Throughout literature, from mythology to modern fiction, the underworld has been projected as dark and fearsome. As the writer Robert Macfarlane points out in his latest book, this is reflected in language itself — “height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’.” In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane describes his journeys into the worlds beneath our feet — from the depths of Greenland's glaciers to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves. Some of these accounts are frightening. As historian and author William Dalrymple notes in his review for The Guardian, “In a cave system in the Mendips, a rope thrown down as an escape route becomes entangled behind the belay boulder; only the necessity to regain the surface forces Macfarlane to risk his life climbing up it.” Dalrymple notes that “the tales of adventures are only a takeoff point for discussions of deeper concerns: the relationship between man and landscape, the instability of time and place, and perhaps above all, the fragility of all we are and all we create.”
