Off the western coast of Norway are sea caves graced by stick figures painted more than 2,000 years ago. Colored red from the iron-oxide pigment used by Bronze Age artists, the figures appear to be in motion, with arms and legs splayed.
Among his travels in Underland: A Deep Time Journey, British nature writer Robert Macfarlane journeys to the remote cave called Kollhellaren on the tip of the island Moskenes to see its dancing figures. To arrive there, Macfarlane crosses a ridge of peaks called the Lofoten Wall, pulls himself out of a snow crevasse into which he had partway plunged, crosses a boulder field through hail and sleet, and eventually enters "the black vault of a cave." Once inside, his eyes seek treasure. "There, there, yes, is a red dancer, scarcely visible but unmistakable ... a dozen or more of them, spectral still but present now, leaping and dancing on the rock ..." Feeling the past artistry telescope into the present moment, Macfarlane cries as he stands "deep in granite and darkness."
In his latest book, Macfarlane explores subterranean spaces with the yearning of a man who feels awe. Descending below the Earth's surface, he says, brings us into the realm of deep time, a chronology "kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates." In this way, the underland is connected to mystery. Too often that mystery is linked culturally to fear, to entrapment, to death and burial. It is this dark mythology (think Orpheus descending into Hades) that Macfarlane seeks to complicate as he searches for light and knowledge beneath the Earth.
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