Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful. Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives). Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions). Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets). Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.

We are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an ongoing occurrence experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of joint – and so is place. Things that should have stayed buried are rising up unbidden. When confronted by such surfacings it can be hard to look away, seized by the obscenity of the intrusion.

In the Arctic, ancient methane deposits are leaking through ‘windows’ in the earth opened by melting permafrost. Anthrax spores are being released from reindeer corpses buried in once-frozen soil, now exposed by erosion and warmth. In the forests of Eastern Siberia a crater is yawning in the softening ground, swallowing tens of thousands of trees and revealing 200,000-year-old strata: local Yakutian people refer to it as a ‘doorway to the underworld’. Retreating Alpine and Himalayan glaciers are yielding the bodies of those engulfed by their ice decades before. Across Britain, recent heatwaves have caused the imprints of ancient structures – Roman watchtowers, Neolithic enclosures – to shimmer into view as crop-marks visible from above: aridity as X-ray, the land’s submerged past rising up in parched visitation. Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.’ In north-west Greenland an American Cold War missile base, sealed under the ice cap fifty years ago and containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical contaminants, has begun to move towards the light. ‘The problem,’ writes the archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that ...

‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark whe...

When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.

Classical literature records numerous instances of what in Greek were known as the katabasis (a descent to the underland) and the nekyia (a questioning of ghosts, gods or the dead about the earthly future), among them Orpheus’ attempt to retrieve his beloved Eurydice from Hades, and Aeneas’ voyage – led by the Sibyl, protected by the Golden Bough – to seek counsel with the shade of his father. The recent rescue of the Thai footballers from their lonely chamber far inside a mountain was a modern katabasis: the story seized global attention in part because it possessed the power of myth.

What these narratives all suggest is something seemingly paradoxical: that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation. Our common verb ‘to understand’ itself bears an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it. ‘To discover’ is ‘to reveal by excavation’, ‘to descend and bring to the light’, ‘to fetch up from depth’. These are ancient associations. The earliest-known works of cave art in Europe – taking the form of painted ladders, dots and hand stencils on the walls of Spanish caves – have been dated to around 65,000 years ago, some 20,000 years before Homo sapiens are believed to have first arrived in Europe from Africa. Neanderthal artists left these images. Long before anatomically modern humans reached what is now Spain, writes one of the archaeologists responsible for the dating of this art, ‘People were making journeys into the darkness.’

We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.

‘To be human means above all to bury,’ declares Robert Pogue Harrison in his study of burial practices, The Dominion of the Dead, boldly drawing on Vico’s suggestion that humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, meaning ‘burying, burial’, itself from humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’. We are, certainly, a burying species as well as a building species – and our predecessors were buriers too. In a cave system called Rising Star in the limestone of South Africa a team of palaeoarchaeologists led by six women has discovered fossilized bone fragments thought to belong to a previously unknown early human relative, a species now named as Homo naledi. The disposition of this dark matter in two deep-set chambers suggests, remarkably, that Homo naledi was already interring its dead underground some 300,000 years ago. In burial, the human body becomes a component of the earth, returned as dust to dust – inhumed, restored to humility, rendered humble. Just as the living need places to inhabit, so it is often in the nature of our memory-making to wish to be able to address our dead at particular sites on the Earth’s surface. The burial chamber, the gravestone, the hillside on which ashes have been scattered, the cairn: these are places to which the living can return and where loss might be laid to rest. The grief of those who have been unable to locate the bodies of their loved ones can be especially corrosive – acid and unhealing. We give bodies and their residues to t...

Limestone, in particular, has long been a geology of burial – in part because it is so common globally, in part because its erosive tendencies create so many natural crypts into which bodies may be laid, and in part because limestone is itself, geologically speaking, a cemetery. Limestone is usually formed of the compressed bodies of marine organisms – crinoids and coccolithophores, ammonites, belemnites and foraminifera – that died in waters of ancient seas and then settled in their trillions on those seabeds. These creatures once built their skeletons and shells out of calcium carbonate, metabolizing the mineral content of the water in which they lived to create intricate architectures. In this way limestone can be seen as merely one phase in a dynamic earth cycle, whereby mineral becomes animal becomes rock; rock that will in time – in deep time – eventually supply the calcium carbonate out of which new organisms will build their bodies, thereby re-nourishing the same cycle into being again.

I think of Rievaulx Abbey west of Boulby, where in a fertile river valley Cistercian monks founded and built a space in which to hold Mass. Out of ironstone they made an airy structure of soaring buttresses and vaulted ceilings. Their abbey was one among a network of such sites spread around the world, in which prayers were offered to a presence disinclined to disclose itself to the usual beseechings. On the hillsides above the abbey geological forms known as ‘slip-rifts’ slowly open and close in the rock, emitting warm air from deep within the earth, such that on cold days the hillside itself appears to be breathing – as if the land itself were alive. Thousands of years before the Cistercians arrived in those valleys, Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples entered the darkness of the slip-rifts to carry out rituals that may have been sacrificial and were surely devotional, interring body parts amid the stones of the rifts; another kind of annihilation product.

I remember the Wind Cave system in the Black Hills of South Dakota, sacred to the Lakota Sioux people and close to the American dark-matter detection laboratory set deep in the worked-out gold mine. From the opening to Wind Cave, which extends for more than 130 miles below ground, air rushes or is drawn with such force that it can strip hats from heads. In the Lakota creation stories it is from Wind Cave that humans first emerge into the upper world, where they are astonished by colour and space.

What signatures our species will leave in the strata! We remove whole mountain tops to plunder the coal they contain. The oceans dance with hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic waste, slowly settling into sea-floor sediments. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out smog-palls that settle into the soils of nations. A nitrogen spike, indicated in ice-cores and sediments, will be one of the key chemical insignias of the Anthropocene, caused by the mass global use of synthetic nitrogen-rich fertilizers and by fossil-fuel burning. Biodiversity levels are crashing worldwide as we hasten into the sixth great extinction event, while the soaring number of a small number of livestock species ensures the geological posterity in the fossil record of sheep, cows and pigs. We have become titanic world-makers, our legacy legible for epochs to come.

Among the relics of the Anthropocene, therefore, will be the fallout of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.

But the Anthropocene, for all its faults, also issues a powerful shock and challenge to our self-perception as a species. It exposes both the limits of our control over the long-term processes of the planet, and the magnitude of the consequences of our activities. It lays bare some of the cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other beings now, as well as between humans and more-than-humans still to come. Perhaps above all the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’

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.

For centuries, fungi had generally been considered harmful to plants: parasites that caused disease and dysfunction. As Simard began her research, however, it was increasingly thought that certain kinds of common fungi might exist in subtle mutualism with plants. The hyphae of these so-called ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi were understood not only to infiltrate the soil, but also to weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level – thereby creating an interface through which molecular transmission might occur. By means of this weaving, too, the roots of individual plants or trees were joined to one another by a magnificently intricate subterranean system. Simard’s enquiries confirmed that beneath her forest floor there did indeed exist what she called an ‘underground social network’, a ‘bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species’ that linked sapling to sapling. She also discovered that the hyphae made connections between species: joining not only paper birch to paper birch and Douglas fir to Douglas fir, but also fir to birch and far beyond – forming a non-hierarchical network between numerous kinds of plants.

Two of the beech’s lower limbs have melted into one another, their bark conjoining into a single continuous skin, their vascular systems growing and uniting. Living wood, left long enough, behaves as a slow-moving fluid. Like the halite down in the darkness of Boulby mine, like the calcite I had seen beneath the Mendips, like glacial ice drawing itself on over topsoil and bedrock, living wood seems to flow, given time. ‘I’ve heard this called “pleaching”,’ I say to Merlin, patting the fused branches. ‘The artist David Nash planted a circle of ash trees in a clearing in North Wales, then bent and wove the trees so that they grew not just next to one another but into one another, a dancing “Ash Dome”, made of a meld of boughs and limbs.’ ‘Actually,’ says Merlin, ‘plant scientists have a technical term for this. We call it “snogging”, or to give it its full name, “tree snogging”.’ He smiles. ‘Well, not quite. The technical term is actually “inosculation”, from the Latin osculare, meaning “to kiss”. Inosculation means “to en-kiss”. It can happen across trees and between species too.’ Though I know the word ‘inosculation’, I had not known its etymology; what seemed a chilly specialist term gains a passionate warmth, and feels true to this arboreal ‘en-kissing’, which makes it hard to say where one being ends and another begins. I think of Ovid’s version of the ‘Baucis and Philemon’ myth, in which an elderly couple are transformed into an intertwining oak and linden, each suppor...

It is typical of Merlin that he became fascinated from a young age not with the charismatic megafauna of the world, but instead with the undersung, underseen inhabitants of the biota: lichens, mosses and fungi. He studied them as an amateur teenage scientist, counting lichen species on gravestones and granite boulders, and trying to comprehend the subterranean architecture of fungal life – above-ground mushrooms as fruiting bodies that stand as mere fleeting allusions to immense underland structures. ‘My childhood superheroes weren’t Marvel characters,’ Merlin once said to me, ‘they were lichens and fungi. Fungi and lichen annihilate our categories of gender. They reshape our ideas of community and cooperation. They screw up our hereditary model of evolutionary descent. They utterly liquidate our notions of time. Lichens can crumble rocks into dust with terrifying acids. Fungi can exude massively powerful enzymes outside their bodies that dissolve soil. They’re the biggest organisms in the world and among the oldest. They’re world-makers and world-breakers. What’s more superhero than that?’

‘What interests me most,’ says Merlin, ‘is the understorey’s understory.’ He points around at the beech, the hornbeam, the chestnut. ‘All of these trees and bushes,’ he says, ‘are connected with one another below ground in ways we not only cannot see, but ways we have scarcely begun to understand.’ While studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge, Merlin read Simard’s groundbreaking research into the wood wide web. He also read E. I. Newman’s classic 1988 paper, ‘Mycorrhizal Links between Plants: Their Functioning and Ecological Significance’. There Newman argued against the assumption that ‘plants are physiologically separate from each other’, proposing instead the existence of a ‘mycelial network’ that might link plants together. ‘If this phenomenon is widespread,’ wrote Newman, ‘it could have profound implications for the functioning of ecosystems.’ Those ‘implications’ were indeed profound, and they fascinated Merlin. He already loved the alien realm of fungi. He knew that fungi could turn rocks to rubble, could move with swiftness both overground and underground, could reproduce horizontally, and digest food outside their bodies by means of metabolically ingenious excreted acids. He knew that their toxins could kill us, and their psychoactive chemicals could induce hallucinogenic states. The work of Simard and Newman, however, revealed to him that fungi could also allow plants to communicate with one another.

The term ‘mycorrhiza’ is made from the Greek words for ‘fungus’ and ‘root’. It is itself a collaboration or entanglement; and as such a reminder of how language has its own sunken system of roots and hyphae, through which meaning is shared and traded. The relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and the plants they connect is ancient – around 450 million years old – and largely one of mutualism. In the case of the tree–fungi mutualism, the fungi siphon off carbon that has been produced in the form of glucose by the trees during photosynthesis, by means of chlorophyll that the fungi do not possess. In turn, the trees obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi have acquired from the soil through which they grow, by means of enzymes that the trees lack. The possibilities of the wood wide web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, though. For the fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources between one another. Sugars, nitrogen and phosphorus can be shared between trees in a forest: a dying tree might divest its resources into the network to the benefit of the community, for example, or a struggling tree might be supported with extra resources by its neighbours. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant via the network that it should up-regulate its defensive response before the aphids reach it....

‘This is our problem when it comes to studying the fungal network,’ he says. ‘Soil is fantastically impenetrable to experiments, and the fungal hyphae are on the whole too thin to see with the naked eye. That’s the main reason it’s taken us so long to work out the wood wide web’s existence, and to discern what it’s doing.’ Rivers of sap flow in the trees around us. If we were right now to lay a stethoscope to the bark of a birch or beech, we would hear the sap bubbling and crackling as it moves through the trunk. ‘You can put rhizotrons into the ground to look at root growth,’ Merlin says, ‘but those don’t really give you the fungi because they’re too fine. You can do below-ground laser scanning but, again, that’s too crude for the fungal networks.’ I am reminded once more of how resistant the underland remains to our usual forms of seeing; how it still hides so much from us, even in our age of hyper-visibility and ultra-scrutiny. Just a few inches of soil is enough to keep startling secrets, hold astonishing cargo: an eighth of the world’s total biomass comprises bacteria that live below ground, and a further quarter is of fungal origin. ‘We know the network is there,’ Merlin says, ‘but it’s so effortful to track it. So we have to look for clues to the labyrinth – find clever means of following its paths.’ I kneel beside him. I can see dozens of insects just in this small area, the names of most of which I do not know: gleaming spiders and red-bronze beetles battling over...

As Merlin speaks I feel a quick, eerie sense of the world shifting irreversibly around me. Ground shivering beneath feet, knees, skin. If only your mind were a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning . . . I glance down, try to trance the soil into transparency such that I can see its hidden infrastructure: millions of fungal skeins suspended between tapering tree roots, their prolific liaisons creating a gossamer web at least as intricate as the cables and fibres that hang beneath our cities. What’s the haunting phrase I’ve heard used to describe the realm of fungi? The kingdom of the grey. It speaks of fungi’s utter otherness – the challenges they issue to our usual models of time, space and species. ‘You look at the network,’ says Merlin, ‘and then it starts to look back at you.’

All taxonomies crumble, but fungi leave many of our fundamental categories in ruin. Fungi thwart our usual senses of what is whole and singular, of what defines an organism, and of what descent or inheritance means. They do strange things to time, because it is not easy to say where a fungus ends or begins, when it is born or when it dies. To fungi, our world of light and air is their underland, into which they tentatively ascend here and there, now and then.

Fungi were among the first organisms to return to the blast zone around the impact point in Hiroshima, the point from which the mushroom cloud had risen. After Hiroshima, too, images of the mushroom cloud began to appear ubiquitously in media and culture – the fruiting bodies of a new global anxiety. Scientists working in Chernobyl after the disaster there were surprised to discover fine threads of melanized fungi lacing the distressed concrete of the reactor itself, where radiation levels were over 500 times higher than in the normal environment. They were even more surprised to work out that the fungi were actively thriving due to the high levels of ionizing radiation: that they benefited from this usually lethal gale, increasing their biomass by processing it in some way. Ecologists in the US seeking to understand how American trees will respond to the stress of climate change have begun to focus on the presence of soil fungi as a key indicator of future forest resilience. Recent studies suggest that well-developed fungal networks will enable forests to adapt faster at larger scales to the changing conditions of the Anthropocene.

Certainly, orthodox ‘Western’ understandings of nature feel inadequate to the kinds of world-making that fungi perform. As our historical narratives of progress have come to be questioned, so the notion of history itself has become remodelled. History no longer feels figurable as a forwards-flighting arrow or a self-intersecting spiral; better, perhaps, seen as a network branching and conjoining in many directions. Nature, too, seems increasingly better understood in fungal terms: not as a single gleaming snow-peak or tumbling river in which we might find redemption, nor as a diorama that we deplore or adore from a distance – but rather as an assemblage of entanglements of which we are messily part. We are coming to understand our bodies as habitats for hundreds of species of which Homo sapiens is only one, our guts as jungles of bacterial flora, our skins as blooming fantastically with fungi.

During his second season on the island, Merlin became interested in a type of plants called ‘mycoheterotrophs’ – ‘mycohets’ for short. Mycohets are plants that lack chlorophyll and thus are unable to photosynthesize. As such they are entirely reliant on the fungal network for their provision of carbon. Some are white, some tinged lilac or violet. ‘These little ghosts plug into the fungal network,’ Merlin explains, ‘and somehow derive everything from it without paying anything back, at least in the usual coin. They don’t play by the normal rules of symbiosis – but we can’t prove they’re parasites. You could imagine them as the hackers of the wood wide web.’ Merlin focused on a genus of mycohets called the Voyria, a group of gentians known as ‘ghost plants’, the flowers of which studded the jungle floor on Barro Colorado Island like pale purple stars. Working with local villagers, he carried out a painstaking census of the soil in a series of plots, sampling and sequencing the DNA of hundreds of root samples taken both from green plants and the Voyria. The census allowed him to determine what species of fungi were connecting with which plants – and thereby to make an unprecedentedly detailed map of the jungle’s social network. ‘I only stumbled across the importance of Voyria by accident,’ he says, ‘wandering around one day looking for something else, when I realized that they had almost vanished from a plot where we’d increased the phosphorus input. That’s how my breakthroug...

The real underland of language is not the roots of single words, but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world-makers – and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.

Another valley is sheer-sided on its eastern flank, with 400-foot-high white cliffs rearing almost from the road. Plumb in the centre of one is a cave mouth, and out of that mouth roars a silver river which plummets to a plunge pool at the cliff’s base. Rainbows drift in the spray. I have never seen a feature like it. It defies all the usual geological and fluvial rules. Rivers are not meant to issue from the centre of cliffs. But then the earth is not meant to have tides, and mountains are not meant to have windows – and caves are not meant to grow glaciers. We find the glacier-cave sunk high in the mountains, where the beech trees grow to sixty feet or more and the canopy is so thick we can hardly see the sky. We follow a thin contouring path, knotty with tree roots, through the forest. The air is heavy, hot. As we walk, Lucian explains the glacier’s existence to me, but I can hardly believe what he is saying to be true. A flowing river of ice at this height, in this heat? There is no lying snow for many miles around. ‘This cave system is a mile in length, nearly 400 metres deep, and it perforates an entire mountain from one side to another,’ says Lucian. ‘The free movement of wind along the cave system, combined with the chill of the rock itself, keeps the temperatures within the system well below freezing. Snow gathers in the cave mouths in the winter, blown deep into it by the northerly winds, and – hey presto! – over thousands of years, the snow becomes a long thin g...

The ground begins to fall away to the left of the path. We are soon on the edge of a huge doline, perhaps 150 feet across. The far side is near vertical, but our side slopes at fifty degrees or so, and a thin track switchbacks down into the chasm, where a cave mouth gapes. With each hairpin of the path, the air chills around us. I have never before experienced such a precipitous temperature gradient. Thirty degrees Celsius at the doline’s edge becomes twenty-five degrees Celsius within sixteen vertical feet, and so it drops as we drop, and though we pushed first through tepid air, soon an evening cool is around us, and then as we approach the cave mouth, 100 feet down, the air prickles cold as metal in the nose, our breath feathers in front of us and then we pass into a fine silver mist – the breath of the glacier itself. The steep temperature gradient produces a steeply raked ecology. The trees shrink in size with each turn of the path, from towering beeches to bonsai pines near the cave’s belly, clinging on in the arctic temperatures. By the entrance to the maw, where the temperature rarely rises above freezing, there is only moss and lichen matting – a low polar tundra. The smells at this depth are wholly different from those of the Carso and the forests; instead of heat, herbs, resin and stone, here is moss, winter and ice. Lucian and I scramble down a short slab of rock, cross the threshold of the cave and step into darkness. I glance back up through the mist to see a...

‘There are certain glaciers that are held to be clearly malign around here,’ says Matt. ‘There’s one that Kulusumi people just won’t go near, because it has a reputation for hostility. If you have to cross near it, you don’t speak, eat or even look at the glacier while making the crossing, because it calves so far below the waterline that it can kill you from beneath without warning. They call this puitsoq, “the ice that comes from below”.’

The Greek word for ‘sign’, sema, is also the word for ‘grave’. Around 1990 the research field of nuclear semiotics was born. As plans developed for the burial of radioactive waste, so the question emerged in America of how to warn future generations of the great and durable danger that lay at depth. It became important, the US Department of Energy decided, to devise a ‘marker system’ that could deter intrusion into a repository ‘during the next 10,000 years’. The Environmental Protection Agency founded a ‘Human Interference Task Force’ charged with the imagining of such a system for the entombment sites under construction at Yucca Mountain and in the New Mexico desert. Two separate panels were convened to consider the issue of the ‘marker system’, reporting to an overall Expert Judgment Panel. Among those invited to express interest in joining the panels were anthropologists, architects, archaeologists, historians, graphic artists, ethicists, librarians, sculptors and linguists, as well as geologists, astronomers and biologists.

The challenges faced by the panels were formidable. How to devise a warning system that could survive – both structurally and semantically – even catastrophic phases of planetary future. How to communicate with unknown beings-to-be across chasms of time to the effect that they must not intrude into these burial chambers, thus violating the waste’s quarantine? Several proposals developed by the panels involved forms of what is now known as hostile architecture, but which they referred to as ‘passive institutional controls’. They suggested constructing above ground at the burial site a ‘Landscape of Thorns’ (fifty-foot-high concrete pillars with jutting spikes that impeded access and suggested ‘danger to the body’), a ‘Black Hole’ (a mass of black granite or concrete that absorbed solar energy to become impassably hot) and ‘Forbidding Blocks’ (the bulks of which might intimidate a visitor into turning back). The panel members realized, however, that such aggressive structures might act as enticements rather than cautions, suggesting ‘Here be treasure’ rather than ‘Here be dragons’. Prince Charming hacked his way through the briars and thorns to wake Sleeping Beauty. Howard Carter excavated Tutankhamun’s tomb despite the multiple obstructions placed in the way of access, and the warnings given in languages other than his own. Other proposals from the panels involved versions of a transcendental signifier. Human faces could be carved into stone: pictograms or petroglyphs conve...

‘There was a joke among the designers and engineers at Onkalo during the early years of its construction,’ says Pasi abruptly, rapping the stone with his knuckles, ‘that as they began drilling and blasting, the first thing they would uncover would be a copper canister, containing spent fuel rods . . .’ I think with a jolt of the Kalevala, with the powerful Sampo grinding out its epochal changes, with its embedded warnings from centuries ago about the dangers of disinterral from below ground, about the need for copper to insulate from harm, and about the dreadful disease that will ravage air, water and all life if it is brought in untimely fashion to the surface. 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.