Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  Matt has wondered if the bergschrund might be impassable, or if we might need to abseil into it and climb back up its far side: a committing and time-consuming move. But when we reach it, hot from the work of the ascent, there is a single viable crossing place: a pinch-point where the sides close to within a few feet of one another, the gap spanned by a snow bridge.

  We cross one by one, treading softly, the climbers before and beyond on the rope standing braced to take a fall if the bridge collapses.

  It comes to my turn. I intend to cross quickly, but for reasons I cannot explain I pause on the bridge. I look down into the depths of the bergschrund to the right, and feel a bloom of fear in my chest, like a drop of ink spreading in water. Below the snow bridge the sides of the bergschrund fall like a blue gorge, more than 150 feet deep, big enough to eat a truck and its trailer, its upper cliff overhanging, its true depth lost in shadow.

  ‘Keep moving, Rob,’ calls Helen from behind me, urgently. ‘That’s no place to stop.’

  I realize I have stopped, have been stopped by the void and the glimpse into the depths that it gives or demands.

  Half an hour later we step from the high ice and onto the lion-coloured rock of the summit ridge. We take off crampons, make a kit depot, rope up. Matt still has the rifle slung over his back.

  ‘Surely you can leave that here and we can pick it up on the return?’ I say to him. ‘We’re hardly going to meet bears up here?’

  ‘Polar bears were encountered at 2,000 metres in 1913 on the first ascent of the highest peak in this region,’ says Matt.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  We move together up the ridge. There is no need to pitch it.

  Lodged in the lichen of the summit boulders I find the pale quill of a raven feather and a single, implausible shell, bleached pure white.

  We sit quietly together in the sunshine, on the warm rocks of that peak, and look out over the wildest land I have ever seen. Ridge upon ridge of rock spires, range upon range of summits extending as far south and north as the eye could see.

  Fjord after fjord, inlet after inlet, island chains, peaks.

  Blue ocean endless to the east, on which icebergs glint.

  Shorelines pricked with gleams of white: thousands of beached bergs.

  Green-water estuaries marbled with brown alluvial outwash, furling into flowerish patterns.

  Over the valley, at the same altitude as us, lies a high circular corrie. In it sits a green lake of water, circular in form and cupped by seracs. It has the appearance of a font in a church, and its still surface catches the clouds and sunlight that move across it.

  ‘Look behind you,’ says Helen M, pointing.

  There, away to the west, running laterally between the ridges of the highest peaks, is the ice cap itself.

  It appears as a floating band of white, impossibly elevated, nacreous and faint. This is the ‘Inner Ice’ and it extends unbroken to the Arctic Ocean on the west side and the north, running for tens of thousands of square miles. Trillions of tons of ice, up to 11,000 feet thick, so great in their mass that they have warped the bedrock beneath them down into the Earth’s crust by up to 1,180 feet below sea level. If melted at a stroke, the ice would reveal a vast concavity occupying the island’s centre: flattened mountains, crushed valleys.

  The Inner Ice looks off-worldly. I feel a longing to get up onto it, to traverse it, to be in that floating white for thirty days.

  ‘Hey, there! Down in the bay, that dark shape in the water! Whale, I think.’ Matt’s eyes are incredibly sharp and so too is the air, the lensatic effect of its dustless clarity collapsing distance. We are two miles or more distant in space from the bay, but the whale can still be seen with the naked eye.

  Except it isn’t one whale, it’s three. Three shadows in the green water of the bay, two large and one small, parents and a calf, feeding in the outflow where the glacial melt-river sweeps food into the sea. They move in the space between two big icebergs with turquoise underwater bulks.

  We watch the whales through binoculars, breaching and disappearing, dark forms disclosing themselves then sinking back into invisibility.

  A plume of gulls, a shake of silver, tracks their movements.

  Far below us, half a day’s travel away, we can also see the orange specks of our tents, and from this altitude we can clearly see the terminal and lateral moraines marking the former reach of the ice that had once spilled down the valley, which would have submerged our campsite under white.

  ‘The Inuit don’t come to the summits. Why would they?’ says Matt. ‘Every now and then, Geo will use the Inuit word for “beautiful”, of a glacier or a place. But mostly this landscape is the venue of work, danger, and life for him. He loves the land too, though. I remember once he and I were in a boat near the calving face of a glacier, and he turned to me, nodded, smiled, and said, “I like to come hunting in this place in October.”’

  Bergs slip along the sea’s horizon. The crumps of calvings reach us minutes after the events that have made them. A snow bunting flits among rocks to the north, startlingly fast.

  We stay in that sunshine, on that marvellous summit, for an hour and an era. We don’t talk much. Up there, language seems impossible, impertinent, sliding stupidly off this landscape. Its size makes metaphor and simile seem preposterous. It is like nowhere I have ever been. It shucks story, leaves the usual forms of meaning-making derelict.

  Glint of ice cap, breach of whales, silt swirls in outflows, sapphire veins of a crevasse field.

  A powerful dissonance overtakes my mind, whereby everything seems both distant and proximate at the same time. It feels as if I could lean from that summit and press a finger into the crevasses, tip a drop of water from the serac pool, nudge a berg along the skyline with my fingertip. I realize how configured my sense of distance has become from living so much on the Internet, where everything is in reach and nothing is within touch.

  The immensity and the vibrancy of the ice are beyond anything I have encountered before. Seen in deep time – viewed even in the relatively shallow time since the last glaciation – the notion of human dominance over the planet seems greedy, delusory.

  Up there on that summit, at that moment, gazing from the Inner Ice to the berg-filled sea, the idea of the Anthropocene feels at best a conceit, at worst a perilous vanity. I recall the Inuit word I first heard in northern Canada: ilira, meaning ‘a sense of fear and awe’, and also carrying an implication of the landscape’s sentience with it. Yes. That is what I feel here. Ilira. It’s comforting.

  But then I think of the melt that is happening, that has happened, that is hastening. The cryosphere across the globe is troublingly on the move, as carbon dioxide levels rise and the planet warms. The roaring moulins, the sweating bergs, the collapsing permafrost yielding its grim contents; Geo describing how the sound of his village has changed as the glacier has retreated; the camp we have made in a ghost glacier; the dwindling sea ice; Mulvaney pulling up kilometre-deep core – delving down as a means of foretelling the climate future . . . And I think of Christina’s son building his Noah’s Kayak-Ark at school: the escape vessel for this newly melting world, with no room for humans on it.

  Looking out from that summit, I no longer feel awed and exhilarated, but instead faintly sick. Sick at Greenland’s scale – but also by our ability to encompass it. There is something obscene both to the ice and its meltings – to its vastness and vulnerability. The ice seems a ‘thing’ that is beyond our comprehension to know but within our capacity to destroy.

  Three big bergs creep into view on the horizon: white sailing ships stealing up over the Earth’s curve. The sun catches the upper edge of the first berg, sparks silver, then flares on its apex such that the berg appears to be aflame.

  ~

  There is a passage in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon known as the ‘Mycenae Lookout’ section. It concerns a watchman in a roof tower whose task is to look for the brazier fire on the horizon that will tell him that Troy has fallen, a
nd to cry out if he sees it. At last, after many years of keeping watch, the watchman does see the fire flame on the horizon in the distance. But he finds he cannot cry the vital words. He is struck dumb, unable to articulate. In Aeschylus’ memorable image, he feels as if ‘’ – ‘a great ox has stood on [my] tongue.’ In Seamus Heaney’s version, the watchmen feels his tongue to be ‘deaden[ed] . . . like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck’.

  When I consider our attempts to speak the Anthropocene, I think of that watchman with the ox on his tongue, unable to cry out his warning, so that the danger draws ever closer. The idea of the Anthropocene repeatedly strikes us dumb. In the complexity of its structures and the range of its scales within time and space – from nanometric to the planetary, from picoseconds to aeons – the Anthropocene confronts us with huge challenges. How to interpret, or even refer to it? Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures are withdrawn. We find speaking of the Anthropocene, even speaking in the Anthropocene, difficult. It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope.

  The cultural theorist Sianne Ngai suggests that, when shocked or grieving, we find ourselves able to speak of the experience only in ‘thick speech’. When speaking thickly, Ngai says, we are challenged in our usual ability to ‘interpret or respond’. A drastic slowdown and recursion of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion. Tenses work against one another. There is a ‘backflowing’, a loss of causal drive, a gathering of hesitancies and stutters. We speak an eddying speech, cloyed to the point of congealing.

  Up there on the thinning ice, during those weeks in Greenland, I recognized this ‘thick speech’. I would struggle often to stop language from sticking in my throat. The black-inked words in my notebooks seemed sluggish, tar-slow. Writing lost its point, clotted into purposelessness, there in an ice world that was both unhomely and untimely. Often it felt easier to say nothing; or rather, to observe but not to try to understand. I had an Anthropocene ox on my Holocene tongue.

  ~

  We are descending the north-west ridge of the mountain, in the summit’s cold shadow, when Helen M cries out.

  ‘Look! Look up – shooting stars!’

  How can there be shooting stars in broad daylight? I glance back at the summit and stop, amazed. The sun is silhouetting the peak, and the blue air above the top swarms with tiny silver points, swirling and darting with life-like energy and intent. There are hundreds of these glittering sprites, vanishing instantly when they pass into the shadow and out of the light. We all watch, mesmerized, for a minute or two. It is one of the most exquisite, eldritch sights I have ever seen in the mountains – these seething silver sparks, these scattering star-shards.

  Later, we realize that it was probably willow snow, the white wisps of the dwarf willows shedding their seeds, which had been blown by the easterly wind and swept 2,000 feet up from the valley and over the summit, to where the hard Arctic sun backlit and silvered them, and the cold Arctic wind set them dancing.

  We retrace our steps safely back down the glacier, unlocking in reverse the doors through which we passed on the way up: the berg-schrund, the crevasse field, the roll-over . . . One by one at last we jump with thumps off the snout-ice and back onto the fine glacial gravel, which hushes under our feet.

  Back out through the valley between the boulders, down to the shores of the lake, where we set the seagulls chattering up again in commotion.

  The sun across the plain that evening at camp is low and white and bright, and it sets fire to the landscape. Cotton-grass heads glow like bulbs. The moss flames green. Each willow leaf, each pebble, each beached berg carries a flash of that late-day light.

  The aurora that night comes as green fog-banks, rolling, coalescing, ebbing. The first star shows over the glacier, then there are none, and then they come fast and faster.

  We sit out together in silence again.

  After an hour or so the aurora fades, burned out by moonrise. A full moon appears fast over the shoulder of the peak above our camp, as if lifting off the glacier we have climbed that day. We pass binoculars between us; viewed through lenses the moon is almost too bright for the eye. We can see crater rings, impact sites, low lunar seas and high lunar mountains. Its yellow light, borrowed from the sun, lends shadows to the rocks and the tents and to us. I feel an intense loneliness, made by the moonlight, that surprises me with its force.

  A thunder of the glacier rouses me at two o’clock that night. I step out of the tent.

  Sharp calls of sanderlings in the darkness. The moon still massive and yellow. Northern lights flickering as curtains of green above the ice cap, and a single streamer leading back up and over the summit of the peak we climbed.

  The glacier roars again, incomprehensible, the reverberations taking twenty seconds to die away.

  The next morning we wake to find the camp in a thick white mist, as if the ice has returned overnight and submerged us. Dew beads the tripwire lines. A raven circles above us, invisible, cawing.

  Two days and two peaks later we break camp and leave for the Knud Rasmussen glacier, to seek a moulin that bores into its blue depths.

  11

  Meltwater

  (Knud Rasmussen Glacier, Greenland)

  We hear the moulin before we see it: a low rumble, rising in volume as we approach. It is set down in a shallow dip, a day’s travel up the glacier, with three meltwater streams curling towards it, as the currents of foam had spiralled the Maelstrom in the Lofotens.

  I circle around the moulin, keeping well back from its edge, to the point from which I can safely see furthest down into it. It is surely the most beautiful and frightening space into which I have ever looked. Its mouth is oval and around twelve feet across at its widest point. Its sides are of blue ice that are polished as glass, and scalloped in places. It drops vertically from the glacier’s surface like the shaft of a well. Twenty feet down all light is lost and so is all sight. It seems that the moulin might bore through the glacier’s depth until it hits bedrock hundreds of yards below. A torrent of meltwater pours into the void from its western lip.

  We all feel some version of the moulin’s draw that day. It acts on the landscape around it as a whirlpool acts upon the sea, such that everything seems to tend towards it. In its presence I feel a lean in my chest, an urge to step nearer to its edge, then nearer again. The moulin is certain and powerful, and it is a portal giving access to the blue underland of ice.

  ~

  Seven days before we find the moulin, we reach the Knud Rasmussen glacier. It is a body of ice so great that it makes its own weather.

  The glacier is invisible the afternoon we arrive, concealed by a bank of fog that runs the full span of the fjord, a mile or so wide but only a few hundred yards high. Above the fog is blue sky, below it is blue water, and behind it is blue ice. The cold mass of the unseen ice is condensing the moist air to create that hovering mist.

  We cannot see the glacier but we can hear it. The Knud Rasmussen makes the Apusiajik glacier seem like an introvert. The first roar comes minutes after we have dropped our packs on the ledges of gneiss that will be our home until autumn. The noise comes without warning out of the fog-bank and shakes our bodies like bags of jelly.

  ‘Boom!’ says Helen. ‘Welcome to the Knud Rasmussen. The ice is talking!’

  High above us, faint rainbow patterns dapple the sky. These are the colours of the sun refracting in airborne ice crystals in the upper troposphere, four or five vertical miles above us.

  Another explosion rolls out from behind the fog-bank.

  We cannot see the glacier but we can feel it. It extends a chill around itself, dropping the air temperature by five degrees or more. The place we have chosen to camp is over a mile from the calving face, but even there we are within the glacier’s aura. In the days we spend at the Knud Rasmussen, we become icy. We drink ice. W
e wash in ice. We sleep by and on the ice. Ice fills our ears and our dreams and our speech. Ice fills the water and the air and the rock. We enter the ice and the ice enters us.

  ~

  The route to the Knud Rasmussen takes us far to the north of Apusiajik, and into a new order of remoteness and scale. We reach it through fjords like canyons, lined by slabbed walls of gneiss thousands of feet high, topped by spired peaks. A kind of rock unknown to me is visible in this region: crumbly, coarse-grained and the colour of chocolate, splitting the gneiss in broad veins up to 100 yards wide, and running for miles through peak and valley. You can follow the veins through the landscape, tracking them to the point where they disappear beneath the water of a fjord on one coast, then seeing them emerge again on the far side.

  Even in this inhuman landscape, human conflict has left its mark. In a side valley, under a peak that rises to a fishtail-forked summit, we pass the remnants of an American Cold War base abandoned half a century earlier. The rusted skeleton of a hangar, its girders bent from repeated winter avalanches; a tractor with a snowplough fitted to its front, sunk into the shallow tundra; and thousands of oil drums, corroded to orange, stacked in clutches or standing in snaking lines. They give to the site the air of a hatchery, and remind me of the rusted fishing floats that gathered on the shores of Moskenes in the Lofotens. Everything artificial at the base has taken on the colours of the tundra – its dun hues of orange, brown and green. Lichen and moss flourish in the niches of relic infrastructure: Arctic camo.

  Further down the same fjord, in a bay fed by a freshwater stream, is a monstrously beautiful berg. It gleams whitely in the sunlight, long and low-slung, rising never more than fifteen feet above the dark water that laps at it. Its upper ridge is elegantly curved, but what draws the eye are the deeply incised grooves that mark its flanks, running straight and parallel with one another, as if it has been methodically mauled. Each groove glows a slightly different shade of blue. Where the grooves shallow out, the ice is dimpled – the dips and rises glistening like flesh after injury.