Verne, Jules, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, trans. Robert Baldick (1864; Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, 1965)
Wark, Mackenzie, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015) Webb, Dave (dir.), Fight for Life: The Neil Moss Story (2006)
Webb, Dave, and Whiteside, Judy, ‘Fight for Life: The Neil Moss Story’
Weir, Andy, ‘Deep Decay: Into Diachronic Polychromatic Material Fictions’, PARSE 4 (2017)
*Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007)
Wells, H. G., The Time Machine (1895; Richmond: Alma Classics, 2017)
Williams, Rosalind, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (London: MIT Press, 2008)
Williams, William Carlos, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume 111939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1988)
Wilson, Louise K. (ed.), A Record of Fear (Salisbury: B.A.S. Printers Ltd, 2005)
Wohlleben, Peter, The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver/Berkeley: Greystone Press, 2016)
Wulf, Andrea, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Knopf, 2015)
Wylie, John, ‘The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald’, Cultural Geographies 14 (2007)
Wyndham, John, The Chrysalids (1955; London: Penguin, 2018)
*Yusoff, Kathryn, ‘Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics, and the Art of Becoming Inhuman’, cultural geographies 22:3 (2015)
Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al., ‘The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?’, Philosophical Transactions. Series A, Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences 369 (2011)
Zhdanova, N. N., et al., ‘Ionizing Radiation Attracts Soil Fungi’, Mycological Research 108:9 (2004)
Zola, Emile, Germinal, trans. Havelock Ellis (London: Dent, 1970)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank first those who have shaped this book most as companions, guides and teachers, helping me learn to see in the dark: John Beatty, Hein Bjerck, Sean and Jane Borodale, Bill Carslake, Lucian and Maria Carmen Comoy, Sergio Dambrosi, Steve Dilworth, Bradley Garrett, Meriel Harrison, Lina and Jay, Helen Mort, Robert Mulvaney, Bjørnar Nicolaisen, Þóra Pétursdóttir, Neil Rowley, Merlin Sheldrake, Richard Skelton, Helen and Matt Spenceley, Christopher Toth and Pasi Tuohimaa.
Garnette Cadogan, Walter Donohue, Henry Hitchings, Julith Jedamus, Simon McBurney, Garry Martin, Rob Newton and Jedediah Purdy read all or part of Underland in the course of its writing; their responses were invaluable. I hope I have made my profound gratitude apparent to each of you. Several people brought their specialist knowledge to bear on specific sections of the book, correcting and clarifying my work with generous expertise. I am especially grateful to Carolin Crawford (on stars), John MacLennan (on rocks) and Ruth Mottram (on ice). Tanja Trček kindly and bravely translated the foiba text for me. Rob Newton was the best research assistant I could have hoped for in the closing months of the book, offering calm counsel and sharp eyes at every turn.
My editor Simon Prosser and my agent Jessica Woollard have been remarkable readers and friends throughout the six and a half years it took me to write Underland. At Hamish Hamilton/Penguin I have been exceptionally fortunate to work with Richard Bravery, Dave Cradduck, Caroline Pretty, Anna Ridley, Ellie Smith and Hermione Thompson. At W. W. Norton in America I have benefited immensely from the acuity, support and patience of my editor Matt Weiland and the encouragement of Jim Rutman.
I have learned so much from – and thought much with – my students, especially Jei Degenhardt, Louis Klee, Aron Penczu, Kryštof Vosatka and Lewis Wynn. I thank my close friends for all they have done for me and the book: Julie Brook, Peter Davidson, Gareth Evans, Nick Hayes, Michael Hrebeniak, Michael Hurley, Raphael Lyne, Finlay Macleod, Leo Mellor, Jackie Morris, Clair Quentin, Corinna Russell, Jan and Chris Schramm, David Trotter, James Wade and Simon Williams. Above all and forever, love and gratitude to Julia, Lily, Tom and Will, and to my parents, Rosamund and John.
Thanks are then also due for many kinds of assistance, information and inspiration over the years: to Glenn Albrecht, Alice and Chris Allan, Tim Allen, Antti Apunen, Marina Ballard, Ariane Bankes, Mattias Bärmann, Ginny Battson, Sharon Blackie, Miguel Angel Blanco, Adam Bobbette, Edward-John Bottomley, James Bradley, Michael Bravo, Julia Brigdale, Julie Brook, Rob Bushby, Jonathan and Keggie Carew, Steve Casimiro, Silvia Ceramicola, Christopher Chippendale, Václav Cílek, Horatio Clare, Erlend Clouston, Michela Coletta, Ray Collins, Adrian Cooper, Holly Corfield-Carr, Nicola Dahrendorf, John Dale, William Dalrymple, Jane Davidson, Jeremy Davies, Tim Dee, Thomas Demarchi, Aly Derby, Hildegard Diemberger, Hunter Dukes, Cody Duncan, Minna Moore Ede, Chris Evans, Garry Fabian-Miller, David Farrier, Kitty Fedorec, Rose Ferraby, Toby Ferris, Johnny Flynn, Xesus Fraga, Robin Friend, Rebecca Giggs, Antony Gormley, Simon Grant, Susan Greaney, Pino Guidi, Beatrice Harding, Kateřrina Havlíková, M. John Harrison, Harriet Hawkins, Caspar Henderson, Julia Hoffman, Cymene Howe, Robert Hyde, Bob Jellicoe, Martin Johnson, Stuart Kelly, Michael Kerr, Patrick Kingsley, Andrew Kötting, Paul Laity, Szabolcs Leél-Őssy, Angela Leighton, Emily Lethbridge, Huw Lewis-Jones, Tim de Lisle, Thelma and Bill Lovell, Borut Lozej, Richard Mabey, Helen Macdonald, Jim Macfarlane, Duncan Mackay, Finlay Macleod, Andrew McNeillie, Geoff Manaugh, Kevan Manwaring, Philip Marsden, Jana Martinčič, Rod Mengham, China Miéville, Alex Moss, Helen Murphy, Victoria Nelson, Kate Norbury, Annie O’Garra Worsley, Bjørnar Olsen, Jay Owens, Francesco Panetta, Fabio Pasini, Donald and Lucy Peck, Sibylle Pein, Borut Peric, Pirhuk, Jonathan Power, Andrew Ray, Lara Reid, Fiona Reynolds, Dan Richards, Autumn Richardson, Darmon Richter, Tim Robinson, David Rose, Giuliana Rossi, Corinna Russell, Stanley Schtinter, Adam Scovell, Geoff Shipp, Robbie Shone, Philip Sidney, Iain Sinclair, Ingrid Skjoldvœr, Paul Slovak, Jos Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Emily Stokes, John and Katja Stubbs, Kier Swaffield, Sarah Thomas, Louis Torelli, Michaela Vieser, Marina Warner, Jim Warren, Julianne Warren, Giles Watson, Stephen Watts, Samantha Weinberg, Andy Weir, Deb Wilenski, Christopher Woodward, Geoff Yeadon, Benjamin Zidarich and many correspondents on Twitter.
I am grateful to those photographers and rights-holders who have generously allowed me to use their images here. The photograph prefacing the First Chamber is the image of a hand stencil made in El Castillo cave in northern Spain; the earliest of the El Castillo stencils has been dated to at least 37,300 years old, and it is therefore possible that it was made by a Neanderthal artist. It is reproduced with permission of and © to La Sociedad Regional de Educacíon, Cultura y Deporte of Cantabria (SRECD). The photograph that prefaces Chapter 1, ‘Descending’, is by Ivana Cajina (@von_co) and is made available for free use under the @unsplash licence. The photograph of one of the Priddy Nine Barrows that prefaces Chapter 2, ‘Burial’, is © Richard Scott-Robinson. The photograph that prefaces Chapter 3, ‘Dark Matter’, is by Alexander Andrews (@alex_andrews) and is made available for free use under the @unsplash licence. The photograph that prefaces Chapter 4, ‘The Understorey’, is by Johannes Plenio (@jplenio), and is made available for free use under the @ pixabay/CCo Creative Commons licence. The photograph that prefaces Chapter 5, ‘Invisible Cities’, is of Le Passe-Muraille and is © Laura Brown (fuschiaphoto.com). The image that prefaces Chapter 6, ‘Starless Rivers’, is of the chamber at the bottom of the Abyss of Trebiciano, through which the Timavo river runs. It is an engraving by Giuseppe Rieger from the mid nineteenth century, and I am grateful to the Biblioteca Civica Attilio Hortis, Trieste, and E. Hapulca for permission to reproduce it here. The image that prefaces Chapter 9, ‘The Edge’, is Harry Clarke’s illustration to accompany Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ when the story was reprinted in a 1919 edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination; it is out of copyright. The
photographs prefacing Chapters 10 and 11, ‘The Blue of Time’ and ‘Meltwater’, are from our time in East Greenland and are © Helen Spenceley. The photograph prefacing Chapter 12, ‘The Hiding Place’, is of Onkalo and is © Posiva. The photograph prefacing Chapter 13, ‘Surfacing’, is of the Cueva de las Manos, the ‘Cave of the Hands’, in Patagonia in 2005; the hand stencils were made using ochre dust blown through a bone pipe, and have been dated to around 9,300 years ago. The image is generously made available by and is © Mariano Cecowski. The jacket photograph is of me approaching the crevasse labyrinth of the Knud Rasmussen glacier, East Greenland; it is © Helen Spenceley. All other images are my own.
For the granting of textual permissions, I am grateful to James Maynard and the estate of Helen Adam for allowing me to quote from ‘Down There in the Dark’ as an epigraph. It is © the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. I am grateful to Alexey Molchanov for permission to publish his mother Natalia’s poem ‘The Depth’ in full. The only significant portion of this book to appear in any form before publication was ‘Secrets of the Wood Wide Web’, in the New Yorker online, edited by Emily Stokes; I am grateful to Emily and the New Yorker for permission to reuse sentences from that essay here.
Underland could not have been completed without the support of the British Academy in the form of a Mid-Career Fellowship, for which I am grateful beyond easy expression. I am indebted to several other institutions and colleagues, above all Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where I have been privileged to teach for seventeen years now; also the English Faculty in Cambridge and the English Faculty Library (the best library beyond Babel). Among the music and musicians whose work has kept me company above and below ground, I could not have done without *AR, Bon Iver, the Duke Spirit, Elbow, Johnny Flynn, Grasscut, Willy Mason, the Pixies, Karine Polwart, Schubert, Cosmo Sheldrake and Le Tigre.
The cover image of Underland is by my long-time friend and collaborator Stanley Donwood. I first saw his luminous painting Nether in 2013, the year after I’d begun work on Underland. It amazed me at first sight – the eerie glow of the sun, the curling technicolour fingers of the trees, the sense of looking down into a radiant, dangerous underworld – and I knew immediately that I wanted it to be the cover of my book. It’s huge, too: 1.5 square metres. Big enough to fall head first into – or down. At its simplest, indeed, the word ‘nether’ just means ‘down’, ‘downwards’. It more fully suggests, the OED records, ‘what lies, or is imagined as lying, beneath the earth; of, belonging to, or native to hell or the underworld’. Whenever I felt exhausted or unsettled by work on Underland – which was often – I would think of Nether. It lit the way.
Except that while Nether looks like a vast sun rising at the end of a sunken lane, it’s not. I remember asking Stanley about the image when we were together one day on Orford Ness, the shingle spit off the Suffolk coast where nuclear weapons were tested in the decades after the Second World War. ‘Nether, Stanley said then, ‘isn’t the sun. It’s the last thing you’d ever see. It’s the light of a nuclear blast that has just detonated, seen down a holloway. When you look at Nether, you’ve got about 0.001 of a second of life remaining, before the flesh is melted from your bones.’ Oh. Lustrous and lethal, fatal and beautiful, nuclear and natural, the image beckons the viewer’s eye on and down into the underworld, into its reactor core. As such, it could hardly be truer to the atmospheres of Underland.
INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
abseiling 11, 166, 195, 357–9
Acheron, river 177, 178
Adige, river 180
Aeneas 16, 177
Aeschylus: Agamemnon 363
Africa gold
mining 5–6
South see South Africa
Aggy cave system, Wales 159–60
albedo 330
Albrecht, Glenn 104, 113, 317
Alcestis 191
alluvium 353
Alpine glaciers 14
Altamira, cave art 255
Alvarez, Al 155
Amsterdam 171
Andenes, Andøya 290, 298, 302
lighthouse 300, 314
Anderson, John 71
Andøya, Norway 286, 289–323
Andenes see Andenes, Andøya
beach litter 319–20
the Edge 294–5, 298–306
fishing 291–2, 300–301, 303, 305, 306, 312–16
and the oil industry 295–8, 301–6, 317, 322
western mountains 318–19
animacy 112
annihilation products 68
scattered electrons 59
Antarctica
British Antarctic Survey 346
glaciers 357
ice cap 340
Mulvaney and 346, 350–51, 352
search for oldest ice 352
West Antarctic Ice Sheet 379–80
anthrax 14, 329
Anthropocene/Holocene epoch 13–14, 75–8, 113, 310, 320–21, 338, 350, 362, 363–4, 394, 407
Anthropocene Working Group of the
Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy 75–6, 394
Antigone 191–2
Apusiajik glacier 341, 342–3, 346, 353, 355–62 365–6, 393
aquifers 178, 239
Arctic
burial sites 329
heatwave (2016) 330–31
methane deposits 14
sea ice 330, 331, 334–5, 336, 339–40, 354, 358, 362, 372, 379–80, 394
see also Andøya, Norway; Baffin Island; Greenland; Lofoten islands
Arctic Ocean 331, 360
Ariadne 191
‘Ariadne’s thread’ 48, 49, 358
Ario System, Spain 195–6
Aristaeus 28
Artemis 191
Athapaskan oral traditions 380
Attout, Jacques 194–5
aurora borealis 122–3, 255, 346, 354, 365–6, 392
Auschwitz death camp 282–3
Australia
Brisbane underland explorer 154
Nullarbor Plain 179
uranium mining 399
Austria 32
Aveline’s Hole, Mendips 25–6, 37, 417
Aymé, Marcel 143
bacteria 100
Baffin Island 335
Bailey, June 43
Ballinger, Pamela 225
Barents Sea 296–7
Barro Colorado Island 106–8
barrows 3, 27
Bronze Age 30, 33–4, 51–2, 80
Iron Age 80
Neolithic 30, 80
Priddy Nine Barrows 50–51, 52
Barton, Hazel 192
baryonic matter 57
Basovizza/Bazovica 226
Bataille, Georges 283
batin (occult forces of underland) 247
bears
brown 26
polar 307, 344–5, 359
in rock art 26, 280, 282
bedding planes 11, 49, 417
Bede: The Reckoning of Time 81
beetle, Anophthalmus hitleri 185
Behar, Alberto 357–8
Bélanger, Pierre 149
Belgium, HADES facility 401
Benford, Gregory 412
Benjamin, Walter 132, 134, 135, 137
The Arcades Project 133–6, 150–51
Berger, John 279
Berkner Island 350–51
Bey, Hakim 142
biodiversity 76
biomass, global 100
Bjerck, Hein 254, 264, 266, 275–6
Blackwater 150
Blautopf, Germany 197
blindness 28
Bloubank dolomites 192
Blue Hole, Red Sea 198
Boesmansgat system 197
Bohr, Niels 337
Bohuslän, Sweden 265–6
boracite 60
Borges, Jorge Luis: ‘On Exactitu
de in Science’ 413
Borodale, Jane 27, 34
Borodale, Louis 34, 44
Borodale, Orlando 34
Borodale, Sean 27, 28, 29, 30, 34–40, 43–4, 45–52
Boulby, Yorkshire
dark-matter detection laboratory 55, 60, 63–7, 73, 403
mine 60–63, 69–74, 78–80
Bradley, Richard: An Archaeology of
Natural Places 265
Brisbane underland 154
Britain
heatwaves revealing imprints of ancient structures 14
karst landscapes 179
see also Boulby, Yorkshire; Epping Forest; London; Mendip Hills, Somerset; Nine Wells Wood; Peak Cavern, Derbyshire; Pennine valley miners; Scotland; Somerset Levels; Wales; Yorkshire Dales British Antarctic Survey 346
Browne, Thomas: Urne-Buriall 31, 351
Brunel, Eliette 279–80
Budapest labyrinth 199–200
Bukkhammar Cave 264
bunkers 141, 170, 309
burial 4–5, 25–52
in Austria 32
barrows see barrows cairns 31, 265
catacombs see catacombs cemeteries 25–7, 30, 80, 139–40, 265
contamination from melting Arctic burial sites 329
Egyptian 5, 65–6
in Israel 32–3
marks of 5, 80
in Mendips 25–7, 30, 33–4
mounds see barrows and mummification 5
as an onwards journey 33–4, 265–6
ossuaries 140–41, 142
Parisian 136–7, 138, 139–43 see also catacombs: Paris and preservation 5, 27, 31
Rising Star cave, South Africa 30–31
in Thessaly (wall painting) 245–6
urns 31, 33, 51
of votive objects 26
waste disposal through see waste disposal Bushman’s Hole, South Africa 197
Cairngorms 209, 235, 345
cairns, burial 31, 265
calcite 4, 25, 37, 44, 417