Trecho do "Underland", de Robert Macfarlane
All cities are additions to a
landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere. Much of Paris was built from
its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for
dressing and placing. Underground stone quarrying began in the thirteenth
century, and Lutetian limestone was used in the construction of such iconic
buildings as Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and Saint-Eustache Church. The
result of more than six hundred years of quarrying is that beneath the southern
portion of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than two
hundred miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, extending beneath several arrondissements.
This network is the vides de carrières—the quarry voids, the catacombs, which
together total an underground space around ten times the space of Central Park.
(...) In 1786, the process began of
evacuating the city’s cemeteries, crypts, and tombs and transferring the
remains of more than six million corpses to the quarry region known as the
Tombe-Issoire, soon to become Les Catacombes, on what was then the Montrouge
Plain. A grim, ritualized production line was established for this task, involving
diggers, cleaners, stackers, drivers, porters, and overseers. Every night, for
years, horse-drawn funerary wagons containing the bones of the disinterred
dead, covered with heavy black cloths, preceded by torchbearers and followed by
priests, who chanted the Mass of the Dead, clopped through the streets from the
cemeteries to the Tombe-Issoire, where they disposed of their contents. Down in
the tunnels, workers sorted the remains of the dead, filing them by bones into
space-efficient ricks and stacks. Minor forms of folk art emerged in the
disposition of these bones: serried ranks of femurs, their gleaming lines
separated by rows of skulls, all turned eye sockets outward.
The deposition of bones into the
catacombs continued over the course of the nineteenth century, but quarrying
dwindled away as the best limestone deposits became worked out. Adaptable
quarrymen made a career move into farming, renting out some of the quarry voids
as mushroom fields; damp and dark, these spaces provided the perfect growing
spaces for champignons, which sprouted from rows of horse manure. During the
Second World War, the French Resistance retreated into sections of the tunnels
in the months following the Occupation. So did civilians during air raids—and
so, too, did Vichy and Wehrmacht officers, who constructed bombproof bunkers in
the maze under the Sixth Arrondissement.
*
(...) The approach to the Salle du
Drapeau—the Room of the Flag—is the only time when I feel real fear in the
Parisian catacombs. It is early evening in the upper city by the time we get
close to the room. On the surface, people are leaving offices, walking home
through dusk streets, boarding trains and buses, stopping for drinks in bars.
Down in the invisible city, we are
heading northwest along a tunnel with no side turnings, the ceiling of which is
dropping steadily lower. I walk with a bent neck, then with hunched shoulders;
then I have to lean at the waist, and then, at last, I have to drop to my knees
and can only crawl forward.
Ahead of me, past Lina, the tunnel
seems to cinch to a dead end. I wait for Lina to admit that she has at last led
us the wrong way. Lina says nothing. The yellow of the limestone ahead glows in
her torchlight. She shrugs off her pack, pushes it behind her, loops one of its
straps around one of her ankles, and then eases herself head first into what I
can now see is a tiny floor-level opening, perhaps eighteen inches high, where
I thought the tunnel ended. My heart shivers fast, and my mouth dries up
instantly. My body does not want to enter that opening.
“You’ll need to pull your pack along
with your toes here,” Lina says. Her voice is muffled. “And from now on don’t
shout or touch the ceiling.
Fear slithers up my spine, spills
greasily down my throat. Nothing to do but follow. I lie flat, loop pack to
foot, edge in head first. The clearance above is so tight that again I have to
turn my skull sideways to proceed. The clearance to the sides is so scant that
my arms are nearly locked to my body. The stone of the ceiling is cracked into
blocks, and it sags around the cracks. Claustrophobia suddenly grips my full
body like a vice, pressing in on my chest and lungs, squeezing my breath hard,
setting black stars exploding in my head.
There’s the drag-scratch of my bag
behind me, pain already in the leg to which it is looped, from the effort of
pulling it. Movement is a few inches at a time, a snakelike wriggle, gaining
purchase with shoulders and fingertips. How long does this tunnel run like
this? If it dips even two inches, I’ll be stuck. The thought of continuing is
atrocious. The thought of reversing is even worse. Then the top of my head
bumps against something soft.
Ahead I can just see, by cocking my
neck back, that the underside of Lina’s rucksack is jammed against the dipping
edge of a block in the ceiling. The pack is jerking around, trying to get free;
she must be hauling at it with her leg, but it looks as if it could loosen the
block at any moment and bring the ceiling down.
“Easy, easy!” I shout and she shouts
back, telling me not to shout. Pop—and the bag comes free, slithers on.
(...) These are trains above us; we
are directly underneath the Métro and over-ground lines, and it is decades of
train judder that has left the ceiling unstable here. I want to shout but
mustn’t, want to retreat but can’t, so I just keep inching forward, stone dust
in my mouth, finger-scrabble against the rough rock, hauling the bag behind me,
all in silence—just the rumble of the trains rising and falling away, my heaving
breath, and my drumming heart. And then, after a few minutes of that
sick-making fear, the space widens and lifts, and then we can kneel again, and
then we can stand, and then we can walk, and then we are close to the Salle du
Drapeau.
