Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

‘Does it change the way the world feels?’ I ask him. ‘Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter – about what matters? Are you surprised we don’t fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?’ Christopher nods. He thinks. His screensaver changes to the limestone towers at Guilin, seen near dusk such that they are backlit in ways that are considered widely appealing on Instagram and other large-scale image-sharing platforms. ‘At the weekends,’ Christopher says, ‘when I’m out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we’re walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.’ He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe. ‘But mostly, and in several ways, I’m amazed I’m able to hold the hand of the person I love.’

We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.

Throughout the cave there is, strikingly, little foreground present – no line of landscape or vegetation on which these creatures exist. They have no habitat save the rock and the dark, and as such they seem to float free, unmoored from the world. They exist at once as exquisite anatomical drawings – and as embodiments of a worldview utterly different from our own. These animals live, as Simon McBurney memorably puts it: in an enormous present, which also contained past and future. A present in which nature was not only contiguous with them, but continuous. They flowed in and out of a continuum of everything around them; just as the animals flow into and out of the rock. And if the rock was alive, so were the animals. Everything was alive.

Perhaps, concludes McBurney, ‘this is what truly separates us’ from the makers of this art: ‘not the space of time but the sense of time . . . In our minute splicing of our lives into milliseconds, we live separated from everything that surrounds us.’ Certainly, the three discoverers of the cave recognized, as they stood there that first day in 1994, something of that older sense of being. ‘It was as if time had been abolished,’ wrote Jean-Marie Chauvet, ‘as if the tens of thousands of years of separation no longer existed, and we were not alone, the painters were here too.’