Robert McFarlane
As a traveler, thinker, and writer, Robert McFarlane's footprints have traveled to mountains, wilderness, and trails, and in Deep Time, he travels to an area that feels unfamiliar to most people—the underground. "Deep time," the term used to describe geological time, is "the dizzyingly long history of the Earth—the endless stretch of time from the present to the front to the back." ”
Although it feels strange to modern people, the underground world and the origin and development of human civilization have always been closely related. The clumsy handprints and paintings in the caves, traveling through tens of thousands of years, tell us about the daily life of our ancestors; the tombs, which were once the final destination of all mankind; and the mines, drilling, the underground system of the city... Fascinated by the relationship between geography and the human psyche, Macphalan felt that the underground should be the end of his quest, "sinking is a calling." He quotes a poem.
In this book, he goes to all the underground worlds you can think of, from the Medieval Age Repositories, the Deep Sea Laboratory, the Forest Mycorrhizal Network, to the Twin Dungeons, the Underground Galaxyless River, the Wartime Mass Graves, to the ancient cave walls, ice mortars, nuclear waste repositories... Perhaps this is the most adventurous book of all his works, and at the same time, he has not forgotten his trademark side-quest and constant thinking about history, civilization, and human nature. "I've seen things I wish I'd always remembered, and I've seen things I'd rather never witness," he said. ”
Authorized by the publisher, The Paper excerpts a passage from Journey to Deep Time, where Robert McFarlane arrives at an underground river system full of unknowns and dangers, and does he find the peace and ecstasy that cave divers seek?
Journey through Time; Robert McFarlane/Author, Rufei Wang/Translation; Wenhui Publishing House; 2021/7
"Connecting" and "finishing" is the ambition of many cave researchers: to prove the penetration of a river and find its point of confluence with other rivers. In The Darkness Beckons, Martyn Farr tells the story of cave explorers Giofu Eden and "Dog Bear" Oliver Statham, who spent four years trying to connect two caves in the Yorkshire Valley, Kingsden Masters and Keld Hyde Caves. The two places are separated by a mile and a half miles apart and are connected by a series of underground waterways. This path is known as the "Underground Egger" (referring to the Eiger in Switzerland, at an altitude of 3970 meters, known as the "first dangerous peak in Europe" due to its steep mountainous terrain. )", which shows its danger. The cold water of the passage contains a lot of sediment, the visibility is low, and there are very few air pockets for divers to float to the surface to change oxygen cylinders. In the early days of Eden and Statham expeditions, the body of a diver who was killed five years earlier was found. The two of them finally succeeded in connecting the two caves on January 16, 1979, which was a remarkable achievement given the harsh conditions. Eight months later, "Dog Bear" Statham committed suicide in his pottery studio in Sedbergh. He put a full-face diving mask and regulator over his head, connected it to the kiln's gas equipment, and then lay down on the couch and died.
Many of the world's longest-standing underwater systems are accessed through inconspicuous ponds on the ground. One such entrance is a small lake called "Blue Spring" in Germany, and another in central Norway called "Prula", which has claimed the lives of two divers. The "Bosmansgart Cave" on the edge of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa's Northern Cape Province, also known as the "Bushman Cave". It looked like a small pond, but it was actually the entrance to a flooded cave eight hundred and eighty-five feet deep.
The "Bushmen Cave" looks ordinary on the surface
Historically, only a few dozen people have used diving equipment to dive to a depth of seven hundred and ninety feet. Challenge this dive depth with a high mortality rate. And even for survivors, ultra-deep diving can cause terrible damage to their bodies, including lung damage and hearing loss. In 1994, young diver Dean Dreher was killed deep in the Bushman system, his body embedded in the mud and sand at the bottom, only to be found ten years later. In order to give an account to his grieving family, people racked their brains to make plans to try to retrieve the remains. The leader of the team, an Englishman named Dave Shaw, was entangled in his own safety rope when he tried to put Dreher's body into a pre-prepared silk bag. On the other side, Dreher's neck softened after ten years of soaking in the water, and when Shaw managed to move Dreher's head, the latter's neck loosened, and the head was completely separated from the body, drifting past Shaw, and Dreher's eyes seemed to be staring at Shaw through the dark goggles. This scene was captured by Shaw's head-mounted camera. In a panic, Shaw's breathing and heartbeat intensified, and it wasn't long before he suffocated due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide.
Four days after Shaw's death, other divers returned to the cave. Surprisingly, Shaw's body floated near the top of the cave, and the flashlight was still lit, hanging beneath him. The beam of light from the flashlight was facing Dreher's headless body. After his death, Shaw fulfilled the original purpose of his trip - to bring the legacy of his predecessors back to light.
Dave Shaw was alive
For years, I could only understand these quests for deep water, dark rivers, and abysses as a state of intensity driven by the death instinct, more intense than even the most fearless climbers. Extreme caveman terminology is often associated with life to death and mysticism: the extended passages are called "dead ends", and some passages lead to "end pits" and "suffocation zones", and the deepest and farthest areas are called "dead zones". But after a while, I discovered that extreme cave exploration, like extreme mountaineering, has another meaning to this kind of death instinct action. Divers and cave divers often describe their experiences with ecstasy and detachment. Don Shirley, an English diver who has dived seven hundred and ninety feet below the Bushman Cave, said: "The moments in the water are wonderful. You are in an absolute, complete vacuum, like in outer space. There is no God, no past, no future, only the present and the next thousandth of a second. The environment did not give any sense of threat, only complete calm. ”
Freediver Natalia Molchanova has a similar description, describing it as if she were dissolving herself when she was underwater. Morchanova was one of the first to do free diving in the Blue Cave, a sinkhole in the Red Sea, three hundred and ninety feet deep. There is an opening in the side wall of the Blue Cave, known as the "Arch", from which it is possible to enter the high seas. It is said that more than a hundred freedivers and scuba divers were killed here, driven by complex desires to the depths of the Blue Cave. Morchanova was able to safely complete the blue hole dive in just one breath, which is quite an amazing achievement. One day in August 2015, she went on a recreational dive off the coast of Ibiza, Spain, at depths of between 100 and 130 feet, making it a breeze for a talented and experienced diver. But she never surfaced, and her body was never found. "I feel non-existence." In a poem titled "The Depth," Morchanova writes:
The silence of eternal darkness,
And infinity.
I crossed the clock,
Time pours into my body
So we become
Unshakeable.
My body was lost in the waves
...... Become like its blue abyss
Also touch the secrets of the sea.
I've only been to the underwater labyrinth once in all my years of exploring the underworld, and that experience gave me a little understanding of what Shirley calls "calm." The labyrinth is below the center of Budapest, Hungary, on the buda side of the Danube. I was accompanied by Szabolcs Leél-Y, a Hungarian geographer, a cave explorer, and a climber. Part of the city of Budapest is built on limestone, and its "invisible city" includes both a network of mine tunnels and a cave system formed by warm, upwelling, dissolutive water flows. On a hot summer night with insects chirping in the trees lining the streets, Shoboldge and I drilled through the cracks of the heavy iron doors, opened the doors embedded in the bedrock, entered a tunnel blasted out of the limestone, and came to the flooded cave below the city. It is more than 450,000 cubic feet and is the entrance to the city's network of tunnels. Over the years, cave divers have set out from here to map the underwater labyrinth of Budapest.
Shoborch and I went into the water from the edge of the cave and floated comfortably for an hour in the hidden space beneath the city. Whenever I think back on this experience, I feel like I am in a dream. The water there comes from deep underground and the temperature is maintained at twenty-seven degrees Celsius. In the darkness, I could feel the great abyss unfolding under and around me, but I didn't feel dizzy, I only occasionally felt the collision of spirit. The water was surprisingly clear, and my limbs were moving around in the water, as if they didn't belong to me anymore.
Shoboldge said, "Here, I find peace in the stone. ”
We occasionally talked, and in addition to that, there were large segments of silence. In the womb-like space, I felt a rare sense of relaxation.
"Before you leave, you should take a look at the entrance to the real labyrinth." Shoborch said. He swam to a wall deep in the cave, and I followed. He said, "Now, sink down and open your eyes." The water here does not harm the eyes. ”
I took a few deep breaths, raised my hands above my head, put my feet together, drained the air from my lungs, and slowly sank, leaving a string of rapid bubbles. At about ten feet deep, my head and skin felt the pressure of the water growing, and I fanned my hands to maintain balance and opened my eyes. The water gently pressed against my eyeballs, and in front of me was the tunnel entrance to a black hole cave that led into the stone, the size of the hole was big enough to engulf me, and the edge of the stone was very smooth. In that unusually clear water, the opening of the cave has a huge attraction. Just as a person would want to jump when standing on the edge of a tower, I had a strong desire to continue diving deep into the cave, when I just ran out of oxygen.
Editor-in-Charge: Qian Chengxi
Proofreader: Ding Xiao