• Complain

Robert Macfarlane - Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Here you can read online Robert Macfarlane - Underland: A Deep Time Journey full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2019, publisher: W.W. Norton Company, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Robert Macfarlane Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Underland: A Deep Time Journey: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Underland: A Deep Time Journey" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From the best-selling, award-winning author ofLandmarksandThe Old Ways, a haunting voyage into the planets past and future.
Hailed as the great nature writer of this generation (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. InUnderland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earths underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.
In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestsellerThe Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through deep timethe dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the presenthe moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk hiding place where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. Woven through Macfarlanes own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls the awful darkness within the world.
Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power,Underlandspeaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, Macfarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?Underlandmarks a new turn in Macfarlanes long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

Robert Macfarlane: author's other books


Who wrote Underland: A Deep Time Journey? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Underland: A Deep Time Journey" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents

By the same author Mountains of the Mind The Wild Places The Old Ways - photo 1

By the same author

Mountains of the Mind

The Wild Places

The Old Ways

Landmarks

The Gifts of Reading

The Lost Words (with Jackie Morris)

UNDERLAND

A Deep Time Journey

ROBERT MACFARLANE

Picture 2

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

New York | London

Copyright 2019 by Robert Macfarlane
First American Edition 2019

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Macfarlane, Robert, 1976author.
Title: Underland : a deep time journey / Robert Macfarlane.
Description: First American edition. | New York : W.W. Norton & Company,
2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019000216 | ISBN 9780393242140 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Subterranean. | Underground areasHistory. |
Voyages and travels. | Geology.
Classification: LCC GN755 .M295 2019 | DDC 551.44/7dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000216

ISBN 9780393242157 (eBook)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

Is it dark down there

Where the grass grows through the hair?

Is it dark in the under-land of Null?

Helen Adam, Down There in the Dark, 1952

The void migrates to the surface...

Advances in Geophysics, 2016

Contents

The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree - photo 3

The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.

Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. Somewhere down on lower ground an unseen fire is burning, its smoke a column. A child drops stones one by one into a metal bucket, ting, ting, ting.

Follow a path through fields, past a hill to the east that is marked by a line of nine round burial barrows, nubbing the land like the bones of a spine. Three horses in a glinting cloud of flies, stock-still but for the swish of a tail, the twitch of a head.

Over a stile in a limestone wall and along a stream to a thicketed dip from which grows the ancient ash. Its crown flourishes skywards into weather. Its long boughs lean low around. Its roots reach far underground.

Swallows curve and dart, feathers flashing. Martins criss-cross the middle air. A swan flies high and south on creaking wings. This upper world is very beautiful.

Near the ashs base its trunk splits into a rough rift, just wide enough that a person might slip into the trees hollow heart and there drop into the dark space that opens below. The rifts edges are smoothed to a shine by those who have gone this way before, passing through the old ash to enter the underland.

Beneath the ash tree, a labyrinth unfurls.

Down between roots to a passage of stone that deepens steeply into the earth. Colour depletes to greys, browns, black. Cold air pushes past. Above is solid rock, utter matter. The surface is scarcely thinkable.

The passage is taken; the maze builds. Side-rifts curl off. Direction is difficult to keep. Space is behaving strangely and so too is time. Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.

The passage turns, turns again, narrows and leads into surprising space. A chamber is entered. Sound now booms, resonates. The walls of the chamber appear bare at first, but then something extraordinary happens. Scenes from the underland start to show themselves on the stone, distant from one another in history, but joined by echoes.

In a cave within a scarp of karst, a figure inhales a mouthful of red ochre dust, places its left hand against the cave wall fingers spread, thumb out, palm cold on the rock and then blows the ochre hard against the hands back. There is an explosion of dust and when the hand is lifted its ghostly print remains, the stone around having taken the red of the ochre. The hand is shifted, more dust is blown and another pale outline is left. Calcite will run over these prints, sealing them in. The prints will survive for more than 35,000 years. Signs of what? Of joy? Of warning? Of art? Of life in the darkness?

In the shallow sandy soil of northern Europe, some 6,000 years ago, the body of a young woman dead in childbirth along with her son is lowered gently into a grave. Next to her is laid the white wing of a swan. Then onto the wing is placed the body of her son, so that the baby is doubly cradled in death by the swans feathers and his mothers arms. A round mound of earth is raised to mark their burial place: the woman, the child and the white swans wing.

On an island in the Mediterranean 300 years before the founding of the Roman Empire, a metalworker completes the design of a silver coin. The coins face shows a square labyrinth with a single entrance on its upper edge and a complex path to its centre. The walls of the labyrinth like the rim of the coin are slightly raised and polished to a sheen. Tooled into the labyrinths centre is the figure of a creature with the head of a bull and the legs of a man: the Minotaur, waiting in darkness for whatever comes next.

Six hundred years later, a young woman sits for a portrait painter in Egypt. She has dressed most handsomely for the sitting. She has strong dark eyebrows and wide dark eyes, almost black. Her hair is pulled back from her forehead by a metal band topped with a gold bead, and she wears a golden scarf and brooch. The painter works with hot beeswax, gold leaf and coloured pigments, layering them onto wood. He is creating the young womans death image. When she dies it will be wrapped into the bands of cloth used to mummify her corpse such that it takes the place of her real face. As her body decays beneath its swaddling, the portrait will remain un-aged. It is well to do such things early, when one looks most glowing. Her body will be placed in a necropolis a city of the dead built at the entrance to a sunken depression of desert, in a buried chamber lined with limestone and covered with quartzite slabs to deter grave robbers, close to vaults that hold the mummified corpses of more than a million ibises.

Beneath a plateau in southern Africa, late in the nineteenth century, miners crawl through miles of narrow tunnel cut deeper underground here than anywhere else on Earth at this time lugging ore from a sunken reef of gold. Some of these men, who have migrated to the area in their thousands to work, will die soon in rockfalls and accidents. More will die slowly of silicosis from breathing the rock dust down there in the killing dark, year after year. Here the human body is largely disposable in the view of the corporations that own the mine and the markets that drive it: a small, unskilled tool of extraction to be replaced when it fails or wears out. The ore the men bring up is crushed and smelted, and the wealth it yields lines the pockets of shareholders in distant countries.

In a cave in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas not long after Partition, a young woman meditates sixteen hours a day, for seventy- five days. She sits stone-still while meditating, save for her mouth, which moves as she murmurs mantras. She emerges most often at night; when it is cloudless the Milky Way can be seen spilling across the sky above the peaks. She lives on water drunk with cupped hands from a sacred river, and on foraged wild berries and fruits. The mantras, the solitude and the darkness bring perceptions that are new to her, and she experiences a profound change in her vision. When at last she completes her retreat she feels vast as the skies, old as the mountains, formless as starlight.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Underland: A Deep Time Journey»

Look at similar books to Underland: A Deep Time Journey. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Underland: A Deep Time Journey»

Discussion, reviews of the book Underland: A Deep Time Journey and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.