Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  The peak’s five-finned summit ridge is of clean golden rock, and from it we can see over and down into a huge horseshoe cirque to its east. The cirque is ringed by sharp mountains and has a collapsing serac face at its centre – a 600-foot wall spilling mint-blue ice rubble onto the snowfield beneath. A chilling wind lifts from the cirque, sapping my confidence.

  Matt leads the final pitch: a chimney of cold, sound rock, up which we bridge and lay-back one by one. The serac face collapses three times while we climb, audible crumps echoing off the cirque walls. From the peak we can see far up the Knud Rasmussen. From here it seems less an ice river than an ice sea, flooding the peaks around it.

  We reverse the summit pitch with cold hands. Lenticular clouds hover over the peaks of the Karale. A front is coming in. Late in the day the sun breaks through with slanted gold rays, backlighting big bergs in the fjord below us so they shine like opals.

  That evening we sit together, exhausted, companionable. It is a time of cusps. Dusk, early September, just beneath the Arctic Circle, by a tideline glacier in East Greenland. The cusp of the day, the cusp of seasons, the cusp of the globe, the cusp of the land. The Arctic fox comes again to the camp, keeping to the shadows where it is blue-silver in colour.

  We stay out late. The last light gathers on the water of the fjord, on the rims and edges of bergs, on quartz seams in the gneiss. Twilight specifies a landscape by means of such finely lit details, but it also disperses it. Relations between objects are loosened, such that shape-shifts occur. In the last minutes before full night falls, I experience a powerful hallucination, my tired eyes starting to see every pale boulder around our tent not as rock but as white bear, polar bear, crouched for the spring.

  A big calving wakes me in the night. Minutes later, waves surge up the shoreline rocks.

  The next morning, nine bergs – human in their size – have wandered into our bay overnight and become beached. They tick as they melt: nine ice-clocks.

  ~

  We leave early the morning after next, carrying heavy packs: gear for several days away. We are heading inland, along the glacier, to establish an advance camp far up the Knud Rasmussen, and use that as a base to explore peaks and passes that lie further in.

  We also want to search for a moulin wide enough to descend.

  We will get onto the glacier via the moraine, pass through disrupted ice hard above the calving face, and then pick up flat ice in the glacier’s centre, over which we can make good progress. That, at least, is the plan. Afterwards Matt will describe what we meet on the Knud Rasmussen as ‘massively exploded terrain’. I will think of it as the Labyrinth. It makes the crevasse mazes of Apusiajik look like children’s puzzles – and beyond it lies a Minotaur.

  We follow the fjord shore to the calving face, cut up and over slopes of bilberry and willow until we meet the lateral moraine slope, a wall of rubble bulldozed to the valley side by the glacier’s seawards drive.

  Any boulder field on a steep gradient is a perilous place. I know someone who died in a boulder slope in the south-west USA, approaching a dihedral spire he planned to solo. He never even made it to the base of the route: ascending the boulder field, he triggered movement in a massive plate of rock, which slid into him at the waist, crushing his pelvis and trapping him fast.

  So on a loaded moraine slope you walk like a cat. Your aim is to dislodge nothing, not even a grain of quartz. You move tenderly. You advance with soft tread, placing the balls of the feet first, not heel-jabbing with a stiff leg. You never pull on a rock with your hand; instead, you press down with your palm or fingertips so that any force you apply confirms the rock in its location. You never put your full foot-weight on a boulder without testing it first. You never move when someone is directly below you on the fall-line. You never put your foot or your arm into a gap between rocks, in case the one above drops down. Shins and forearms break easily in stone jaws.

  We make it safely up the moraine face, four cats in a row – and me, a clumsy ox bringing up the rear. From the high point of its shoulder we can see up and along the glacier, and back down to the calving face. This close we have a sense of the face’s scale. It is a sea cliff. The gulls look like pond-skaters on the silt gouts.

  From there we pick cautiously down the far side of the moraine, desk-sized boulders rocking and rumbling underfoot as they take weight, and at last we step up one by one onto the black-glass fringe where the glacier meets the moraine, and from there we climb up onto the low billows of the Knud Rasmussen proper.

  The night has left films of ice across standing water on the pools. This delicate ice tinkles when broken. The glacier is a frozen sea, as yet calm enough that we have no need of ropes or crampons.

  Half a mile in and the sea becomes stormier. The billows of ice lift, become sharper in their contours, more hog’s back than billow, then more shark’s fin than hog’s back. We rope up, axe up, crampon up. The consequences of a slip or trip are now severe. Our progress slows, as Matt probes to find a way through the crevasse maze. We speak less.

  Crevasses open around us, a few feet deep only at first, soon dropping to twenty, thirty, fifty, countless feet deep. Colours change. The surface ice is whiter than at the snout. The crevasses glow a version of the unearthly blue we saw on Apusiajik. Here the blue is even more intense, more radiant, older.

  Ice is blue because when a ray of light passes through it, it hits the crystal structure of ice and is deflected, bounces off into another crystal and is deflected again, bounces off into another, and another, and in this manner ricochets its way to the eye. Light passing through ice therefore travels much further than the straight-line distance to the eye. Along the way the red end of the spectrum is absorbed, and only the blue remains.

  In glacial terrain of that seriousness, you move like light through ice. Time spins away and space misbehaves. You take an hour to travel half a mile in the desired direction. The straight-line distance to your destination is irrelevant, because the ice sends you on a bouncing and deflected course – a blue-line not a bee-line.

  We are in the Labyrinth for four hours. At last Matt finds a way through and onto flatter ice, and we can unrope, eat, drink, stand in safety. I feel taut nerves slackening again. One of us cries briefly. We all feel hunted by this ice, haunted by it.

  It is still hard going from there, uphill and inland, but the ice is calmer now and our progress is good. As we move, new tributary glaciers open up their vistas to either side. New peaks are glimpsed on the horizon. None has been climbed. They entice us. Our wish is to make a high bivouac that night, and from there strike out for a peak the next day: exploratory mountaineering, no maps to speak of, scant knowledge of the terrain ahead.

  Hot sun now and the glacier’s surface is thawing so fast we can see and hear it. Tiny plates of ice, formed in the hoar-frost forests that rise to the height of a centimetre each dawn, tilt and then blink out as they become water. The glacier hisses. It crackles. Sometimes a bank of slush ice collapses into a melt-stream, and the crystals rush down the channel like sizzling fat.

  ‘Where does all this meltwater go?’ I ask Matt.

  ‘Down the moulins. We’ll find them. You’ll see.’

  We do. Two smaller moulins first, a little bigger than the one we found on Apusiajik. And then the big one, a true maw gaping close to a lateral moraine band. Three meltwater streams curl towards it, braiding into a single current in the final yards then toppling into the drop.

  We circle the moulin warily, as if approaching a wild creature. I put a rope on and Matt belays me to its brim. I lean a little out over the edge – and look straight down into deep blue, into the blood of the glacier. I feel my belly and my bones sucked towards the colour, step quickly back. The void migrates to the surface . . .

  ‘This is the one,’ says Matt. ‘We can get down this one. We’ll need to come back early though, very early, while the glacier is still frozen, before the melt-streams get running. But right now we need to find our bivouac site for ton
ight. I’d much rather be sleeping on rock than on ice.’

  Where a tributary glacier sweeps down to pour into the Knud Rasmussen, a small rock island has been revealed. It is a recent artefact of the increased melt rates – an Anthropocene landmark not present on any existing maps, even on Google Earth – and it sticks out like a boulder in an ice-rapid where the tributary glacier tumbles 400 vertical feet to the Knud Rasmussen. We spot it from two miles away; wonder if it might give enough flat ground on which to camp.

  Near dusk, we climb a slope of grey ice to reach it. Certainly, we are the first people ever to set foot on that new world, disclosed from the underland of ice. It is equivalent to perhaps half a tennis court in area.

  ‘It’s like walking on the moon’, says Helen M in amazement. And it is. The rock is as the ice left it. A thick layer of grey stone dust coats everything. The bedrock has been smoothed by the passage of the ice, but its surface is scattered with loose round stones on which we stumble like drunks.

  Big domes and bulges of ice rear immediately above the island, and it is from these that we gratefully catch meltwater in our bottles, slaking the thirst of the day’s long work.

  It takes half an hour to clear space for the tents, shovelling dust and moving stones. Bill, Helen M and I sing as we work. Bill’s rich voice spills over the glacier as the sun sets, keeping our spirits up. Then we pitch the tents, and lash them down with rocks and cord in anticipation of the night’s wind. Rock dust covers our hands and faces.

  ‘Look, the mountains are on fire!’ calls Helen, pointing.

  They are, too: an intense light flows over the summits from the west, scalding the rock of the highest peaks so red that they seem to be running with lava.

  ~

  The next dawn a low band of cloud stripes the land. We wake into silence, after a night of gusting wind. The air is calm. The glacier has been petrified by the overnight freeze.

  We climb that day: a long ascent of a distant peak, the summit of which we fail to reach.

  The morning after that we wake at five in half-light. We break camp on the rock island quickly, nervously. The air is calm. We crunch down the slope to meet the Knud Rasmussen, then pick up a line of moraine debris and follow it to the moulin.

  Before we see it, noise tells us that even at that cold hour the moulin is churning, the mill is grinding. A stream of water tumbles steadily into it from its western lip.

  ‘The sun’s warming things up already,’ says Helen. ‘Every minute that passes, the flow will increase.’

  We work fast. Matt manages the set-up. Two ropes, four belay points, each one double-pointed. Clear any rotten ice to reveal the hard ice, the sweet stuff that will hold a screw, then press the teeth of the ice-screw in until they bite, make sure it stands perpendicular to the surface, then with one hand steady the screw-barrel and with the other crank the handle. Any object foreign to ice will absorb heat and melt ice, so we must heap and pack brash ice around the screws and the karabiners.

  It takes half an hour to rig things to Matt’s satisfaction. The waterfall gains noticeably in power and noise. It is clear that, once inside the moulin, communication by voice will be almost impossible. We agree a simple sign-system: up, down, pause, and – forearms crossed to make an upheld X – get me the fuck out of here.

  Tie on to descent rope, to haul rope, check and double-check knots. Stamp feet, pull hood hard over, run through final systems again. The moulin dropping away: a radiant blue sci-fi tube, ready to beam me down. Going over the edge I feel no fear, nor should I – just the familiar buzz in the scalp, the caul of bees.

  The space of the moulin is immediately, intensely beautiful. The air has a blue aura and the ice surrounding me is sleek to the touch. I descend foot by foot, and the mouth of the moulin above me cinches its white oval tighter. Glancing down, I can see no base and the memory rises unbidden of flipping centimes into clear azure water from a boat in the Mediterranean as a child, watching as they spun silver through the depths, turning and flashing for thirty, forty, fifty seconds.

  The deeper I go, the closer I come to the meltwater stream that is falling down the moulin, and then my crampons slip on the ice and I spin out from the face and into the torrent, which crashes down on my head with cold pummelling fists and the force of it punches me back out of the torrent, but from there I cannot catch the glassy sides of the moulin again and so I swing back further into the torrent, and there I am knocked out of it again, and so I begin to pendulum back and forth in and out of the torrent, and with each cold dousing I am losing strength, and I feel that I am trapped in a perpetual-motion machine that can run indefinitely even after I have ceased to function.

  I glance up as I pendulum and can see Matt’s face leaning out and looking down at me, mouthing words at me, but he is of the surface now and I am of the depth, and these are quite different places. He exists in that porthole of sky rimmed with white and gold light, but down here there is no colour or time other than blue. Up there Bill, Helen M and Helen are moving freely around on the glacier; down here there are only the glass of the ice, the torrent of the water and the obligations they enforce.

  But this is too strange a site to leave unless I must, so I gesture to Matt that he should lower me, realizing that if I descend further I might be able to pull myself out of the flow, and so I drop deeper and, spinning around, I see that there is – sixty feet down into the glacier, a dozen centuries or so further on – a terrace of a kind, off which the water corkscrews deeper still in a twisting borehole too tight to admit me, but with a lateral blue side passage also leading away. I use the swing of the pendulum to catch the ice edge of the side entrance with my hand. I pull myself towards the passage and out of the flow, and see that below me is a fine spear-blade of ice, twelve feet or so long, that somehow grows upwards from the terrace, and I hook one of my feet around it and then perch on its point. At last I am secure, one hand gripping the passage edge, one foot on the spear-blade. I pause, catch my breath, glance at the porthole, thumb-up to Matt that I am fine. Braced there, I can study the space.

  Twenty feet below me the meltwater current drills away and down into the glacier’s underland, impossible for me to follow. The side passage leads off as a tunnel, though, and I can see a chamber filled with more blue at its end, and I want to follow the passage to that chamber. But I know that rope drag will occur soon after I begin to move sideways from the shaft, making progress difficult and meaning also that a slip in the side passage will bring me slamming back into the main shaft at speed. I wish I had ice-screws with me, so that I could set runners to manage the rope for the traverse of the tunnel. But I do not, and so there is no choice but to stay a while on that blade of ice in this otherworld, and then reluctantly, gratefully, to give the sign to Matt: Get me the fuck out of here!

  He changes over the rig, and they haul me up and out, Helen, Helen M, Bill and Matt all running my weight on a Z-pulley prusik system, and I emerge from the moulin like a gopher from a burrow, head surfacing into the upper world which is full of laughter and how-was-its and open mouths, and Helen is reaching forwards with a hand to pull me to safety, and the sun is streaming its gold on the silver of the ice, and I am blue to my bones for days afterwards from that deep time dive.

  Later we send Bill down too, and from a depth of thirty feet he sings an aria from Tosca. The notes pour up through that great blue pipe-organ and fly joyfully out into the still air.

  ~

  It is afternoon when we step off the Knud Rasmussen glacier for the last time, back near the fjord. The colours of the tundra leap to the eye, shocking in their brightness after the days on ice and rock. Sulphur blaze of grey-leaf willow on the turn, punk green of lichen, black mica shards in the rocks.

  The leaves on the willows have reddened at their tips while we have been away.

  Six ptarmigan churr among bilberries, their plumage on the turn to winter white. We are glad to see life that is not ice. They are unafraid of us. Bill reads them as a score, see
ing their positions on the slope as six notes on a stave.

  On reaching base camp, we drop our packs and bathe in the freezing water of the fjord, scrubbing days of dust and toil from our bodies among the icebergs, whooping and shouting.

  That night there is the fieriest aurora display we have witnessed. We sit up in our sleeping bags to watch it. Green curtains bling and spangle inland, over the Knud Rasmussen, over the rock island, over the moulin. For the first time there are pink hues as well as green – the pink of willowherb. Search beams of green shoot up from summits to the west. The display is profuse, extravagant, spinning over thousands of miles of sky, a busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years . . .

  ‘Have you noticed,’ says Helen M, ‘how the stars show in greater number through the aurora?’

  She is right. I would have expected the Northern Lights to make the stars less visible, rather than more – the excess of light cancelling out the stars’ glimmer. But instead it has the counter-intuitive effect of causing more stars to show, clusters of them, which vanish back into the blackness when the aurora flickers away. None of us can explain how the green light could be collaborative rather than competitive with the starlight.

  That night I dream, clearly and for what seems like hours, that a fine blue moss has begun to grow under my skin, starting on my right forearm, then spreading up to my shoulder and across my chest. It is painless and luxurious.

  ~

  Days afterwards, back in Kulusuk, on our final evening in the village, Helen, Matt and I go out kayaking in the bay with Nuka, one of the young men from the village. Nuka wears a black squared-off baseball cap, has a gold chain and a gold tooth. He is eighteen. He plays the guitar softly, with passion, like José González. He loves kayaking.