To get my excuses in early, it’s fairly difficult to write seriously when travelling. The short time between thermal baths and meals out is spent moving to the next country. It’s a hard life at the moment for young Joe.
So I write on my phone, between work emails and disgusting trigonometric diploma revision on long train journeys, the countryside between Leipzig and Vienna providing a constant diorama of frosty pine forested hills and squat gold steepled churches under endless turbines. The not so gentle rocking of both the old local and high speed trains, and the fact I don’t have autocorrect leaves the text ramshackle. Interruptions from the armed polizie when the train crosses a border stalls the flow and with every sentence I’m left with less battery to find the tramstops and hostels of each evening. So please forgive repeated words.
It’s also difficult to talk openly and honestly about my trip when this blog’s for family and the hike is illegal.
Pack weight: none
Distance: 15km through the night (after a 25km day)
Depth: between 10 and 30 meters
We begin with five young men, talking in English and French as they smoke and drink coffee in a small densely furnished garret in the 15th Arrondissement of Paris. It’s a weekday and the sun sets behind the white stone townhouses as we consider what lies ahead of us. The Catacombs.
There are always large risks present when going underground. Some are known and can be managed with preparation, the water is sometimes crotch deep so heavy boots are a no. The more interesting risks are those that are unknown and cannot be managed or the most interesting of course cannot even be imagined.
My main concerns are that; I’ve just met the only member of our party who knows the catacombs, I’ve only a few hours to establish if I trust him to lead me in the darkness. I’ve also already hit 25km today tramping around Brussells so I’m worried I’ll be slowing these boys down if we’re walking hard for more than an hour. I’m also more than concerned about the underground special Gendarmarie, not for any fines or cautions but for the sure terror of tearing, for even a minute, through tunnels half full of water, eagerly pursued by unseen shouts, torchlight and truncheon.
At this point I was not over-confident but aware of some of the rest of the known risks. I’d experienced meeting gangs of chaps out of their minds on spice in the flint mines underneath Norwich. I’ve spent weeks descending the rope ladders into the stale air and small gaps of the Andamooka opal fields. In those weeks I came to love lying on my back, submerged in absolute silence and darkness, feeling the weight of the world above me.
We leave the flat and traipse downstairs and into the lamplit streets of Paris, bemusing the couples sitting outside the cafes as we try to look inconspicous in waders, shorts and headtorches. I have to be more than a little vague regarding our entrance and exits to protect the magic. Needless to say our intentions became even more clear when we entered a large public square, lined with bars and thronged with people watchers, and begun to heavily wrestle with the manhole covers sunk into the ground.
For 15 painful minutes we were the evening’s entertainment. Without crowbar the lids would give but an inch before smashing back into the street with a deep bong that bounced around the square. Passers by slowed to watch, offering no words of indignation, nor reaching for their phones, simply smiling at the sight of people climbing down into the bowels of their capital to spend the night beneath them.
My cousin’s friend at last hefted the lid off the rim. Warm air surged up through the shaft and past our faces as we stared down at the rungs. I was struck by the memory of myself, peering into a dusty red shaft in the Outback, trying not to imagine the sensation of being on a rope ladder as it gives way or the the distant sound of a cave-in that would spell a lonely death. Permitting no time for this we hustled into the shaft, closed the lid and dissapeared from Paris. We wouldn’t see surface again for 7 hours.
The world we entered was the word of the cataflic and cataphile. An underground network of quarries and tunnels at different levels, all comprising 170 miles of madness. The tunnels are solid white limestone, though not overly familiar with the mechanisms of collapse I took reassurance from the fact the network was without massive cracks or large piles of debris on the floor. The dimensions were fair and when the floor was dry and the music was on you could make good pace, stooping for overhangs as “sur la tèt” was called out and threading past the pipes and utilities that pushed down through the earth from the tenements above. We marched for half an hour without pause to the first room, a large cavern with table and benches to sit ten, rust brown spoons everywhere protruding from the walls and ceiling. Uneeded layers are removed and we explore the bumps on our heads as we drink and smoke, myself too smug to wonder how far the tunnels will pull the smells and sounds of our presense to the others waiting down here. The talk is understandably if incomprehensibly French so I have a little wonder away from pool of candlelight, along the cut offs and forks in the paths around us. The walls are cold and wet to the touch, they don’t crumble or leave much plaster on the fingers. I’m caught by the beauty of the signs underground that denote the streets above, the work taken to guide other explorers around this dark maze. For a minute it’s like the camber on my train rapidly changes, i’m so dumb and happy I forget my balance. Pushing my hands against the walls I start passing through them. I’m sober here, there’s just some places where you can find yourself under the earth’s very skin and really get know your spinning rock. Even above surface the stones have a power that sings. Hold the pillars at Stonehenge on a solstice and you hug the earth itself, tension rolling between your fingers like guitar string. I would’ve liked to get a little more caught up with the local geology, tried to dissasociate a little further, not to be born again or imagine myself a rock mind, just to relax into the walls free from external stimulation, but my friends were calling and we had many miles to walk before dinner.
We step in time. Staying close to each other and led by our resident expert, unknown to me but a friend of my cousin, we go deeper and deeper into the network, taking hairpins faster, climbing deeper into the ossuary. We pass a few strange things, some beautiful works hastily defaced to deter tourists, a throne of human bones where all the skulls have had their faces removed, leaving the cover around once loving brains as so many dusty brown kippah.
We slow only to take water and wade through it. It’s cold at the ankle and fucking awful mid thigh. Muddied by the first in the party, thick calcinated soup hides well the boulders and crevasses in the path. At one point it’s thigh high only at the very edges of the path, deepening to a watery gorge in the middle that would at the very least instantly end the adventure with one missed step.
The water channels into a separate river and we pass a couple with a cheery “salut” and then shortly later we overtake an old man listening haunting strains of French accordion music, lantern hanging from a staff in his hand. I’m still high and dripping off the cold water adrenalin and relatively immune to unease concerning strangers underground. I’ve worked and continue to work underground with some of the hardest people you could find on surface. It’s my experience that at 50 or 250 metres down, the rough, the introverted and the isolated can’t help but feel the weight of the earth above compounding their human responsibilities to each other. It’s a dark haven of gentlemen. Unfortunately the Catacombs proved a slight exception to the rule. On stopping for water in a 2 storey cavern papered with flags we were confronted by our first Cataphile. He also carried a staff tightly with small paper white hands. The rest of the group fell silent as the newcomer hit our leader with rapid questions in French, I was told later that his knowledge of the network was being tested, and our route onwards was being identified. I’m fairly sure from the tone and atmosphere that other questions were probably asked. Questions like “Is the English as tired as he looks, will he run or fight?” or perhaps “Would the English be deterred from re-visiting my special place if me and my skinny paper friends dressed as police and chased him into the river maze with lanterns blazing?“
After presumably getting the information needed he made to leave the chamber, stopping at the entrance to glare at me he said “you have no bag“. Then he was gone before I could explain that my only bag was larger than my body, or that the new cut throughs between old networks we’d been forcing ourselves through were often no taller than 50 or 60cm, or that I was the English guest and he could do with some sun.
We bumped into a fair few people after that, all heralded by the drum of techno and smell of smoke. We passed a group of men sat around a teenage looking boy as he danced in the middle of them, long dark hair swaying over his milky topless body. The atmosphere changed after that, we were more conscious of smoke bombs and fishing line and I was acting less myself and more as hard as I could (which isn’t very) whenever we encountered groups of the pale tunnel dwellers, wondering if they were bothered enough to cut us off at a narrow pass.
After those few encounters we made real progress to another network. I’d probably hit 30km for the day at this point and was slipping in the water and catching my head on the overhanging rock of the tunnel ceiling. I couldn’t have been in better company for as soon as I started stalling it was decided it was time for dinner. Not only were we being let into a huge secret, at possible cost to the reputation of our friend, we were hiking as a team, keeping momentum while caring and supporting each member, and unfortunately that’s not always the case in a group hike. And Christ what support. I like writing but forgive me for fucking up and stumbling here.
Nothing and no-one will ever take the joy and grace of that dinner from me. I will carry the simple splendour of an underground raclette deep within me until I die. Just know that it was the best meal I’d eaten in my life, without question. The care that the French take with cuisine is beautiful and when we sat together, cheese melting in a pot over a burning jam lid full of white spirit, potatoes steaming under blankets of ham, I understood why. The soul was nourished, the body was fuelled. I can’t say any more than that. Really I can’t even move on, just sit beside me in the chamber and let’s watch the steam rise over the melted cheese before it’s carried into the tunnels, out the vents, wells and railways, and back into Paris.
Light shines brighter in darkness. Small moments can have larger impacts when underground and we could sit and talk openly without any thought of the stresses or strains of surface. I understand how the ability to totally remove yourself from life and reinvent yourself can be compelling. How safe it can feel sleeping in a catacomb when your life above has turned to shit or you simply find the world in 2020 overstimulating. If I wasn’t a whore to the sun this could well be a strange life to be bounced into after a relationship breakdown.
Keep walking. Thinner gaps, deeper water. Every monument we pass a testament to the struggle of getting to the location. Immense carvings of faces, 3 meters high. A whole sea side town carved into the cliffs of a flooded passage, so you enter the harbour wading among the limestone boats like a wet god. With each intensely beautiful mural we feel the weight of carrying 10 different paint pots 6km underground, and pushing them individually through each of the tiny passage holes.
We figure we’ve marched about 12ish km for 6 hours, there’s water left but it’s time to try the first exit, another manhole next to a ring road about an hour walk from our original entrance. We stop for a smoke then journey through the tunnels to series of ladders reaching up through 3 floors to the surface. We climb and struggle with the manhole from underneath, knowing that the 50kg of metal would fall down the shaft like a mass possesed. On seeing the lid lift exhaustion overtakes me. I enter Paris and stand among commuters waiting to cross the road. I’m soaked and wracked with aches, covered in white chalky mud, watching the sky begin to lighten as the city heads to work.
We head back to the garret and sleep from sunrise til sunset. All we can talk about on waking is what we’ve just experienced.
Just as a brief end note I’d like to thank my unamed cousin for bringing me. It was pure happy chance I happened to be free and in Europe when he had a chance to go underground. But it’s pure respect to him that he allowed me to join.
Not to be recommended, I wont be passing on any details.
Merci
Joe Stuttle's Blog 