#Underland - Robert Macfarlane - Review

 

    A kind of travel book, "Underland" presents the world beneath our feet.  It explores the archaeological facts of rare places on Earth and covers caves, ammonites, sinkholes, gorges, and.... the tragedies associated with them. The author presents caving history around the Oxford philosophy student Neil Moss as the most notorious one. It is about the Peak Cavern near Derbyshire, 1000 feet from the entrance he was stuck and died out and the place was converted into a tomb of Dark matter with molten cement being poured and sealed. 

     There is a slight deviation from 'under' to 'above' as the author discusses dark matter and gravitational lensing, which slightly evokes interest in reading. The 5% of the Universe's mass is made of matter we can touch and the rest of it we have to feel- is the most mysterious thing about our existence. The search for Dark matter has produced a network of working sites and labs that are dedicated to research.  It seems to resemble what we call religion rather than what we call science. Thus, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists. Mutualism is the fascination between organisms. Plants and fungi find a lot of descriptions in the book

     The second chamber (chapter) has what we have been reading under 'kahaf' where seven sleepers of Ephesus - the people of kahaf- fleeing religious persecution in the city of Ephesus go into 300 years of sleep and wake up in a different era - though here it is described by a painting.

     Arctic landscape and Anatolian Plateau to Paris and Mediterranean find description followed by quarries below the Paris town and many surrounding areas. The author likes the sound of sleep exhausted by nerves and travel. It is here that there is a reference to manholes. Opening manhole covers the sewer workers, particularly in India,  should be happy on seeing flies and cockroaches, which means toxic gases haven’t gathered in there.

 As there is no continuity to the narration, here are some excerpts from the chapters:

     The history of the river in Italy with the Northern cape of south Africa where scuba divers have died is described in an agonizing colour. There is a mention of the decayed body of Dreyeres's head, the Abyss of Caros, the Slovenian highlands of Austria Hungary Italy, and limestone rocks.

     That 1000 years of snow going on to become glaciers coated with millions of trees on iced and frozen canopies is intriguing.

     Lofoten of Norway and its description is attractive throughout the chapter and carries on to the Ardeche Gorges Andoya of Norway where Nuclear waste is buried is mentioned. The drill for oil at Lofoten and Vesteralen is portrayed as industrial pollution and the author says: "What we excrete comes back to us". Karakorum fighting of India with its neighbour and the slaughtered human bodies is described as gruesome.

     Mining licenses given in Greenland Narsaq, Worlds largest Uranium deposit was amazing to learn. Neils Bohr visited here in 1957 as China-Australia joint company took to mining.

     Ice has memory and remembers details for millions of years, now with plastics, crates, kayaks, and melamine cups there is more capping to this withered cream of the Earth. Compressed ice in Antarctica acts like a blanket trapping geothermal heat and when bedrock ice absorbs some heat they melt slowly.

     There are nearly 500 or so freshwater lakes beneath Antarctica's ice and the Polar bears can smell food sources 20 miles away. There is more penning of Greenland than any other underland on this Earth; this is interesting as it has a reservoir of undiscovered life and aura.

     The meltwater of Knud Rasmmussen glacier is presented with Northern lights background - Olkiluoto in Finland has another Uranium reserve and the author says it was created in a Supernova explosion 6.6 billion years ago. This is really thrilling that cold places can have radioactive deposits. Going with Uranium the author describes its rods that can remain hot even after decades of cooling in a Pool!

     Katabasis - But for every Theseus who enters the labyrinthine darkness of the Underland to triumph against the Minotaur there are many more Eurydice who never returns. Such fears, Robert Macfarlane points out, are embedded deep in our language where “height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down.”

     Nevertheless, his journeys deep into the earth “far from the human realm”, is melancholic and claustrophobic, and are occasionally correctly frightening. Macfarlane remains obsessed with the fear and fascination generated in the human heart by extreme landscapes, and he clearly savors the adrenaline rush.

     Underland is, as its title suggests, “a book about burial and unburial and deep time”, “the awful darkness inside the world”, “of descents made in search of knowledge”, to study the places where “we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save”.

     Coupled with history, geography, and some science, this book is, also, for those who would like to go on adventures. I had a slight feeling that should a movie be made with appropriate music it would be worth watching like "127 hours" - where A R Rahman's music added to the icing on the cream of the incident.