Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  The true peaks of the Julian Alps are now beginning to show on the horizon: a Gothic dream-range. Limestone summits spiral up to towered tops. Structures of hollow and fold replicate up and down the scales, from ridges and valleys to the water-scores on a single boulder. Matter shifts appearance, changes place. It is hard to tell cloud from snowfield from pale rock-face.

  I think of W. G. Sebald’s writing about landscape and the relics of violence; how his narrator in The Rings of Saturn, walking the tranquil but chronically militarized coastline of East Anglia, becomes preoccupied to the point of ‘paralysing horror’ by the combination of an ‘unaccustomed sense of freedom’ in the landscape with ‘the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place’. I remember taking a friend to the former nuclear weapons test site of Orford Ness off the Suffolk coast – where Sebald had also been – and seeing her weep uncontrollably on its shingle bank by the brown waves of the North Sea. The state violence latent at the Ness had caused the surfacing in her, unbidden, of memories of a cruel relationship in which she suffered for several years. The violent event persists like crushed glass in one’s eyes. The light it generates, rather than helping us to see, is blinding.

  We are up into the heart of the Julian Alps now, and at a turn in the road, where it crosses a river bridge, we see an elderly woman sitting alone on a shingle beach by the water. She is in a wheelchair, pushed out among the shore boulders. She wears big dark glasses, dark amber in tint, and her legs are wrapped in a green blanket. Her hands are placed together on the blanket, and she is looking without moving into the whirling blue water of the river. It is not clear how she has arrived there or how she will leave, but she seems to be at peace by the current.

  Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness. The Slovenian karst is an ‘occulting’ landscape in this sense, defined by the complex interplay of light and dark, of past pain and present beauty. I have walked through numerous occulting landscapes over the years: from the cleared valleys of northern Scotland, where the scattered stones of abandoned houses are oversung by skylarks; to the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid, where a savage partisan war was fought among ancient pines, under the gaze of vultures; and to the disputed valleys of the Palestinian West Bank, where dog foxes slip through barbed wire. All of these landscapes offer the reassurance of nature’s return; all incite the discord of profound suffering coexisting with generous life.

  A mile or so up the river valley from where the woman sits watching the water a stream tumbles down to the main river from a side valley. This is marked on the map as the ‘Rio Bianco’, the White Torrent, and it is to be our path up to the high tops where war was waged exactly a hundred years earlier. We set off from the road-head along a thin track through the beech woods that fringe the stream. The path itself is lightning white where it has been worn to bedrock. It strikes up and on between the trees.

  Holes in the trunks of the beeches hold micro-gardens of moss and ferns. Dwarf pines spread between the boulders of the stream-bank. Harebells, gentians and edelweiss star the understorey. Little trout flick as quick shadows in the bigger stream-pools. Towering above us are scree-slopes and bone-white summits jagging several hundred feet up from the ridge line. Can we really be going up there? Always to our left is the Bianco, pooling and splashing. It is a mysterious and wilful presence, a fine companion for our ascent on that hot day, and soon I can resist its invitation no longer.

  ‘Lucian, I’m going to use the stream as my way up.’

  ‘Enjoy. I’ll stay dry, I think, and I’ll see you up in the cirque.’ He gestures up to cloud level. ‘Head towards the junction of valleys, and then hook left and up. You’ll find yourself in a big, flat-bottomed corrie, with a small bivouac hut bound to the rock by iron cables. We’ll meet again there in, what, three hours? Four?’

  He wanders on into the woods, and I clamber down to walk the stream.

  Sunlight blazes off stone. I hop from rock to rock, climb the bigger boulders, clamber up the faces of plunge pools, and where the stream runs deep and wide I just wade through it, relishing the snowmelt bite of the water on feet and shins. There are water-worn humps of limestone as smooth as skin. Little spill-pools have their own white-sand beaches a few inches wide. Each new section of the stream poses a different puzzle of ascent.

  It is a beautiful stream for the whiteness of its light, and it is a strange stream because it tricks. In the stiller pools, the water is transparent to the point of seeming absent, and more than once I stop to dip a hand to prove the water is still there.

  The challenge, really, is to keep moving at all, for each pool is inviting as a place to wait and jabble, and each side-stream beckons its own following. At last, in a waterfall-fed basin of polished limestone twelve feet wide, its lower rim giving a view across the valley to a pillowy peak beyond, I swim. It is a natural infinity pool, and I wallow in it for five minutes or so, letting the waterfall pummel my back until it numbs.

  I proceed lazily upwards, boulder-hopping, stopping, each rapid luring me up and on, each pool detaining me, until the sides of the gorge become high enough that I risk getting trapped. So I climb out using tree roots for ropes. Seven chamois watch – with the feigned disinterest of true voyeurs – a near-naked man dressed in little but a rucksack clamber over a gorge-edge into a glade, and there re-clothe himself.

  From the glade it is up again, the path switchbacking past a hut in a clearing, the trees diminishing in size as height is gained. Purple scabious remind me of the chalklands of home. As I ascend, towering beeches shrink to ten-foot-high mature trees, then to a wide scrub forest, forked with different paths. The scrub is of pines and glossy-leaved pin oak, and the trees stand first at head height, then at shoulder height, then at waist height, then they are gone altogether – and I am out into ground scoured clear of trees by altitude and avalanche.

  Bare rock, shrill whistles of marmots echoing, the peaks pressing closer around. Rock towers rising, their forms continued above by the white-bossed thunderheads that are building in the sky, and continued invisibly below by the chasms and cave systems that descend from the landscape’s surface.

  Flocks of finches sweep across the pines below me, vanishing with a flutter amid the leaves. I climb up through a boulder field to reach the corrie’s belly and there, lashed to a flat boulder by steel cables to brace it against ferocious winter storms, is the bivouac hut Lucian mentioned. It is little more than a metal capsule. I open the front door. The space is just high enough to stand up in. Six bunks, three on either side of the space. Stacks of blankets neatly folded on the beds, two full jerrycans of water. A life-saving outpost. But where is Lucian?

  I lie down to wait on a promontory of grass near the hut. Warm wind. Pincushions of alpine flora. Clouds, rock, marmot whistle, happiness. Raven cries hexing off the cliffs. Clink of stone-fall, hoof-hit of ibex – ibex! – just twenty yards away. The hum of something like silence. The corrie is horseshoed by a great curling wave of limestone, rising to peaks and falling to sharp notches. I know our eventual destination lies to the west, but have no idea how we will reach it.

  Half an hour later, Lucian emerges over the lip of the corrie, hot but cheery. I passed him somewhere in the scrub maze without realizing it. We eat apples and drink river water there by the shelter.

  ‘In winter the snow drifts to fifteen, twenty feet here,’ he says. ‘This gets buried.’

  ‘This place lifts my heart,’ I say to Lucian. ‘Thank you for bringing me here.’

  ‘I’m glad, Rob,’ he replies. ‘There
was war here too, sadly, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking around. They burrowed through rock and scaled cliffs to get at the enemy. But here more men were killed by the winter conditions than by bullets.’

  Across the Dolomites and the Julians, retreating glaciers have begun to disclose their contents from the conflict a century earlier: rifles, crates of ammunition, unsent love letters, diaries and bodies. Two teenage Austrian soldiers have surfaced from a glacier in Trentino, lying top to toe beside one another, each with a bullet wound to the skull. Three Hapsburg soldiers melted out of an ice wall, hanging upside down near the peak of San Matteo at an altitude of 12,000 feet. The problem is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure . . .

  From the refuge, we begin the proper climbing. Up towards a notch in the ridge on a tongue of scree: two steps up, one step back. Sugary snowfields to cross, punching through with each step. Hard, hot, private work. Helmets on now to guard against rockfall. We reach the notch. It is an extreme place. We sit astride it facing one another, as if upon a horse, for here the rock is a spine a foot or so wide. To the south is a huge fall-line, dropping several thousand feet to the white ribbon of limestone that marks the path of the Isonzo, its water shining blue even from this height amid the dark green pines of the valley.

  Ahead of us the ridge leads off in peaks, fins and drops. These are the Cime Piccole di Rio Bianco, the Little Peaks of the White Torrent, and their traverse is made possible only by the cables and brackets of the vie ferrate – the ‘paths of iron’ – that have been bolted into place. Lucian and I get into our harnesses. My karabiners still carry the silt and mud of the Abyss at Trebiciano, and at the sight of them my mind flies to that dark chamber, some 7,000 vertical feet below us.

  ‘That’s the Canin,’ says Lucian, pointing to the other side of the valley. A humped, slumped white mountain, with what look like – but cannot be – vast snowfields descending from its whale-backed summit, gleaming in the light and pocked with holes.

  ‘The Canin is a true karst peak. You can see how the limestone behaves differently. The type we’re on is more friable, sharper. The Canin is more of a bread loaf in outline, more like the moon in texture. You have to imagine it in cross-section, too. It’s honeycombed with natural cave systems. There are caves with their entry points on the slopes of the Canin that descend for almost two vertical kilometres.’

  ‘A mountain has an inside,’ Nan Shepherd wrote in her great study of the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, and it took me years to understand what she meant with respect to that granite range, which appears so outwards-facing. Here in the Julians, though, Nan’s proposition seems merely a statement of the obvious. These are hollow mountains, lightless peaks, which everywhere turn in on themselves in the form of valleys and caves.

  We are about to begin the traverse of the Cime Piccole when we hear a sustained peal of thunder, rolling in from the north-west.

  ‘This is not good timing,’ I say to Lucian. ‘We’re attached by metal karabiners to metal cables, with metal ice axes sticking up from our packs, on the exposed ridge of a mountain, with thunder and lightning incoming.’

  ‘Well, we could wait it out back in the corrie,’ says Lucian, ‘or we could race the storm and hope it slides past us, or doesn’t reach us until we can take shelter in one of the tunnels.’

  We race the storm. A two-hour sprint against the thunder. Pinnacle after pinnacle, ticking them off. I remember it in shutter-clicks and sharp shards. Hot rock under the hands. Drops pulling at us. First, second, third tops. Adrenaline, bloodied fingernails, lactic in legs and arms. We are alive in the world, happy to be alive in the world, and the thunderstorm slides slowly past several miles to our north.

  The cables of the via ferrata interweave with the conflict infrastructure of the First World War. We balance up trembling timber steps hammered into the rock a hundred winters previously. We use rusted iron ladders to cross notches in the rock. We reach the slopes of the ninth pinnacle and there ahead of us, somehow, is a tunnel mouth – gapingly dark in that sunlit upper world. It has been blasted and hacked fully through the pinnacle, and during the war it must have been one of the safest places in this deadly conflict zone, secure from ordnance, lightning and avalanche.

  We step into the tunnel, grateful for the respite it offers from the wind, and the shelter it can provide if the storm swings our way. We walk on into the mountain. The tunnel dips for sixty feet, takes two corner turns, and then we are in darkness so complete we must turn on our head-torches. On again, dropping into a lower level by a rusty ladder, helping each other down with raised and reached hands.

  Light rises and we round a corner to find a gun window cut out of the limestone, offering lines of fire across the valley towards the Canin. The rotational iron circle on which the gun was wheeled to east and west is still set into the stone of the emplacement. A recoil space has been cut back into the interior wall. In this confined space, the detonation noise of each shell-fire would have been shattering. The men who worked this gun must have lost their hearing almost immediately.

  Light shows again at the turn of the tunnel – a doorway of light now. Having passed through the phases of that hollow peak – light, dark, light, dark, then light again – we are at the end of the ridge, and above a scree-slope that falls away towards a col. I think suddenly of Le Passe-Muraille, the figure in the catacombs who walks through walls.

  I run the scree, skidding down to green sloping pastures seamed with paths made by chamois and by people. Patches of old yellow snow lie in the shadows of the peaks. A mile or two away I can see a hut, perched at the point where the ground drops thousands of feet to the valley. It holds the promise of rest, food, company. Thoughts of war tumble away. Clouds pass rapidly over the sun, casting an occulting light over the landscape.

  ~

  The hut is presided over by seven-year-old Theresa and her white cat, Luna. Theresa’s father is the custodian, though he keeps to the back room. Theresa’s mother is nowhere to be seen. Theresa makes the pasta for dinner, and comes out to greet us with flour on her face, carrying Luna under one arm like a rugby ball. She speaks to me in Italian and I to her in English, and neither of us can understand the other but it doesn’t matter at all.

  Seeing Theresa, my heart aches for my own children. I haven’t seen them in almost two weeks. The darkness of these beautiful landscapes has leached a little into me, shadowing the edges of sight and spirit. I want to be with them, to make them safe.

  The hut is a reliquary of the White War. Its windowsills are lined with the debris of death, picked up by walkers over the years. Shell fragments, bent bayonets, bullets, boot buckles, helmet spikes and chinstraps, and a shell-casing peeled back like a banana skin by the blast. It is a grim museum of slaughter.

  There is a small library of books, many of them concerning the war. I sit on a wooden bench, reading about what happened here. There are black-and-white photographs of the fronts that shifted across these mountainsides, the men who fought here. Tunnel after tunnel, portal after portal cut into the stone of the peaks. Men in shadow, looking over to enemy cliffs perforated as the flank of a cruise liner. To get inside the mountains was the only way to shelter from the killing avalanches, from the killing cold, and from the killing enemy shells and bullets. These Alps became weaponized peaks, their topography forcibly reorganized by the imperatives for cover and concealment. Shell-fall alone lowered the height of one mountain by twenty feet. The theatre of the White War extended from the summits of the peaks, through their hollowed-out interiors, down into the caves of the slopes and valleys.

  I am reminded again of Eyal Weizman’s study of the landscape architecture of the Israel–Palestine conflict, Hollow Land, and its proposal of ‘elastic geography’, whereby space is to be understood not simply as the backdrop for actions of conflict, ‘but rather the medium that each . . . action seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate’. Weizman mapped the ‘elastic geography’ of the Wes
t Bank and Israel: the attempts made by erecting walls and fences hermetically to seal areas of territory, the nonsense made of such sealings by the tunnels that were dug under these barriers by Palestinians in order to smuggle people and weapons, and the arcs described by rockets fired out of Gaza by Hamas militants. He wrote of the reconceptualizations of space undertaken by both sides in the conflict: the way the disputed terrain ran vertically from the militarized airspace far above ground level, all the way down into the competition for control of the water aquifer that lies deep in the limestone, sunk thousands of feet below the West Bank. Weizman’s name for this fluxional space is ‘hollow land’, possessing as it does ‘a complex architectural construction . . . with its separate inbound and outbound levels, security corridors and many checkpoints. Cut apart and enclosed by its many barriers, guttered by underground tunnels, threaded together by overpasses and bombed from its militarized skies, the hollow land emerges as the physical embodiment of the many and varied attempts to partition it.’

  Something comparable happened in the Julians during the White War. In this ‘laboratory of the extreme’, new types of warfare were developed, and new transformations of space occurred. Mountains were seen no longer as solid structures, but as honeycombs that could be opened, the interiors of which could be traversed, the walls of which could be walked through. The landscape itself had become actor, agent, combatant. In the Second World War, as Lucian and I saw at the foiba, it would be differently instrumentalized into a means of execution.

  Theresa brings Luna over to see me. She drops him onto my lap, then holds him by his ears and kisses him full and hard on the mouth. Luna yowls in protest and digs his claws deep into my thighs. I yowl in protest and dig my fingernails deep into my palm. Theresa wanders off, pleased with the result.

  We share the hut with four Triestini. They are regulars, two couples who come up here often from the city to spend time together: ski-mountaineering in the winters, climbing and caving in the summers. They fold us into their conversations, share stories of the mountains. One of the Triestini is a broad-shouldered man, bearish of build. He wears an orange fleece and a blue bandana, and his hair is sweated tight to his scalp. He explains without bravura that he is an extreme caver. I am surprised; he seems quite the wrong shape for such a specialism. I do not convey this thought to him. He gestures over at the Canin.