Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

Urban exploration might best be defined as adventurous trespass in the built environment. Among the requirements for participation are claustrophilia, lack of vertigo, a taste for decay, a fascination with infrastructure, a readiness to climb fences and lift manhole covers, and a familiarity with the varying laws of access across different jurisdictions. Among the sites favoured by urban explorers are skyscrapers, disused factories and hospitals, former military installations, bunkers, bridges and storm-drain networks. A serious explorer needs to be content sitting on the counterweight of a crane 400 feet above the street, or skanking along a sewer twenty yards under the asphalt. Urban explorers shun the Sturm und Drang of mountains. Their thrills are niche, their epiphanies mucky. Rumours circulate about entry points which might give access to unseen spaces. Secrets are jealously guarded, closely shared.

The foreshortening illusion is powerful, born of the air’s pristine clarity, and it is the first of countless misprisions of scale I will experience in Greenland. This is, I will learn, a landscape that plays tricks on the eye, dupes perception, induces forms of clarity that are in fact forms of delusion. Rock and ice walls reflect and redirect sound misleadingly: events occurring ahead of us seem to issue from behind. There are no usual units to which the eye has become accustomed: no buildings, no cars, no distant people. The terrain is built out of a few elements – rock, ice, water – that echo their own forms up and down the orders of magnitude.