It ’s another installment of Entropist , a scifi culture column by futurist designing maven Geoff Manaugh , generator ofBLDG BLOG . You stumble on a cave in the mickle of Slovenia . Rumor has it this place inspired Dante ’s verbal description of Hell in his Divine Comedy . Called thePostojna Jama , it ’s areal cave . Let ’s say , then , that you join a radical of mass mill about at thecave‘s entrance before you all derive into the mystifying . At a stage that clear is n’t the bottom , you ’re told to twist around . But why contain ? you think , looking ahead into the darkness . Is there something down here we should n’t see ? In an dead cheesy , but nonetheless pleasurable – even impossible to halt reading – novel calledThe Descent , author Jeff Long presents us with a very similar premise . It involves nuns and the U.S. military machine and Himalayan mountain climber and a unearthly parallel branch of the human species , some rogue sub - race that went literally underground so many tens of G of years ago – and is only now descend back into the visible light .
They ’re called Homo hadalis . Get it ? They ’re from Hades , “ the planet within their satellite , ” as Long visit it – where their refers to the military men who now find themselves blur by this brand unexampled foe that confront them from below .
Soon enough , find more and more of these literally hellish non - human being rain cats and dogs up from the bowels of the Earth , kill thousand before vanish again into unilluminated caverns , the war machine of every res publica in the worldly concern plan a subterranean encroachment . arm with machine guns , hydroponic husbandry , ultraviolet radiation lights , and batch of instant concrete , they head downward . They begin the descent .
Indeed , organized and State Department - fund , the military machine “ approached the subplanet the direction America approached manned landing on the moon forty years ago , as a mission requiring life support systems , modes of transportation and access code , and logistics . ”
huge cavern are mapped . Tunnels stretching clear across the Pacific seafloor are come across – and , from there , cobweb of subsidiary tunnels , weave off into an abyss :
The abysm beneath the Pacific is basalt , which gets attack every few hundred age by huge plumes of atomic number 1 - sulfide saltwater , or sulphuric acid , which snakes up from deeper stratum . This acid brine corrode through the basalt like worms through an apple . We now consider there may be as many as six million miles of of course occurring cavity in the rock beneath the Pacific , at an intermediate depth of 6,100 fthm .
The earth , in other actor’s line , is hollow . There are thousands of tiny tunnels , like capillaries , but big enough to take the air through – and there is one monumental one , a geologic superhighway spiking east from theMariana Trench . It angles toward a nest of little caves on the surface as far aside as Peru .
As one of Long ’s characters allege :
“ Where it goes , we ’re not quite sure … A profusion of tunnel shoots throughout the Asiatic plate system , feed access to the basements of Australia , the Indonesian archipelago , China , and so on . You name it , there are doorways to the surface everywhere . ”
There are doorways to the aerofoil everywhere – but the traffic moves both way . Things add up up ; things go down . One of those threshold is the Postojna Jana , advert above , with the logical implication that Dante had literally been describing Hell , having view its subsurface chamber .
presently the Army Corps of Engineers gets involved . “ They were tasked to reinforce burrow , forge young tape transport organisation , drill shafts , frame elevators , bore channels , and erect whole camps underground . They even paved parking bunch – three thousand feet beneath the control surface . roadway were construct through the mouths of cave . ”
It takes days at a time to get anywhere ; people move between secret understructure camps and vast crying city further on , full of klieg lights , ringed with landmines , thriving behind walls of sandbags and bastioned machine gun nest . There are outbreaks of “ tropical cave disease ” and claustrophobia – and there is something else down there , that foe twin of the human wash .
Everywhere the descend soldier find “ evidence of rude business at the deeper grade , ” down amidst overwhelming pressures beneath continents and beneath the ocean .
Of naturally , control surface - dwellers desire to research ; they want to see where the burrow lead , to go out to the edge of the Earth by going into the Earth . “ Into Hell ? ” some character innocently ask . No , not underworld : into “ an upperlithospheric environs , ” we read . “ An abyssal neighborhood riddled with holes . ”
Suddenly , man no longer looked out to the star topology . Astronomers fell from grace . It became a metre to look inward .
To look into the Earth …
There is a rich vein of subterraneous adventure in scientific discipline fable , fromJules Verne , of class , to Neil Marshall ’s late horror filmThe Descentand the unwatchably badThe Core – or even the Bible , where we read about theharrowing of Hell , which the Catholic Encyclopedia describes as a “ rejoicing descent ” into the world abyss .
I ’m tempted to cite Nietzsche . After all , with all this talk of entering into undiscovered kingdom of pressure and darkness , look into a nothingness that perhaps looks into us in turn , the obvious final doubt is : Are we prepare for what we ’ll find ?
As Jules Verne himself save : “ Look down well ! You must take a example in abysm . ”
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