I think of Sebeok’s ‘atomic priesthood’ charged with conveying warnings across generations in the form of folklore and myth. I think of the last line of the poem pinned on the tin sheet above the sinkhole into which people had been clubbed and pushed and bayoneted up in the Slovenian beech woods. A curse be upon anyone who might attempt to erase this record . . . I have a swift, chilling sense of the Kalevala as part of a messaging system, the warnings of which we have not heeded or even heard.
The stillness of the stone around is now crushing. I remember being in the bedding plane in the Mendips with Sean, the pressure exerted by the unmoving black stone. Other memories arrive, from further back, rising unbidden in my mind. I am with my father, using the claw of a hammer to prise up the floorboard of the house in which I grew up, in order to lodge a time capsule in a jam jar there. What did we put in the jar? A little die-cast aeroplane, a bomber? Yes. A letter to an unknown future recipient. Rice to absorb moisture and prevent the perishing of paper and ink. A Polaroid photograph of me and my brother. Is that right? At this distance, details have decayed. I can only clearly recall the fact of placing the jar – fat jar, thin mouth, brass lid – and nailing down the floorboard above it. Gone. Safe. A message to the future.
Time begins to fission into overlapping shadow-times. Burial thoughts from the underland crowd in. Neil Moss, his body still there in the shaft in the Peak District, entombed in concrete to prevent future harm to others. The Mesolithic bodies in the Mendips, chrysalized by calcite, almost converted into stone . . . My father’s wish that his ashes be scattered to the winds in three places, so that in this way there is no grave to which we will be tied after his death, and the medium of his remembrance will be an atmosphere, a skein of associations.
I sit down, tired, on the brown plastic chair at the end of the world. Pasi is still in the side tunnel, talking to a worker. I imagine walking down and around a corner in the main tunnel, where it turns out of sight of Pasi. In the right-hand wall of the tunnel are three boreholes, each about the diameter of my shoulder. I imagine reaching as far as I can into the middle borehole, and I imagine that when I retrieve my arm a weight has been lifted from me and a promise has been kept.
Once the canisters of waste have been deposited in Onkalo and all the reception cylinders are replete, the spiralling access ramp will be backfilled, the ventilation shafts will be backfilled, the lift shaft will be backfilled and at last the mouth of the tunnel entrance will be backfilled – 2 million tons of bedrock and bentonite, sealing those canisters in place, keeping the future safe from the present.
Then I see that on another of the plastic panels bolted to the wall of the terminal chamber there is a handprint in the dust: spread fingers, the pad of the thumb pressed clear. It is the print of a right hand, left there at some point for the keeping of balance, for the taking of rest – or just for the making of a mark.
I think of the black and red hand-prints left on the cave walls at Chauvet, of the red figures of the dancers with their outstretched arms, of the spray-can hand stencil on the catacomb wall in Paris, of Helen reaching a hand down to haul me out of the moulin. I think of the many people I have encountered in and through the underland who have been committed to shared human work rather than retreat and isolation. Many of them have been mappers, really, of networks of mutual relation, endeavouring to stitch their thinking into unfamiliar scales of time and space, seeking not the scattered jewels of personal epiphany but rather to enlarge the possible means by which people might move and think together across landscapes, in responsible knowledge of deep past, deep future and the inhuman earth.
Suddenly, surprisingly, there is something hopeful – no, something moving – about this mundanely functional space I have reached. The melamine desk and the moulded chair. The plastic panels with their doodled art. Pasi’s passion for Onkalo. The copper canisters, the visitors’ centre, Einstein’s drooping moustache. Here a vast problem is being solved, gradually and practically, by a community of people to the best of their abilities. Here the hard labour of collective decision-taking and world-making is being carried out, imperfectly but necessarily, and with a care that extends not only for a decade or a generation but far forwards into a post-human future.
Maybe this is among the best things we can try to do, I think, as the Sampo grinds through the world’s epochs: to be good ancestors. I remember a paragraph I have copied out into a notebook, from a book called After Nature:
People are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature: something to fear, a threat they must avoid, and also something to love, a quality . . . which they can do their best to honour. Either impulse can stay the human hand, but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken. The second keeps the hand poised, extended in greeting or in an offer of peace. This gesture is the beginning of collaboration, among people but beyond us, in building our next home.
~
When we return to the surface the wind has eased but the snowfall has strengthened. Dusk is coming. All sight is through fading grey light. Mid-afternoon and already the day is over.
Back over the bridge from the island. Salt marsh at either side of the bridge. The sea in shattered pieces. A blue letter-box on a white pole. Boulders big as houses among the pines, between the birches. My headlights making tunnels in the dusk ahead. Birches, pines, birches, birches. Everything frozen.
On the way back to Rauma a yellow dashboard warning light pings on. The back right tyre is losing pressure. I can feel the car’s grip on the icy road starting to loosen. I pull over, crunch to a halt, get out. The tyre is almost flat. Deep forest runs to right and left of the road. The car detects the air temperature to be -12°C. I am getting cold fast. I don’t have enough warm clothes with me. I look in the boot. There is a spare tyre but no jack. This is not a good situation. I do not know what to do.
Five minutes later I see the headlights of an approaching vehicle, the first to pass. I stand by my car and raise a hand into the air, asking for help, not expecting to receive it. But the car pulls over, and a man gets out. I explain the situation, my helplessness, that I was driving back from the island when it happened. He says he is a worker from Olkiluoto on his way home after finishing a shift.
‘I’m sorry. You must be tired,’ I say. ‘Thank you for stopping.’
‘It is just no problem,’ he says.
He has a jack. Ten minutes later he has changed the tyre and stowed the flat in the boot. He cleans the oil and grease from his fingers with a cloth. Then he puts out a hand, I shake it in gratitude, and we drive off one after the other into the darkness.
13
Surfacing
The way out of the underland is where nine springs flow clear from the bedrock.
Months after Onkalo, when the year has warmed, I take my youngest son to the chalk uplands a mile or so from our house. He is four years old and I am forty-one. We cycle most of the way, then I lay the bike in the grass and he and I walk hand-in-hand the few hundred yards to a half-acre copse of beech and ash called Nine Wells Wood. Nine Wells lies close to the railway line, close to the hospital, and like many small woods its extent seems much greater once entered than it appears from the outside.
The hour or so that he and I spend together in the wood is happy and calm. There I am able to focus on him, to walk at his pace, to think what it is like to see the world as a four-year-old might see it. The sun is high and strong, and light streams through the canopy, falling in splinters around us.
We make our way to the end of the wood where the springs rise. The springs have organized themselves in a circle around a hollow in the chalk, filling a pool that is perhaps a foot deep and six feet across. The water in the pool is so clear as to be invisible, save for the root-like reflection of the branches above that it carries.
The sides of the hollow are slippery, so I hold on to the trunk of an elder with one hand and grip his arm with the other, and in this manner he and I are able to slither down
to the edge of the pool and crouch there.
He is amazed by the fact of the springs. He cannot comprehend that water should issue from the earth like this, that the stone should flow in this way.
We count the springs off, one by one. They declare themselves only by the ripples they stir on the surface.
‘The water is black,’ he says, and this puzzles me until I realize that because the water is so clear he is seeing straight through it to the pool bed, which is dark with fallen leaves and twigs.
To prove the water’s existence I dip a hand and drink. The water – straight from the chalk – tastes different from any other I know; somehow round in the mouth. And cold. Stone-cold. I hold a cupped hand of the water up for him and he drinks from it too, tentatively at first, then greedily, gripping my wrist, enjoying the water’s coolness on that warm day.
Of the nine springs, he likes best the one with the strongest flow. I like the smallest, though, the one on the inaccessible far side of the pool, just below water level. There the chalk is whitest and the spring shows itself only as the faintest of ripples, and as a triangular rift in the chalk giving onto inky blackness.
Sitting there on the ground by the springs, him sitting on me, I let my mind run against the flow of the water, following its path back into the rift in the chalk, and down through the interstices of the rock. I think of what has been excavated and interred here over thousands of years of human presence – Neolithic causewayed enclosures, Bronze Age burial barrows, a sunken Iron Age ring fort, a medieval cemetery, a Second World War anti-tank trench, a buried Cold War observation post a few hundred yards distant, down into which a designated observer was to retreat in the event of a nuclear strike, with no room for his wife or children, who were to be abandoned by order of the government.
I hug my son. A young woman appears on the path above the pool, looks down into the spring-hollow and smiles on seeing us. She is walking her collie. The dog darts around, barking. We talk for a little, low to high, about the springs, the wood, the weather. On her calf she has a circular tattoo of a map that shows the Arctic Circle from Canada all the way round to Greenland, as if seen from a vantage point somewhere above the North Pole.
Lumps of white chalk lie among the ivy, glowing in the day-dusk of the wood. Dragonflies hunt the spring stream where it flows away from us. Beneath and around us, invisibly, the fungal network connects tree to tree.
The young woman walks on, calling for her dog, which has disappeared. My son and I talk quietly about nothing much. We feel small in the universe, and together.
Later, as we are leaving, he runs on ahead down a tunnel of briar and blackthorn. The tunnel is at first in shadow, but as I watch him run he passes into a place where the sunshine falls so brightly that he is burned up by it, lost to my sight, and suddenly the knowledge that he will die strikes me and every leaf falls from the trees around us and the air greys to ash and colour is utterly lost – and then life and hue pour back into the world as quickly as they were drained from it, and the leaves flicker greenly on the trees again.
I run to catch up with him, calling loudly, and he turns to face me at the edge of the wood. As I kneel down on the earth he raises a hand in the air, fingers spread wide. I reach my hand towards his and meet it palm to palm, finger to finger, his skin strange as stone against mine.
NOTES
List of abbreviations used in the notes
ALDP : Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
ANP : Richard Bradley, An Archaeology of Natural Places (London: Routledge, 2006)
TAP : Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London: Harvard University Press, 1999)
TK : The Kalevala, trans. Keith Bosley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Epigraphs
Page
v ‘Is it dark down there . . . under-land of Null?’: Helen Adam, ‘Down There in the Dark’, in A Helen Adam Reader, ed. Kristin Prevallet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2007), p. 34.
v ‘The void migrates to the surface . . . ’: Advances in Geophysics, ed. Lars Nielsen, vol. 57 (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 2016), p. 99.
Chapter 1: Descending
Pages
12 ‘deep subterranean fact’: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 3.
12 ‘the awful darkness inside the world’: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985; New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 117.
12 ‘They lay full length . . . he could not move’: Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960; London: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 177–8.
13 ‘flat tradition. . . resolutely flat perspectives ‘: Stephen Graham, Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (London: Verso, 2016), pp. 4–7.
13 ‘Force yourself to see more flatly ‘: Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 51.
14 Anthrax spores are being released from reindeer corpses: on this and other forms of Arctic surfacing see Sophia Roosth’s fine essay ‘Virus, Coal, and Seed: Subcutaneous Life in the Polar North’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 December 2016
14 ‘doorway to the underworld’: Melissa Hogenboom, ‘In Siberia There is a Huge Crater and It is Getting Bigger’, BBC, 24 February 2017.
14 ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: see R. Brázdil, P. Dobrovolny et al., ‘Droughts in the Czech Lands, 1090–2012 AD’, Climate of the Past 9 (August 2013), 1985–2002.
14–15 ‘The problem is not that things become buried. . . dark force of “sleeping giants”‘: Þora Pétursdóttir, ‘Drift’, in Multispecies Archaeology, ed. Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 85–102, p. 98; see also Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘Climate Change? Archaeology and Anthropocene’, Archaeological Dialogues 24:2 (2017), 182–93; ‘sleeping giants’ is quoted from Graham Harman, Immaterialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), p. 7.
15 ‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland: the coining of the phrase ‘deep time’ is usually attributed to John McPhee in Basin and Range (New York: FSG, 1981); John Playfair wrote of ‘the abyss of time’ as he examined the Siccar Point unconformity with James Hutton in June 1788.
16 ‘netherworld. . . I saw them’: ‘Gilgamesh, Endiku and the Nether World’, Version A, in J. A. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Fluckiger-Hawker, E. Robson and G. Zólyomi, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (Oxford: 1998-)
17 ‘People were making journeys into the darkness’: Alistair Pike, quoted in Emma Marris, ‘Neanderthal Artists Made Oldest-Known Cave Paintings’, Nature, 22 February 2018.
18 ‘The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned’: William Carlos Williams, ‘The Descent’, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1988), p. 245.
18 ‘the feet of the dead . . . touch those of the living, who stand upright’: Richard Bradley, drawing on the work of Tim Ingold, ANP, p. 12; see Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 246.
19 the first of the objects. . . help me see in the dark: the whalebone owl and the demon casket were made and given to me on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides by the sculptor Steve Dilworth, about whose extraordinary life and work more can be read in the chapter entitled ‘Gneiss’ in my book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012). Images of his sculptures and practice can be seen at
Chapter 2: Burial
Pages
25 ‘surprised with the appearance . . . converted into stone ‘: Bristol Mercury & Universal Advertiser, 16 January 1797. This source among others is quoted in full
in A. Boycott and L. J. Wilson, ‘Contemporary Accounts of the Discovery of Aveline’s Hole, Burrington Combe, North Somerset’, Proceedings of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society 25:1 (2010), 11—25. I draw here also on R. J. Schulting, ‘“. . . Pursuing a Rabbit in Burrington Combe”: New Research on the Early Mesolithic Burial Cave of Aveline’s Hole’, Proceedings of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society 23:3 (2005), 171—265.
28 ‘is hollow . . . some huge subterranean sea’: Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, in Arthur Conan Doyle, Tales of Terror and Mystery (1902; Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2009), p. 58.
29 ‘I do not trust space an inch’: Tim Robinson, My Time in Space (Dublin: Lilliput, 2001), p. 114.
30 ‘To be human means above all to bury’: Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. xi. See also Rebecca Altman’s fine essay ‘On What We Bury’, ISLE 21:1 (Winter 2014), 85–95.
30–31 In a cave system called Rising Star. . . some 300,000 years ago: see John Hawks et al., ‘New Fossil Remains of Homo Naledi from the Lesedi Chamber, South Africa’, eLife 6 (2017).
31 ‘between fourty and fifty Urnes . . . nether part of the Earth ‘: Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff (1658; New York: NYRB Classics, 2012), pp. 103, 114—15, 112.
32–3 Twelve thousand years ago in a limestone cave . . . inside her chamber: see Leore Grossman et al., ‘A 12,000-Year-Old Shaman Burial from the Southern Levant (Israel)’, PNAS 105:46 (2008), 17665—9.
40 The most notorious story in British caving history. . . known as Moss Chamber: I draw in this description on several sources, principally: James Lovelock, Life and Death Underground (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1963), pp. 11–27; Dave Webb and Judy Whiteside, ‘Fight for Life: The Neil Moss Story’
Underland Page 36