High above, in the sky and the mountains, the gods reside. Under our feet, kingdom of potholes, pits, burrows and tombs, demons and hellish creatures live. The heights, where the light shines, are the kingdom of the blessed, the dark and dark underground world is that of those who suffer eternal condemnation. The up-down axis dominates our traditional beliefs, our deep psychology, our morals and even our language. What is above us is positive; below, negative. We have high feelings and low passions; when things go wrong we sink while happiness has an aerial quality; we ascend professionally and socially, we fall into temptation. In the animal kingdom itself we consider that what lives underground is repulsive, sinister, threatening or at least ugly and dirty.
A series of recent books invite us to reconsider our ideas and opinions - essentially prejudices - about the underworld. Down there, the authors of those works tell us, there is darkness and mystery, yes, strange and dangerous things, and feared characters (including Hades, Pedro Botero and the Indian Joe), and threats to conjure, and a lot of terrors and tragedies , and a lot of claustrophobia. But also fascinating things and wonders to know, spaces to discover and explore, stories to tell and an unexpected beauty. The beauty of starless rivers, of deep blue eddies in the heart of glaciers, holes through which meltwater descends hundreds of meters; the beauty also of the paintings of our ancestors deep in the caves. Of the caves, precisely, Will Hunt, in an underground obsessed with tunnels, old metro stations, sewers, bunkers and graves, explains to us in Subterranean (Review, 2020), who discovered his fascination at the age of 16 when he found An abandoned Lovecraftian-style passageway below his Providence home has sprung much of our spiritual world. Not only do you contact the gods looking at the sky and the descensus is not always ad inferos .
In this downward journey we will find images of a dazzling darkness (and the oxymoron is worth it), unexpectedly exciting creatures like moles, to whom he has dedicated a surprising book, How to Hunt a Mole , Marc Hamer, repentant hunter of those animals (Ariel, 2019); the earthworms, which cast a spell over Darwin himself — his sex life, that of earthworms, is very intense: keep reading! —or the prairie dogs, capable of drilling 160-kilometer-long tunnels underground in Wyoming, and that they interested General Custer, no less, that he wrote of them in his diary, as if he had nothing better to think about, while he was going to a place called Little Bighorne. Not forgetting archaea, extremophilic organisms that live so low that they heat up with the heat of Earth's magma, survive and even thrive at 120 degrees and freeze to death below 90.
The thing about roundworms, puppies and whopping bowls is told, among many other sensational things, by scientist David W. Wolfe in The Subsoil, A Natural History of Underground Life (Seix Barral, 2019), an exciting book (talks about the creepy South African gold mine in East Driefontein that extends up to three kilometers below the surface and at the bottom of which the rocks are 50º) and full of surprising data. Revered by gardeners and farmers as icons of a healthy and productive soil (and by fishermen for different reasons), earthworms have a formidable sex life to which the great possibilities of being hermaphrodite undoubtedly contribute. A "typical earthworm sexual hug," a powder, come on, done in position 69, with the bugs lying in parallel with the heads facing the opposite way, says Wolfe, associate professor of plant ecology at Cornell University. and a collaborator of the United States Department of Agriculture, it can last an hour. "Considering that the worms fully and simultaneously enjoy both the male and female sexual experience during the encounter (imagine!), It is not surprising that they are not in a hurry to finish," stresses the scholar with both sympathetic and unusual enthusiasm, which leads the New York State sponsored Soil Health initiative. "On a handful of earth," Wolfe surprises, "there are more creatures than humans on the entire planet," and no other habitat on earth exceeds the potential for underground discovery. " What happens is that we are ignorant of what is under our feet, and "chauvinists of the surface".
For his part, the former mole hunter Hamer, approaches with a somber existential spirit, comparing them with his own, the lives of those animals, champions of drilling, to which he has dedicated his entire life, chasing them through gardens and golf courses. They live four years — that is if they did not meet Hamer — and they are lonely. They inhabit a dark and humid atmosphere with very little oxygen. Given their tiring job of digging and digging, moles do require precisely a lot of oxygen and they do this by being able to breathe their own breath. Instead, its blood has a hard time clotting and it is easy for a mole to bleed to death. There is the data. The author, who cultivates a melancholy worthy of a better trade, explains that there are occasionally white and gold moles but that if you kill one of those you will die within a month. There is a mole that is attributed to having killed a king: the one who dug the hole that tripped the horse of William III of Orange, with fatal consequences for his royal rider. Moles are killed by cheating or by introducing poison (usually pills that release phosphine) into their tops. "Suffering is inevitable," notes Hamer. "The extermination is resolved discreetly." The golfer does not know about the agony that occurs under his feet as he happily heads down the green.
Terrifying dramatic human stories like that of the life of the girl Alicia Quispe, who works for free in the Bolivian mines of Cerro Rico de Potosí, on the night shift (!), To pay off a debt from her mother and that Ander Izagirre tells in Potosí (Libros del KO, 2017). Izaguirre is the author of another book related to the subject, The basements of the world , now reissued by Libros del KO, a chronicle of trips to the lowest points on the planet, the deepest depressions of each continent, such as the Death Valley, 86 meters below sea level, the Dead Sea (-411 meters) or Lake Assal in Djibouti (-157). The effort is reminiscent of Alain Nadaud's and his geographical and literary search for the legendary entrances to hell ( Aux ports des enfers, Actes Sud, 2004). Among the scariest episodes that occurred underground was undoubtedly the death of young Neil Moss, the most chilling case in British caving, trapped in a well in the Peak Cavern cave system in 1959, and that continues: they could not take out neither dead and decided to throw cement in the chasm. He died drowned from the carbon dioxide produced in his last hour of breathing. Probably if it had been a mole it would have survived.
The urge to go down is older and more primary than the one to ascend, says Robert Macfarlane, author of the most beautiful, moving and exciting Bajotierra (originally Underland, which has a convenient echo like Alice in Wonderland ), which he has published this year Literature Random House, and from which the story of the unfortunate Moss comes. Lowland is a study of the role of the underground world in culture and imagination, over time until today. "The urge, the urge to descend into darkness is older and more mysterious than that of ascending to the light and the height of the peaks," says the renowned author of The Mountains of the Mind , one of the most revealing books and evocative that have been written about the passion of the summits, when asked why he has changed his subject so radically. The mountains will always be in my heart. Although I live in one of the flattest parts of the world, in Cambridgeshire, I often have to go to the mountains. They are what I have missed the most during confinement, along with my parents. So the first book I wrote, almost 20 years ago, sought to explain why I, like many other people, was able to risk dying as a mountaineer, when only three hundred years ago in Europe the desire to Climb a mountain".
“But in Lowland,” continues Macfarlane, “I wanted to explore a much older practice. Because we have gone into the darkness of the underworld in search of visions, refuge and power from even before being modern anatomically human. " The writer recalls that the oldest undisputed evidence of intentional burials dates back to Neanderthals, 130,000 years ago. "Still today, as a species, we go to the underground world for three great reasons: to keep what is precious, to obtain what is valuable, and to get rid of what is harmful or dangerous." The idea of Bajotierra occurred to Macfarlane in 2010, a year of emerging catastrophes: the Haiti earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill, the Ejafjallajökull volcano explosion, and the drama of the 33 Chilean miners trapped under the desert of Atacama. "It was impossible for me not to think about what lies beneath the surface, and about the traumas, disruptions and revelations that occur when the borders between above and below suffer a breach." Coincidence wanted him to start writing his book in June 2018 with millions of people hanging on the fate of the 13 young Thai soccer players caught with their coach at the Tham Luang Nang Non Cave Complex ...
In Lowland , Macfarlane, who regularly writes on the relationship between the landscape and the human heart, physically travels to points on the planet where one can penetrate the underworld. Their selection is very special. An intricate and labyrinthine cave system in the British Mendips Mountains where you enter a speleologist, and where you will find Aveline's Hole, which is not a bar of bad reputation, but a necropolis; a potash mine in Yorkshire where a young physicist tracks dark matter in the universe; the tunnels under the city of Paris, where an astonishing subculture of the deep thrives and the catacomb-philia unfolds (it was in places that it cannot reveal); a river in Italy that runs in some sections more than three hundred meters underground; some chasms in the Slovenian beech forests and the Julian Alps that keep secrets and horrors of various wars; a cave with prehistoric paintings on the Lofoten Islands called "Hell Hole"; the Finnish underground nuclear waste warehouse called the Hide and Seek… Along the way, the author draws on colleagues such as Poe, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Fitzroy Maclean or the Kalevala , the Finnish epic poem.
"I conceived the itinerary as a descent, followed by a period below the surface and a return to light," explains Macfarlane. “I want the reader to follow me in that katábasis; that I feel claustrophobic, that I understand what and how it is possible to see in the dark, and eventually celebrate with me the return to the world above carrying the knowledge of the depths ”. Talk about claustrophobia, that's an essential word when we go down to that underground world. Obviously he doesn't suffer it. "Hahaha, well, before writing it I asked a friend to take me on a caving expedition to do a claustrophobia test. And although we went through some very difficult point, I emerged exultant with the experience, and confident that, in general, I could tolerate confinement. Of course, I still didn't know what I was going to find under the Mendips or in the catacomb maze under the south of Paris… ” Precisely there, the readers passed it but it was very bad at his side. Weren't you afraid of getting lost? “It is a compliment that you suffer with my book. I think it's great that you have to leave Lowland and you can't continue reading. That is that writing works. The Paris chapter seems to be the most intense claustrophobic passage in many readers. Claustrophobia interests me a lot as a writer, because of its power to intensely affect readers vicariously, for others. More than vertigo, reading about claustrophobia is shocking. It is related to what William Golding called sympathetic or sympathetic kinesthesia: the limbs begin to tremble, the heart rate increases, breathing is faster. All writers want to move the reader, one way or another; Writing about claustrophobia allows that in a way that can approximate the sinister. "
Are fans of the depths strangers than those of the tops? "Good question. I think the true obsessed with depth, cave divers in particular, are even more extreme than the true obsessed with heights, mountaineers from the highest peaks and lovers of free climbing, but just. I love to talk about all of them. I have always liked writing about people, as well as places. ”
It is inevitable to ask him why he found the worst place down there. “The regions of Italy and Slovenia that I speak of in the book, where holes, limestone chasms, were used as places of execution and slaughter in World War II, and where the mountains themselves were converted, filling them with tunnels underground military like an alpine gruyere, in war machines during the First ”. Curiously, the story of the subsoil that has most impacted Macfarlane is also the one that most excites David Wolfe: the network of mycorrhizal connections, association of fungi and roots, that unites trees underground and makes them a greater collective entity, the interconnected forest. "That idea forever changed my sense of the land I walk on," says Macfarlane. The Saami people, he recalls, believe that the dead live upside down in the basement, so that we walk on their feet, like on a mirror. Science and exploration show us that the reality of what is down there is even more amazing ...
UNDERGROUND
Author: Robert Macfarlane.
Translator: Concha Cardeñoso Sáenz de Miera.
Publisher: Literatura Random House, 2020.
Format: softcover (512 pages, 23.90 euros) and e-book (10.99 euros).
Find it in your bookstore
THE UNDERGROUND
Author: David W. Wolfe
Translator: Javier Calvo Perales.
Publisher: Seix Barral, 2019.
Format: softcover (352 pages, € 20) and e-book (€ 9.99).
Find it in your bookstore
HOW TO HUNT A MOLE
Author: Marc Hamer.
Translator: Beatriz Ruiz Jara.
Publisher: Ariel, 2020.
Format: hardcover (208 pages, 19.90 euros) and e-book (9.99 euros).
Find it in your bookstore
POTOSY
Author: Ander Izagirre.
Illustrator: Javier Muñoz.
Publisher: Libros del KO, 2017.
Format: softcover (204 pages, 15.90 euros) and e-book (6.99 euros).
Find it in your bookstore
THE BASEMENTS OF THE WORLD
Author: Ander Izaguirre.
Illustrator: María Castelló.
Publisher: Libros del KO, 2020.
Format: softcover (404 pages, 19.90 euros) and e-book (7.99 euros).
Find it in your bookstore
UNDERGROUND
Author: Will Hunt.
Translator: Efrén del Valle.
Editorial: Criticism, 2020.
Format: hardcover (288 pages, 19.90 euros) and e-book (9.99 euros).
Find it in your bookstore
AUX PORTES DES ENFERS
Author: Alain Nadaud.
Editorial: Actes Sud, 2004 (in French).
Format: softcover (304 pages, 22.40 euros).