Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

‘As if’ – in the analogy of the poet and dark-matter physicist Rebecca Elson – ‘all there were, were fireflies / And from them you could infer the meadow’.

webwork. The great challenge faced by physicists has been how to compel such elusive particles to interact with experiments; how to weave a net that might catch these quick fish. One

halite and

curious correlation. When paper birch saplings were weeded out from clear-cut and reseeded plantations, their disappearance coincided with first the deterioration and then premature deaths of the planted Douglas fir saplings among which they grew. Foresters had long assumed that such weeding was necessary to prevent the young birches (the ‘weeds’) depriving the young firs (the ‘crop’) of valuable soil resources. But Simard began to wonder whether this simple model of competition was correct. It seemed to her plausible that the

crash in financial markets worldwide. No, the omens of Merlin

Its form may be compared to a constellation or galaxy, the individual stars of which he drew together over more than a decade, collecting notes, quotations, aphorisms, stories and reflections in dozens of dossiers that he called Konvolute – ‘convolutes’ in English, meaning ‘coils’, ‘twists’, ‘enfoldments’ – each of which was identified by a letter. Rather

Wanderer above a Sea of Fog.

‘Interdit d’entrer’.

okna (Slovenian) is a point where water has worn

Arachnocampa luminosa,

After the war, Lucian’s father was posted to Trieste,

Mithras.

Théophile Gautier in 1868, and the reverse is also true. The fallen angel of French speleology is a man called Marcel Loubens, who was seized from a young age by what the British caver James Lovelock called ‘a passion for depth . . .

. You get to the point where there is no God, no past, no future, just now and the next millisecond. It’s not a threatening environment – just total serenity.’ The free-diver Natalia Molchanova similarly

described her time below the surface as self-dissolving. Molchanova

Eastern Approaches

are building in the sky, and continued invisibly below by

First, second, third tops. Adrenaline, bloodied fingernails, lactic

in the world, and the thunderstorm slides slowly past several

We are the bees of the invisible . .

shingle beach by a deep pool. Trout shadows flip for flies, or hang wavering

Find beauty, be still.

A bay of black-gold sand, bound by marram, angled from the base of ice-lined cliffs. Rain falling, then hail again. Forest of birch and willow with a six-foot canopy. Birch bark gleaming in the light, first buds bursting furred on the willows. Up and over crag and boulder to a headland shoulder, each step sore now, the wind colder. Pack heavy, head heavy, throat chilled, body older. Headland after headland, until there at last to the west is the bay and beyond it, perhaps, the vent of the cave. Green sea over white shell-sand in the bay. Guard-arms of rock curving out and around to either side, the bay water calm, though the outer ocean by the Maelstrom is in chaos. Five sharp-coned summits rising steep from the shore to the peak called Hellsegga, each higher than the last. From the top of each flows a white plume of cloud, bent flatter to the east, and there, there, set low in the belly of one is the black vault of a cave. ~ Boom of waves on the offshore reefs. Two sea eagles circling, unmoved by the wind, silent. Ping ping of crow-cries sounding steel off the cliffs. Croak of a raven. I reach the north side of the bay below Hellsegga – named on the map as Refsvika Bay – exhausted, excited. It has taken me more than an hour to move each mile over this exceptionally obstructive terrain. On raised ground I find what seems a good place to pitch camp. It is exposed if the wind were to swing to the north, but that is its only serious vulnerability. Two big boulders give shelte...