This newsletter presents a small, weekly collection of geographic, historical, archaeological, cultural and/or artistic articles that have caught my attention. As a fantasy writer, I am fascinated by the nooks and corners of our real world and constantly find inspiration for my own world building and storytelling — it’s my hope that these newsletters are an inspirational resource for other fantasy writers, too.
This is my first “part two” — unplanned, but my browsing popped a few more underground stories this week, so I thought it worth repeating. Caves have long held a fascination for humans. They are places of shelter and safety, but also thresholds to the underworld, the passage from one realm of being into the next. I can’t help wondering how different it must have been being underground in the ages before electric lights. Candles or torches would only make greater mysteries, their unsteady light only casting more mysteries in the looming shadows.
It’s said that the Greek people of Derinkuyu (below) called their underground city, “Mαλακοπια (Malakopia), which means “soft”—possibly a reference to the pliancy of the local stone.” But I wonder if it also refers to the pliancy of the boundary between worlds that you can find underground, and how easy it is to cross over to the other side when you are deep inside the earth.
Soft Places, Deep Wells
“We live cheek by jowel with undiscovered worlds. Sometimes the barriers that separate us are thick, sometimes they’re thin, and sometimes they’re breached. That’s when a wardrobe turns into a portal to Narnia, a rabbit hole leads to Wonderland, and a Raquel Welch poster is all that separates a prison cell from the tunnel to freedom.
“Those are all fictional examples. But in 1963, that barrier was breached for real. Taking a sledgehammer to a wall in his basement, a man in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu got more home improvement than he bargained for. Behind the wall, he found a tunnel. And that led to more tunnels, eventually connecting a multitude of halls and chambers. It was a huge underground complex, abandoned by its inhabitants and undiscovered until that fateful swing of the hammer.
“The anonymous Turk—no report mentions his name—had found a vast subterranean city, up to 18 stories and 280 feet (76 meters) deep and large enough to house 20,000 people. Who built it, and why? When was it abandoned, and by whom? History and geology provide some answers.”
Read more: The Mysterious Underground City Found in a Man’s Basement
Just a Blink of the Cosmic Eye
“A cousin of stalagmites and stalactites is the ‘cave curtain.’ Curtains grow when water dribbles down cave walls, rather than dripping from their ceilings. This creates ribbons, or curtains, that hang down in beautifully wavy patterns.
“Stalagmites, stalactites, and curtains can also serve the same purpose as the rings of a tree: they can begin to tell us how old a cave is. ‘The general rule of thumb is, it takes a hundred years to grow one cubic inch,’ Doyle says. ‘At Lake Shasta, we have these very long curtains that stretch up to 80 feet long. So, you can start extrapolating how much time it takes to accumulate them, and how long these formations have been growing.’ Scientists estimate that the Lake Shasta Caves are over 250 million years old.”
Read more: How to Decode a Cave
A Gateway to Hell
“When an oracle foretold the fall of Rome, it was predicted that the city could only survive by sacrificing that which it held most dear: ‘quo plurimum populus Romanus posset.’ The pit opened of its own accord, a deep passage to the underworld that stood ready to accept the sacrifice. Marcus Curtius recognized that the dearest thing to Rome was her brave young soldiers – and so dressed in full battle armor, he rode his horse into the pit. Marcus Curtius died, but Rome was saved.”