ملاحظات

الفصل الأول: النُّزول

‘deep subterranean fact’: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 3.
‘the awful darkness inside the world’: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985; New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 117.
‘They lay full length … he could not move’: Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960; London: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 177-8.
‘flat tradition … resolutely flat perspectives’: Stephen Graham, Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (London: Verso, 2016), pp. 4–7.
‘Force yourself to see more flatly’: Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 51.
Anthrax spores are being released from reindeer corpses: on this and other forms of Arctic surfacing see Sophia Roosth’s fine essay ‘Virus, Coal, and Seed: Subcutaneous Life in the Polar North’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 December 2016 (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/virus-coal-seed-subcutaneous-life-polar-north).
‘doorway to the underworld’: Melissa Hogenboom, ‘In Siberia There is a Huge Crater and It is Getting Bigger’, BBC, 24 February 2017.
‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: see R. Brázdil, P. Dobrovolny et al. ‘Droughts in the Czech Lands, 1090–2012 AD’, Climate of the Past 9 (August 2013), 1985–2002.
‘The problem is not that things become buried … dark force of “sleeping giants”’: Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘Drift’, in Multispecies Archaeology, ed. Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 85–102, p. 98; see also Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘Climate Change? Archaeology and Anthropocene’, Archaeological Dialogues 24:2 (2017), 182–93; ‘sleeping giants’ is quoted from Graham Harman, Immaterialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), p. 7.
‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland: the coining of the phrase ‘deep time’ is usually attributed to John McPhee in Basin and Range (New York: FSG, 1981); John Playfair wrote of ‘the abyss of time’ as he examined the Siccar Point unconformity with James Hutton in June 1788.
‘netherworld … I saw them’: ‘Gilgamesh, Endiku and the Nether World’, Version A, in J. A. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Fluckiger-Hawker, E. Robson and G. Zólyomi, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (Oxford: 1998–) (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr1814.htm).
‘People were making journeys into the darkness’: Alistair Pike, quoted in Emma Marris, ‘Neanderthal Artists Made Oldest-Known Cave Paintings’, Nature, 22 February 2018.
‘The descent beckons/as the ascent beckoned’: William Carlos Williams, ‘The Descent’, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1988), p. 245.
‘the feet of the dead … touch those of the living, who stand upright’: Richard Bradley, drawing on the work of Tim Ingold, ANP, p. 12; see Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 246.
the first of the objects … help me see in the dark: the whalebone owl and the demon casket were made and given to me on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides by the sculptor Steve Dilworth, about whose extraordinary life and work more can be read in the chapter entitled ‘Gneiss’ in my book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012). Images of his sculptures and practice can be seen at (http://www.gallery-pangolin.com/artists/steve-dilworth).

الفصل الثاني: الدَّفْن

‘surprised with the appearance … converted into stone’: Bristol Mercury & Universal Advertiser, 16 January 1797. This source among others is quoted in full in A. Boycott and L. J. Wilson, ‘Contemporary Accounts of the Discovery of Aveline’s Hole, Burrington Combe, North Somerset’, Proceedings of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society 25:1 (2010), 11–25. I draw here also on R. J. Schulting, ‘“… Pursuing a Rabbit in Burrington Combe”: New Research on the Early Mesolithic Burial Cave of Aveline’s Hole’, Proceedings of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society 23:3 (2005), 171–265.
‘is hollow … some huge subterranean sea’: Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, in Arthur Conan Doyle, Tales of Terror and Mystery (1902; Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2009), p. 58.
‘I do not trust space an inch’: Tim Robinson, My Time in Space (Dublin: Lilliput, 2001), p. 114.
‘To be human means above all to bury’: Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. xi. See also Rebecca Altman’s fine essay ‘On What We Bury’, ISLE 21:1 (Winter 2014), 85–95.
In a cave system called Rising Star … some 300,000 years ago: see John Hawks et al., ‘New Fossil Remains of Homo Naledi from the Lesedi Chamber, South Africa’, eLife 6 (2017).
‘between fourty and fifty Urnes … nether part of the Earth’: Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff (1658; New York: NYRB Classics, 2012), pp. 103, 114-15, 112.
Twelve thousand years ago in a limestone cave … inside her chamber: see Leore Grossman et al., ‘A 12,000-Year-Old Shaman Burial from the Southern Levant (Israel)’, PNAS 105:46 (2008), 17665–9.
The most notorious story in British caving history … known as Moss Chamber: I draw in this description on several sources, principally: James Lovelock, Life and Death Underground (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1963), pp. 11–27; Dave Webb and Judy Whiteside, ‘Fight for Life: The Neil Moss Story’ (www.mountain.rescue.org.uk/assets/files/TheOracle/historyandpeople/NeilMossStory.pdf); and Fight for Life: The Neil Moss Story, dir. Dave Webb (2006).
‘For the first time in millennia … the vast majority of people a few generations ago’: Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, p. 31.

الفصل الثالث: المادة المُظلِمة

shielded from the surface by 3,000 feet of halite, gypsum … clay and topsoil: on the strata sequence at Boulby, see ‘Lithological Log of Cleveland Potash Ltd’, Borehole Staithes No. 20, drilled September–December 1968 to a depth of c.3500 feet (BGS ID borehole 620319, BGS Reference NZ71NE14).
‘the revelation of a new order … and darkness as well’: Kent Meyers, ‘Chasing Dark Matter in America’s Deepest Gold Mine’, Harper’s Magazine (May 2015), 27–37: 28.
‘As if … you could infer the meadow’: Rebecca Elson, ‘Explaining Dark Matter’, in A Responsibility to Awe (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), p. 71.
‘I suddenly thought … it seems to have stuck’: Paul Crutzen, quoted in Howard Falcon-Lang, ‘Anthropocene: Have Humans Created a New Geological Age?’, BBC, 11 May 2011 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/science-environment-13335683).
‘mankind [sic] … millions of years to come’: Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’, International Geosphere-Biosphere Newsletter 41 (May 2000) (https://www.mpic.de/mitarbeiter/auszeichnungen-crutzen/the-anthropocene.html).
As the Pleistocene was defined by the action of ice … at a global scale: for several years now I have taught a graduate course at Cambridge called ‘Cultures of the Anthropocene’. The literature of and on the idea of the Anthropocene is vast, various, disputatious and growing. Some of the texts I find most interesting are detailed in the bibliography and are drawn on in this brief discussion of the concept and its implications for deep time, politics and ethics.
‘stratigraphically optimal’: Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, ‘When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth-Century Limit is Stratigraphically Optimal’, Quaternary International 383 (2015), 204–7.
‘Are we being good ancestors?’: Jonas Salk, ‘Are We Being Good Ancestors?’, World Affairs 1:2 (1992), 16–18.
‘palaeontology of the present’: W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 325.
A trace fossil is the sign … absence serves as sign: see also Ilana Halperin, ‘Autobiographical Trace Fossils’, in Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, ed. Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (New York: Punctum, 2013), pp. 154–8.
‘At night, according to … beneath the earth’: Bede, The Reckoning of Time, trans. Faith Wallis (725; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), p. 97.
Occasionally the miners hacked their ways into geodes … down there in the crust: on Pennine mining cultures, see Peter Davidson’s glittering chapter, ‘Spar Boxes: Northern England’, in his Distance and Memory (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013), pp. 42–58.

الفصل الرابع: أشجار الطبقة السُّفلى

‘underground social network … fungal species’: Suzanne Simard, ‘Notes from a Forest Scientist’, afterword to Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver/Berkeley: Greystone Press, 2016), p. 247.
‘forged their duality … making a forest’: Simard, in Wohlleben, Hidden Life of Trees, p. 249.
‘co-operative system … forest wisdom … mothers’: Suzanne Simard, ‘Exploring How and Why Trees “Talk” to Each Other’, Yale Environment 360, 1 September 2016 (https://e360.yale.edu/features/exploring_how_and_why_trees_talk_to_each_other).
‘the wood wide web’: see Suzanne Simard et al., ‘Net Transfer of Carbon between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field’, Nature 388:6642 (1997), 579–82.
‘The wood wide web … languages of the forest network’: Simard, in Wohlleben, Hidden Life of Trees, p. 249.
‘plants are physiologically separate … functioning of ecosystems’: see E. I. Newman, ‘Mycorrhizal Links between Plants: Their Functioning and Ecological Significance’, Advances in Ecological Research 18 (1988), 243–70: 244.
‘a busy social space … cross-species world underground’: Anna Tsing and Rosetta S. Elkin, ‘The Politics of the Rhizosphere’, Harvard Design Magazine 45 (Spring/Summer 2018) (http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/45/the-politics-of-the-rhizosphere).
‘Next time you walk through a forest … lies under your feet’: Anna Tsing, ‘Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom’, Manoa 22:2 (2010), 191–203: 191.
‘we had roots that grew … one tree and not two’: Louis De Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Reading: Secker and Warburg, 1996), p. 281.
and of the hyphae that are weaving … a version of love’s work: Ginny Battson has also written-beautifully-on mycelia and/as love, in a short online essay, ‘Mycelium of the Forest Floor. And Love’, 12 October 2015 (https://seasonalight.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/mycelium-of-the-forest-floor-and-love/).
If only your mind were a slightly greener thing … drown you in meaning: Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 4.
Fungi were among the first organisms … changing conditions of the Anthropocene: for more on the cultural and political histories of fungi, and how they entangle with our own, see Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). I have also drawn in this discussion on Karen Barad, ‘No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering’, in ALDP, pp. G103–G120.
Scientists working in Chernobyl after the disaster … processing it in some way: see N. N. Zhdanova et al., ‘Ionizing Radiation Attracts Soil Fungi’, Mycological Research 108:9 (2004), 1089–96; and E. Dadachova and A. Casadevall, ‘Ionizing Radiation: How Fungi Cope, Adapt, and Exploit with the Help of Melanin’, Current Opinion in Microbiology 11:6 (2008), 525–31.
‘Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking’: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), p. 11.
‘mosses … the limits of ordinary perception’: Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, p. 10.
‘holobionts’: Lynn Margulis, ‘Symbiogenesis and Symbionticism’, in Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis, ed. Lynn Margulis (Boston: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 1–14: p. 3.
‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi … sharing a common life’: Glenn Albrecht, ‘Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene’, PYSCHOTERRATICA, 17 December 2015 (https://glennaalbrecht.com/2015/12/17/exiting-the-anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene/).
‘To dwellers in a wood … voice as well as its feature’: Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872; London: Penguin, 2012), p. 3.
‘live in a world that watches … sensate, personified. They feel’: Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 14.
‘the word for world is forest’: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (1972; London: Orion Books, 2015).
‘all its technical vocabulary … no words to hold this mystery’: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013), p. 49.
‘fluent botany … gift of seeing’: Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, pp. 48-9.
‘A bay is a noun … well[ing] up all around us’: Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 55.
‘grammar of animacy’: Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘Speaking of Nature’, Orion Magazine, 14 June 2017, passim.
mammal language: J. H. Prynne, ‘On the Poetry of Peter Larkin’, No Prizes 2 (2013), 43–5: 43.
‘geotraumatics’: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, ‘Barker Speaks’, in CCRU: Writings 1997–2003 (Falmouth: Time Spiral Press, 2015), p. 155.
‘planetary dysphoria’: Emily Apter, ‘Planetary Dysphoria’, Third Text 27:1 (2017), 131–40.
‘apex-guilt’: aliciaescott, ‘Field Study #007, The Extinction Event’, Bureau of Linguistical Reality, 1 September 2015 (https://bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/2015/09/01/field-study-007-the-extinction-event/).
‘species loneliness’: Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 208.
‘by human intelligence … the wood wide web’: Albrecht, ‘Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene’.

الغرفة الثانية

‘if we need to go into caves in a nuclear war … a lot of food: British Pathé, ‘Caveman. Days Below’, YouTube, 13 April 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSdBBv5LY84).
‘I can only think clearly in the dark … darkness in Europe’: Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in Tim Robinson, Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness (London and Dublin: Penguin, 2009), p. 1. In the same book, Robinson tells the story of artist Dorothy Cross’s habit of diving down to feed the conger eels at the bottom of the harbour.

الفصل الأول: المُدن غير المَرئيَّة

‘convolutes’: ‘Translators’ Foreword’, in TAP, p. xiv.
‘collective dream’: TAP, p. 152.
‘It is more arduous to honour … memory of the nameless’: these words, from Benjamin’s preparatory notes to ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, are etched into glass at Dani Karavan’s memorial to Benjamin at Portbou.
‘subterranean city … upper world’: TAP, pp. 85–98.
‘Our waking existence … lose ourselves in the dark corridors’: TAP, p. 84.
‘key’, ‘underworld’: TAP, p. 403, p. 84.
‘make some sign to the world one is leaving’: TAP, p. 88.
‘hatchway[s] leading from the surface to the depths’: TAP, p. 98.
‘guard the threshold’: TAP, p. 214.
‘protect and mark the transitions’: TAP, p. 88.
‘lightning-scored, whistle-resounding darkness … entered and traversed’: TAP, pp. 84-5.
‘Paris has another Paris under herself … its arteries and its circulation’: Victor Hugo, The Essential Victor Hugo, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (1862; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 395.
So started one of the most remarkable episodes of Paris’s history: the years of the disinterral of Paris’s cemeteries are vividly discussed in Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (London: Picador, 2010); and Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History (London: Penguin, 2007), among other sources.
‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’: Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003).
An unofficial ‘university’ of the catacombs was established: see, for a fascinatingly detailed account of one aspect of the multiple encryptions of recent cataphile culture, Sean Michaels, ‘Unlocking the Mystery of Paris’ Most Secret Underground Society’, Gizmodo, 21 April 2011 (https://gizmodo.com/5794199/unlocking-the-mystery-of-paris-most-secret-underground-society-combined).
I found a Hollow place … It was quite soft: see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), entry 949.
‘an identical copy of their city … who is alive and who is dead’: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (1972; London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 98-9.
‘there is a layer of urban stratigraphy … unearthed below ground’: Wayne Chambliss, personal communication, May 2018.
‘infrastructure that supports urban life … above the surface of the earth’: Pierre Bélanger, ‘Altitudes of Urbanisation’, Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 55 (January 2016), 5–7: 5.
‘Complex subterranean spaces … above and below ground’: Graham, Vertical, p. 5.
‘The cold in these underground corridors … exchanged addresses’: TAP, p. 89.
The city of the dead antedates … every living city: Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1961), p. 7.
‘most photographed barn in America’: Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 128.
‘feeding the rat’: Al Alvarez, Feeding the Rat: A Climber’s Life on the Edge (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
‘recod[es] people’s normalised relationships to city space’: Bradley Garrett, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (London: Verso, 2014), p. 6.
I was especially struck by the manic systematicity of much explorer practice: see, for more on the connection-delirium of contemporary infrastructure-mappers, Shannon Mattern’s dazzling essay ‘Cloud and Field’, Places Journal (August 2016) (https://placesjournal.org/article/cloud-and-field).
‘London deserted … what a place to explore!’: Edward Thomas, ‘Chalk Pits’, in Selected Poems and Prose (1981; London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 77-8.
I wonder at what will remain of our cities … trace impressions of its presence: I draw here on, among other sources, Jan Zalasiewicz’s work on cities and the rock record, including an interview with him by Andrew Luck-Baker for ‘Leaving our Mark: What Will Be Left of Our Cities’, 1 November 2012 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20154030).

الفصل الثاني: أنهارٌ بلا نجوم

Starless rivers run through classical culture, and they are the rivers of the dead: see for a detailed examination of geology and mythology in this context, Julie Baleriaux, ‘Diving Underground: Giving Meaning to Subterranean Rivers’, in Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity, ed. Jeremy McInerney and Ineke Sluiter (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 103–21; and Salomon Kroonenberg, Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur: Mythology and Geology of the Underworld (London: Reaktion, 2013).
‘Flectere si nequeo superos … the River of Hell’: Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Peter Davidson (personal communication).
‘vanishing lakes’: see Johann von Valvasor, ‘An Extract of a Letter Written to the Royal Society out of Carniola, by Mr John Weichard Valvasor, R. Soc. S. Being a Full and Accurate Description of the Wonderful Lake of Zirknitz in that Country’, in Philosophical Transactions, Giving Some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours, of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World, ed. Henry Oldenburg and Francis Roper, vol. 16 (London: Printed for T.N. by John Martyn, 1687). I draw in this chapter also on the defining work of Trevor Shaw, Foreign Travellers in the Slovene Karst: 1486–1900 (Ljubljana, Založba ZRC, 2008); and Trevor Shaw and Alenka Čuk, Slovene Caves & Karst Pictured 1545–1914 (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2012).
‘limitless tempest’: Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 11 February 1922, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salome: Briefwechsel (Zurich: M. Niehans, 1952), p. 464 (translation mine).
‘Ancient tangled deeps … never to be sought’: Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Sonnet 17’, in Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Martyn Crucefix (London: Enitharmon Press, 2012), p. 47.
‘We are the bees of the invisible … the great golden hive of the invisible’: Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘106. To Witold von Hulewicz, Postmark: Sierre, 13.11.25’, in Rilke, Selected Letters 1902–1926, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Quartet Encounters, 1988), p. 394.
‘The Timavo River flows from the mountains … springs beside the sea’: Posidonius, Posidonius, ed. Ludwig Edelstein and I. G. Kidd, trans. I. G. Kidd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 46.
Systematic exploration of the river’s hidden extent … dive into the ink: I draw here in part on an excellent series of four articles in Italian tracing the course and history of the Reka/Timavo by Pietro Spirito that appeared in Il Piccolo between 2 and 23 August 2014, gathered under the title ‘Alla scoperta del Timavo’.
‘The Timavo is a dream … metre by metre’: Marco Restiano, quoted in Pietro Spirito, ‘Nei cantieri sottoterra da anni si dà la caccia al fiume che non c’è’, Il Piccolo, 23 August 2014 (translation mine).
‘When you’re in the cave … unknown land that people didn’t know existed’: Hazel Barton, ‘This Woman is Exploring Deep Caves to Find Ancient Antibiotic Resistance’, interview with Shayla Love, Vice, 20 April 2018 (https://www.vice.com/en_id/article/j5an54/hazel-barton-is-exploring-deep-caves-to-find-ancient-antibiotic-resistance-v25n1).
‘A peak can exercise the same irresistible power of attraction as an abyss’: Théophile Gautier, trans. Claire Elaine Engel, originally in Les Vacances du Lundi (1869; Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1907), p. 13.
‘a passion for depth … man had been before’: Lovelock, Life and Death Underground, p. 66.
‘Au revoir, papa’: Jacques Attout, Men of Pierre Saint-Martin (London: Werner Laurie, 1956), p. 96.
‘The show has hardly begun’: Attout, Men of Pierre Saint-Martin, p. 102.
‘Never again shall I celebrate … vast and luminous’: Attout, Men of Pierre Saint-Martin, pp. 38-9.
‘Because it’s there’: George Mallory, quoted in ‘Climbing Mount Everest is Work for Supermen’, New York Times, 18 March 1923.
In The Darkness Beckons, Martyn Farr tells the story of … but also its destruction: Martyn Farr, The Darkness Beckons (1980; Sheffield: Vertebrate Press, 2017); see also ‘Dead Man’s Handshake: The Linking of Kingsdale Master Cave and Keld Head, 1975–9’, in Chris Bonington, Quest for Adventure (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990).
For years I could only understand … Budapest’s underwater maze: I draw in this discussion of cave diving on Farr, The Darkness Beckons ; and Antti Apunen, Divers of the Dark: Exploring Budapest’s Underground Caves, trans. Marju Galitsos (Helsinki: Tammi, 2015).
‘I have had such beautiful moments … just total serenity’: Don Shirley, quoted in Sebastian Berger, ‘Ghosts of the Abyss: The Story of Don Shirley and Dave Shaw’, Telegraph, 6 March 2008.
‘I have perceived non-existence … the oceanic secret’: Natalia Molchanova, ‘The Depth’, trans. Victor Hilkevich (http://molchanova.ru/en/verse/depth).
‘Conquistadors of the useless’: Lionel Terray, Conquistadors of the Useless: From the Alps to Annapurna, trans. Geoffrey Sutton (1963; Sheffield: Bâton Wicks, 2000).

الفصل الثالث: الأرضُ الجَوفاء

Between 1941 and 1945 the limestone of southern central Europe … continues to wound the present: I draw in these pages chiefly on Pamela Ballinger’s outstanding History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); also John Earle, The Price of Patriotism (London: Book Guild, 2005); Pavel Stranj, The Submerged Community, trans. Mark Brady (Trieste: Editoriale Stampa, 1992); Jan Morris’s wonderful Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (London: Faber and Faber, 2001); also Maja Haderlap, Angel of Oblivion, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: Archipelago, 2016); and the generously shared knowledge of Lucian Comoy, John Stubbs and Stephen Watts, among others.
‘the terrain of memory’: Ballinger, History in Exile, p. 15.
‘autochthonous … rights’: Ballinger, History in Exile, p. 252.
‘lieux de mémoire’: Pierre Nora and Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Lieux de Mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1993).
The shadow past … rain through karst: Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 17.
I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist: Anselm Kiefer, in interview with Jim Cuno, ‘Interviewing Anselm Kiefer’, 13 December 2017 (http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/audio-interviewing-anselm-kiefer/).
Kiefer longs for … the earth’s own stigmata: I draw here on conversations about Kiefer, place-guilt and absolution with Kryštof Vosatka. The discussion of ‘occulting landscapes’ in this chapter was also developed in response to ‘Project Cleansweep’, photographer Dara McGrath’s documentation of the sites of displaced violence in Britain, and in conversation with Rob Newton.
‘paralysing horror … evident even in that remote place’: W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (1995; London: Vintage, 2002), p. 3.
The violent event persists … is blinding: E. Valentine Daniel, ‘Crushed Glass, or, Is There a Counterpoint to Culture?’, in Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, ed. E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 370.
‘A mountain has an inside’: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (1977; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), p. 16.
These Alps became weaponized peaks … the caves of the slopes and valleys: I draw here and elsewhere on Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and John Schindler, Isonzo (London: Praeger, 2001).
‘elastic geography … seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate’: Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 6-7.
‘a complex architectural construction … attempts to partition it’: Weizman, Hollow Land, p. 15.
‘laboratory of the extreme’: Weizman, Hollow Land, p. 9.
Find beauty, be still: W. H. Murray, Mountaineering in Scotland and Undiscovered Scotland (London: Diadem Books, 1979), p. 4.

الغرفة الثالثة

You will find on the right … Do not even draw nigh this spring: R. Janko, ‘Forgetfulness in the Golden Tablets of Memory’, Classical Quarterly 34:1 (1984), 89–100:96. More on the Totenpässe can be found in Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston’s Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (London: Routledge, 2007).
‘coruscations’: J. M. Peebles, The Practical of Spiritualism. Biographical Sketch of Abraham James. Historic Description of his Oil-Well Discoveries in Pleasantville, P.A., through Spirit Direction (Chicago: Horton and Leonard Printers, 1868), p. 77.
Early this millennium, on the sweltering north coast of Java … ancient poisonous sludge: see for more details on the geology and interpretations of the ‘mud volcano’, Nils Bubandt, ‘Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene’, in ALDP, G121–G142.
but they are no longer … in the same order: Kate Brown, ‘Marie Curie’s Fingerprint: Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone’, in ALDP, G33–G50: G34. I am grateful to Kate Brown for allowing me to draw on her remarkable research for this scene.

الفصل الأول: الراقصون الحُمْر

‘rite of passage … mental ordeals’: Hein Bjerck, ‘On the Outer Fringe of the Human World: Phenomenological Perspectives on Anthropomorphic Cave Paintings in Norway’, in Caves in Context: The Cultural Significance of Caves and Rockshelters in Europe, ed. Knut Andreas Bergsvik and Robin Skeates (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012), p. 60. See also Anders Hesjedal, ‘The Hunters’ Rock Art in Northern Norway: Problems of Chronology and Interpretation’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 27:1 (1994), 1–28.
‘ritual actions … the outer fringe of the human world’: Bjerck, ‘On the Outer Fringe’, p. 55.
‘land meets the sea … come closest together’: ANP, pp. 13 and 29.
‘hel-shoes … the path from the grave to the world beyond’: ANP, p. 145.
Terje Norsted and Bjerck both propose: see Terje Norsted, ‘The Cave Paintings of Norway’, Adoranten (2013), pp. 5–24.
‘thin places’: the phrase is attributed to George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community.
Time isn’t deep … more as drift: Þóra Pétursdóttir, in conversation with me, Oslo, April 2017.
‘a shooting star’: Bjerck, ‘On the Outer Fringe’, p. 49.
‘cavescape’: Bjerck, ‘On the Outer Fringe’, p. 58.
‘Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away … they arrive together’: John Berger, ‘Past Present’, Guardian, 12 October 2002.
‘flashed onto a mammoth … And a frieze of other animals thirty feet long’: Jean-Marie Chauvet, quoted by John Berger and Simon McBurney in The Vertical Line: Can You Hear Me, in the Darkness?, Artangel Arts (Strand Tube Station, 1999). (https://www.artangel.org.uk/the-vertical-line/can-you-hear-me-in-darkness/).
‘in an enormous present … everything that surrounds us’: Simon McBurney, ‘Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams: The Real Art Underground’, Guardian, 17 March 2011.
‘It was as if time had been abolished … the painters were here too’: Jean-Marie Chauvet, quoted by Jean Clottes in World Rock Art (Michigan: Getty Conservation Institute, 2002), p. 44; these lines also appear in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), dir. Werner Herzog.
‘became known just as everything visible … potential of the universe to be otherwise’: Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics, and the Art of Becoming Inhuman’, cultural geographies 22:3 (2015), 383–407: 391.
‘I am simply struck … the notion of our death appears to us’: Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. and trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p. 85. Quoted by Yusoff in ‘Geologic Subjects’, 392.

الفصل الثاني: الحَافة

a battle for the soul of Norway: see Richard Milne, ‘Oil and the Battle for Norway’s Soul’, Financial Times, 27 July 2017; and also Atlantic (2016), dir. Risteard O’Domhnaill and featuring Bjørnar Nicolaisen.
‘natural resources should be managed … safeguarded for future generations’: the Constitution of Norway, as laid down on 17 May 1814 by the Constituent Assembly at Eidsvoll and subsequently amended, most recently in May 2018 (https://www.stortinget.no/globalassets/pdf/english/constitutionenglish.pdf).
‘a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock’: Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. David Galloway (1841; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 177.
‘wilderness of surge … the abyss of the whirl’: Poe, ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, pp. 178–82.
‘I became possessed … ghastly radiance they shot forth’: Poe, ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, pp. 188-9.
In 1818 an American army officer … potential for resources and habitation: see Duane A. Griffin, ‘Hollow and Habitable within: Symmes’ Theory of Earth’s Internal Structure and Polar Geography’, Physical Geography 25:5 (2004), 382–97.
‘oceans of oil’: Jamie L. Jones, ‘Oil: Viscous Time in the Anthropocene’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 March 2016 (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/oil-viscous-time-in-the-anthropocene).
‘We need new acreage … step up our exploration activities’: Mayliss Hauknes, Statoil spokesperson, quoted in ‘Statoil Seeking New Acreage’, Rigzone, 1 October 2016 (https://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/16859/statoil_seeking_new_acreage/).
‘underexplored Cretaceous basins’: ‘Ceduna Sub-Basin’, Karoon Gas Australia Ltd (http://www.karoongas.com.au/projects/ceduna-sub-basin).
‘destructive currents of the kind found in the Maelstrom’: Bjørn Gjevig, quoted in Malcolm W. Browne, ‘Deadly Maelstrom’s Secrets Unveiled’, New York Times, 2 September 1997.
We have now drilled some 30 million miles … hunt for resources: see Reza Negarastani’s extraordinary theory-fiction, Cyclonopaedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008).
‘solastalgia … existential distress caused by environmental change’: Glenn Albrecht, ‘Solastalgia, a New Concept in Human Health and Identity’, Philosophy Activism Nature 3 (2005), 41–4:43.
‘Worldwide, there is an increase in ecosystem distress syndromes … human distress syndromes’: Glenn Albrecht et al., ‘Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change’, Australian Psychiatry 15:1 (2007), 95–7: 95.
‘monstrous transformer’: Graeme Macdonald, ‘“Monstrous Transformer”: Petrofiction and World Literature’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53 (2017), 289–302.
photographs I have seen recently of hermit crabs … Avon night cream: see also D. K. A. Barnes, ‘Remote Islands Reveal Rapid Rise of Southern Hemisphere Sea Debris’, Scientific World Journal 5 (2005), 915–21.
‘empire of things’: Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).
‘a swelling topography of scrapped modernity … confronting us with its pestering presence’: Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen, ‘Unruly Heritage: An Archaeology of the Anthropocene’ (Tromsø: UiT The Arctic University of Norway, 2017), p. 2 (https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/forskning/grupper/Temporalitet%20-%20materialitet/lesegruppe/olsen-unruly-heritage.pdf).
‘What we excrete comes back to consume us’: Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 791.
‘hyperobjects’: see Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
‘viscous’: Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 27.
‘plastiglomerate’: see Patricia L. Corcoran et al., ‘An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record’, GSA Today 24.6 (June 2014), 4–8.
‘New People’: John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (1955; London: Penguin, 2018), p. 158.

الفصل الثالث: زُرْقَة الزمن

On the Yamal peninsula, between the Kara Sea … frozen bodies of mammoths: see Noah Sneider’s fine essay ‘Cursed Fields’, Harper’s Magazine (April 2018), 40–51.
On the Siachen glacier in the Karakoram … slaughtered human bodies: see Rob Nixon, quoting Arundhati Roy, in ‘The Swiftness of Glaciers: Language in a Time of Climate Change’, Aeon Magazine, 19 March 2018 (https://aeon.co/ideas/the-swiftness-of-glaciers-language-in-a-time-of-climate-change).
‘preserved for eternity’: L. K. Clark et al., ‘Sanitary Waste Disposal for Navy Camps in Polar Regions’, Journal of the Water Pollution Control Federation 34:12 (1962), 1229.
In that region, at this time of history … through the world’s surface: see for more on climate change and ‘untimeliness’, Cymene Howe, ‘“Timely”: Theorizing the Contemporary’, 21 January 2016 (https://culanth.org/fieldsights/800-timely).
Ice has a social life: see Cymene Howe’s ongoing project Melt: The Social Life of Ice at the Top of the World, which examines cryo-human interrelations and the implications of climate-induced geohydrological change in the Arctic and beyond.
‘The loss of that landscape of ice … also a cultural one’: Andrew Solomon, Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World (London: Scribner, 2016), p. 259.
uggianaqtuq: see S. Gearheard, ‘When the Weather is Uggianaqtuq: Inuit Observations of Environmental Changes, Version 1’ (Boulder, Colorado: NSIDC—National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2004) (http://nsidc.org/data/NSIDC-0650).
The weight on 2,000-year-old ice … sequence can be almost impossible to discern: I draw in this discussion on, among other sources, Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 41–58.
‘greyish ghostly bands … focused beam of a fibre-optic lamp’: Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine, p. 50.
Sound is a blow delivered by air … transmitted to the soul: Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 65.
Corridors of breath: Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986; New York: Bantam, 1987), p. 152.
Sick at Greenland’s scale … our ability to encompass it: Elizabeth Kolbert experienced the identical response of nausea when reporting from west Greenland in the same weeks that I was in the east of the country. ‘Again, I was hit, and vaguely sickened, by Greenland’s inhuman scale,’ she writes in her fine essay ‘Greenland is Melting’, New Yorker, 24 October 2016 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/24/greenland-is-melting).
‘deaden[ed] … gangplank of a cattle truck’: Seamus Heaney, ‘Mycenae Lookout’, in The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 29.
‘thick speech’: Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 252.
‘interpret or respond’: Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 250.
‘back-flowing’: Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 249.

الفصل الرابع: مياه الذوبان الجليدي

‘matter out of place’: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 44.
‘animate (endowed with life) … landscapes they inhabit’: Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), p. 3.
‘grammar of animacy’: Kimmerer, ‘Speaking of Nature’.
‘denseness … that strangeness of the world is the absurd’: Albert Camus, ‘Absurd Walls’, in The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973), p. 19.
a busy working of nature … reckoning of days and years: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Sept. 24 1870’, in The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 200.

الفصل الخامس: المَخبَأ

Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island …: I have been writing about ‘deep time’ since my first book, Mountains of the Mind (London: Granta, 2003). In respect of radiological as well as geological time, I draw in this chapter and elsewhere on, among other sources, John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York: FSG, 1998); Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Andy Weir, ‘Deep Decay: Into Diachronic Polychromatic Material Fictions’, PARSE 4 (2017) (http://parsejournal.com/article/deep-decay-into-diachronic-polychromatic-material-fictions/); Vincent Ialenti, ‘Adjudicating Deep Time: Revisiting the United States’ High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Project at Yucca Mountain’, Science & Technology Studies 27:2 (2014), 27–48, and ‘Death and Succession among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts’, Physics Today 70:10 (2017), 48– 53. After travelling to Onkalo and completing a first draft of this chapter, I watched Michael Madsen’s documentary Into Eternity (2010), which also examines the WIPP site-marking plans, and—in a brilliant final scene—visually collapses the 2011 excavations at Onkalo with an imagined far-future disinterral of the chambers.
‘the radiological equivalent of … seven trillion doses of lethal radiation’: John D’Agata, About a Mountain (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 35.
‘the numerous strata of a burial mound … artefacts have been buried’: Matti Kuusi quoted in Keith Bosley, ‘Introduction’, TK, p. xxi. Bosley’s introduction and translation are both excellent, and I draw especially on the introduction in this paragraph contextualizing the Kalevala.
‘grave … demon lair’: TK, p. 202.
‘grievous pain’: TK, p. 206.
‘my guiltless heart … to bite, to devour’: TK, p. 205.
‘a wind-borne disease … carried by chill air’: TK, p. 208.
‘Words shall not be hid … though the mighty go’: TK, p. 213.
‘copper slope … rocky hill’: TK, p. 548.
The earth is our tabernacle, a receptacle for all decompositions …: Michael Serres, Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, trans. Randolph Burks (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 17.
The Greek word for ‘sign’, sema, is also the word for ‘grave’: see Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, p. 20.
‘marker system … during the next 10,000 years’: Kathleen M. Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’, Sandia National Laboratories, SAND92–1382. UC–721 (1993) (https://prod.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf), pp. 1–8.
‘Human Interference Task Force’: Thomas Sebeok, ‘Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia (Technical Report)’, Research Centre for Language and Semiotic Studies, for Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, BMI/ONWI-532 (1984), p. iii.
‘passive institutional controls’: Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, pp. 1–12.
‘Landscape of Thorns’: Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, pp. F-61–F-62.
‘danger to the body’: Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, p. F-42.
‘Black Hole’: Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, pp. F-70–F-71.
‘Forbidding Blocks’: Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, pp. F-74–F-75.
‘active communication system’: D’Agata, About a Mountain, p. 93.
‘atomic priesthood’: Sebeok, ‘Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia’, p. 24.
‘laying a trail of myths … keep people away’: D’Agata, About a Mountain, p. 93.
‘our society’s largest conscious attempt … the abyss of deep time’: Gregory Benford, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across Millennia (New York: Avon Books, 1999), p. 85.
The map will be slightly domed: see for details and diagram, Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, p. F-76.
‘a map of the Empire … inhabited by Animals and Beggars’: Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in Borges, Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 325.
‘Hot Cell’: Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, pp. 3–7.
‘We are going to tell you what lies underground … keep the room intact and buried’: see Trauth et al., ‘Expert Judgment on Markers’, Appendix F.
‘People are best able to change … in building our next home’: Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 288.

زائر

قائمة الاختصارات المُستخدمة في الملاحظات

عباراتٌ مُقتبَسة

الفصل الأول: النُّزول

الفصل الثاني: الدَّفْن

الفصل الثالث: المادة المُظلِمة

الفصل الرابع: أشجار الطبقة السُّفلى

الغرفة الثانية

الفصل الأول: المُدن غير المَرئيَّة

الفصل الثاني: أنهارٌ بلا نجوم

الفصل الثالث: الأرضُ الجَوفاء

الغرفة الثالثة

الفصل الأول: الراقصون الحُمْر

الفصل الثاني: الحَافة

الفصل الثالث: زُرْقَة الزمن

الفصل الرابع: مياه الذوبان الجليدي

الفصل الخامس: المَخبَأ