81
" Deepwater violated that agreement shockingly, manifesting a substance on which most modern human life depends but that few people encounter in the raw. After returning from Norway, I would learn that the Moskstraumen Maelstrom had become literally enabling of the oil industry. In the 1980s a man called Bjørn Gjevig – an antiquarian scholar, professional mathematician and amateur sailor, who seems as if he must have been invented by Poe, but truly exists – became fascinated by the hydrodynamics of the Maelstrom. Using data gathered in part while sailing close to the whirlpool, Gjevig began to model the maths of its currents. When oil was discovered off the Lofotens, he realized that his data had gained application: oil companies would need to understand such ocean forces in order to construct rigs that could withstand ‘destructive currents of the kind found in the Maelstrom’. At the climax of Poe’s story, the human body loses all volition and becomes a kind of drift-matter, helpless within the ‘destructive currents’. The fisherman and his brother are drawn steadily deeper into the vortex. The fisherman realizes that he has entered a giant grading-machine, which weighs and measures the objects that have been pulled into it – and moves the heaviest and most irregularly shaped items to destruction at its base. "
― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey
83
" The discovery, Bjerck will say later, is like ‘a shooting star’ – unexpected, undeserved and magnificent – and it leaves him with a desperate longing to experience such a moment again, once more to be the first person in thousands of years to set eyes on these figures dancing in the dark. He begins years of travel up and down the western coasts, sailing and walking to cave after cave, an undertaking that moves from longing to addiction. He finds himself drawn both in his dreams and in his daily life into what he comes to call the ‘cavescape’. And he does find more figures, enough to feed his addiction. Red figures, always red, almost always the same simple form, leaping and dancing in the darkness of caves up and down the coasts, familiar in their shape now and yet still utterly mysterious in their making. Each time he finds them his heart leaps too and there is a collapse of time, or a coexistence of multiple kinds of time, as the figures dance and flicker in the low light. "
― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey
92
" The strains of the work are intense, the lifespan of the machines short. ‘When one of them reaches the end of its useful days,’ says Neil, ‘it’s not cost-effective to bring it back up. It’d take the place of ore in the upshaft, and that’s too expensive. So instead the machine gets driven into a worked-out tunnel of rock salt, and abandoned there. The halite will flow around it as the tunnel naturally closes up.’ It is an astonishing image: the translucent halite melting around this cybernetic dragon – the fossilization of this machine-relic in its burial shroud of salt. I remember the pit ponies about which Emile Zola had written, brought down as foals into France’s great nineteenth-century coal mines. The foals would not see daylight again. They grew in the mines, were fed there, were worked to death there, and their stunted bodies were left in side tunnels, awaiting the burial of collapse. "
― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey
96
" I remember something Louis de Bernieres has written about a relationship that endured into old age: 'we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.' As someone lucky to live in a long love, I recognize that gradual growing-towards and subterranean intertwining; the things that do not need to be said between us, the unspoken communication which can sometimes tilt troublingly towards silence, and the sharing of both happiness and pain. I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings. Theirs, too, seems to me then a version of love's work. "
― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey