflict. In April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers. It was captured and trisected, with Italy occupying southern Slovenia and Ljubljana, Hungary annexing the Prekmurje region, and Nazi Germany taking northern and eastern Slovenia. Germany and Italy soon began ethnic-cleansing activities in their new territories, deporting, resettling, driving out and killing thousands of Slovenes.

  In response, partisan groups began to form across the Julian March and beyond with the aim of resisting the occupations. These anti-Fascist resistance groups – nicknamed ‘the woodchoppers’, and becoming increasingly left-wing in affiliation as the occupation continued, until formally declaring Communist alignment in March 1943 when they united with Tito’s partisan army – largely took the forests of the karst as their fortress and battleground. They fought nel bosco, in and with the woods. The British and Americans, aware of the power of these partisan troops, began to invest arms and intelligence in their operations. Among the officers sent to support the partisans was Fitzroy Maclean – later famous as the author of Eastern Approaches (1949), an account of his time with the resistance in the Yugoslav mountains – and John Earle, Maclean’s liaison agent with the Slovene and northern Italian partisans.

  The high karst was perfect for strike-and-retreat partisan tactics in occupied territory. Dense forest cover meant ground activity was hard to see from aircraft. Steep-sided valleys and the prevalence of sinkholes made it difficult to move heavy vehicles off the main roads and tracks. Ambushes could be planned on the narrow mountain roads, with attackers firing down onto vehicles before melting away into the woods again, pursuit almost impossible. The ubiquity of natural caves, and the readiness of the limestone to be enlarged into tunnels and chambers by blasting and excavation, made it the ideal geology for a guerrilla war. Weapons stores, sleeping places, even field hospitals were established in the rock, with sly systems of tunnels used to disperse woodsmoke from underground fires, so that the smoke did not rise in a column and betray a position.

  From the summer of 1942, seeking to counteract the growing partisan threat, Italian authorities started to create their own ‘anti-Communist’ militia among ethnic Slovenes, named first the ‘White Guard’ and then – under Nazi command – the ‘Slovene Home Guard’. A brutal ci
vil war developed in the forests and the villages of the karst, aligned chiefly along Fascist-Communist divisions, but also inflaming hostilities between the partisans and Catholic activists in Slovenia. Nationalism, religion and revenge tangled terribly together. Large-scale reprisal killings began to be exercised upon the civilian populations, as well as between fighters.

  The worst phases of these reprisal killings came in two waves: in the autumn of 1943, after the Italian surrender, and then during the notorious Quaranta Giorni, or Forty Days, of the Yugoslav administration of Trieste, following the fall of the city to New Zealand troops in early May 1945. During these terrible periods, geology and atrocity intersected: the landscape of the karst – which had served the partisans so well in terms of shelter and concealment – was repurposed for mass murder.

  Sinkholes, caves, ravines and mineshafts throughout the limestone regions of Venezia Giulia and Istria became the locations of individual executions and group killings, carried out predominantly by Communist partisans but also by Fascist militias. Civilian and military victims were transported to the edges of sinkholes, and there were pushed alive, wounded or dead into these chasms in the limestone. In some cases, victims were bound to one another by barbed wire. Others were buried in scooped graves in the forests. The caves and glades of the karst filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bodies. These extrajudicial killings are known today, especially by Italians, as the ‘ foibe massacres’ – from foiba, meaning a ‘sinkhole used for killing’. The bodies of those executed are still being disinterred in the shallow soils of deep woodland, or down in the sinkholes, where cavers will occasionally encounter human bones, bullets, rusting wire.

  History itself possesses its own burials and exhumations. The history of the foibe killings is still today heavily contested, not least because for decades it was deeply submerged. In the years after the war ended, a strategic ‘good-neighbour’ policy emerged between Italy and Yugoslavia that encouraged the forgetting of the atrocities. Italian politicians seeking to rebuild a united Italy saw little benefit in focusing on the crimes carried out by partisan troops on both sides. Yugoslav leaders rejected evidence of the existence of Communist atrocities, preferring to emphasize the suffering under Fascism experienced by Slavs, and to align their cause symbolically with the ultimate atrocity of the Holocaust. While the consequences of the partisan war played themselves out damagingly in individual and family contexts across the Julian March, in public discourse it was mostly relegated to la politica sommersa, ‘submerged politics’.

  It is primarily over the past three decades that the foibe killings have surfaced again in the public sphere, becoming an intensely controversial subject in the region. For Slovenes and those broadly on the left, the details of the foibe killings are seen to have been lavishly exaggerated by the right for purposes of propaganda and political leverage. For Italians and those broadly on the right, the foibe atrocities serve as a convenient shorthand for all the reprisal killings, jailings and deportations that happened to Italians during and after the end of the war – and they stand, too, reflexively, for the ways in which the post-war Communist governments of these areas disposed of the history of these persecutions. The language of this ongoing debate is riddled with subterranean imagery, literal and metaphorical. Images of light and dark, burial and exhumation, concealment and revelation run through the discussions: historiography and topography tangle with one another. The numbers and identities of those who died in foibe vary considerably, with the numbers given often depending on the political alignment of the researcher in question. In all cases, at stake is what Pamela Ballinger – in her major study of ‘the terrain of memory’ at the borders of the Balkans – refers to as ‘autochthonous . . . rights’, meaning the battle for the right to claim authentically to ‘belong’ to a given area of land, rock and soil.

  The foibe have also become focal points for contemporary right-wing and fascist groups seeking to stoke popular patriotism and fire anger against perceived left-wing influence in government. The sinkholes have become sites of ritual return for Italian nationalists and exiles. Commemoration marches are held, ending at foibe. Swastikas and other marks or mottos are often inscribed at the site. Priests perform annual services of remembrance. Bones of the infoibati (those killed in the foibe ) have been displayed as versions of sacred relic. At the most notorious of the foibe – in fact a mineshaft – near a village called Basovizza/Bazovica in the north-east of the Carso, a few miles from Trieste, two contrasting monuments have been established: one commemorating those killed by Yugoslav partisans in the shaft, and one commemorating the ‘heroes of Bazovica’: four Slovenians shot in 1930 for anti-Fascist activities. The mineshaft at Basovizza/Bazovica was sealed in 1959, in a ceremony carried out by a Catholic priest and attended by 2,000 people, because the deposition of explosives at the time of the killings made the subsequent safe exhumation of the victims’ bodies impossible. Because detailed scrutiny of the contents of this foiba is unfeasible, it has remained a void – susceptible to multiple projections of claim and belief. More hopefully, the village is also now home to the Elettra Sincrotrone, an international research centre that involves people from all the neighbouring countries and affiliations: it, too, is underground.

  Basovizza/Bazovica has become, more even than the other known foibe, an example of what Pierre Nora calls ‘lieux de memoire’, ‘memory-sites’: places in a landscape where the meanings of history are most actively created and contested. The matter of the foibe continues to resist closure. By keeping these sites ‘open’, so the history of the past continues to wound the present.

  ~

  High in the Slovenian beech woods, as a storm grows to the southwest, Lucian and I have found our way to the edge of a foiba now known as Grobišče Brezno za lesniko, the Wild Apple-Tree Shaft Grave. The details of what happened here, as at all the foibe, remain unclear and highly disputed. At some point in May 1945, between forty and eighty people – some of them Italian police, some of them Slovene Home Guard, some of them civilians – are alleged to have been marched through the trees, along the curving track that Lucian and I have also followed, to this chasm. Here they were either killed at its edge and pushed in, or pushed alive into its depths.

  The swastikas cut into the tree bark have been made recently by right-wing protestors, who march to this foiba, as they do to others, in order to protest the killings and to commemorate those who died here. The scorings-out of the swastikas have been done by objectors from the other side. And the poem has been written by someone chiefly in memory of the victims, lest they be left voiceless by the battles of claim and counterclaim.

  Later, a Slovenian friend will translate the poem for me. I should have warned her about where I had found it, what it might contain. I did not anticipate the powers of horror that the text possesses:

  Dehumanization

  But despite it all, they were people like you and me.

  Who are you? The living thrown into the madness,

  Killed with clubs and stabbed,

  Here crucified and no cross for you.

  But O, you humans,

  Your bones in the bottomless pit,

  They were people like you and me,

  Killed in the golden freedom.

  As you pass by, stop for a while,

  Think of your wrists bleeding in the dark night,

  Barbed wire wrapped around them,

  As they, cursing, goad you on,

  Beaten, naked, a corpse still living,

  You can hear the blows of the rifle butts,

  The screams, the groans, the terror turning into the sweetness

  Of approaching death.

  The fear, the pain, are vanishing,

  The footsteps echoing towards the void.

  In the bottomless pit countless numbers of them lie,

  But despite it all: they were people like you and me.

  PS: A curse be upon anyone who might attempt to erase this record.

  Imagine
yourself as victim, the poem orders its readers. Think yourself into the skin of another human, for then – sunk into a different being – you will surely find yourself unable to inflict suffering. It is as unsettling a text as I know: the vividness of the scene of execution it conjures, the curse it threatens as protection against its own erasure. The poem at once challenges and charges its reader, both forbidding and demanding response. Above all, it is a poem about compassion – about feeling as another feels. To the poem’s author, the darkness of the ‘bottomless pit’ represents the utter failure of empathy that characterized the war in those regions, as it must of necessity characterize war at all times and in all places.

  ~

  Apple trees by the roadside, their fruit yellow as lamps. Steady lift of the land. Wide river valleys, and pale limestone peaks rising higher to either side. A vaulted blue sky, strong sun gleaming off stone. We are passing through a mountain paradise, but we drive in silence. The foiba has shaken me deeply, and it has shaken Lucian too, I sense, familiar though he is with the hidden violence that this landscape contains.

  Birches on the turn, now, leaves seething sulphur. Bindweed flowering white in the hedges. A southerly breeze sets the poplars shaking. Air cools as we gain height. The air brightens. The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst . . .

  What is the relationship of beauty and atrocity in a landscape such as this? Is it possible, even responsible, to take pleasure in such a place? What had Anselm Kiefer written? I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist . . . I recall Kiefer’s paintings of German forests: tall-trunked, shadowed woodlands that bewilder and entrap the viewer, their trees often nourished by the cruelty that has occurred among them. Kiefer’s Europe carries an immanent history of guilt and pain. Pines grow tall on bones. Kiefer longs for – but disdains as futile – a soteriology whereby our sins might be absolved by the earth’s own stigmata.