In 2011, the Japanese scientist, Professor Kei Hirose, recreated the conditions at the core of the planet to 'witness the rapid growth of crystalline 'forests'. Extreme conditions found at the Earth's core have been recreated in the laboratory. He created an incredibly powerful vice using the tips of two diamonds. Between them he has pressurised a sample of iron-nickel to three million times atmospheric pressure and heated the sample to about 4,500C.Under these extraordinary conditions, the crystal structure of iron-nickel alloy changed and the crystals rapidly grew in size. "We may have very big crystals at the centre of the Earth, maybe up to 10km," says Hirose. These crystals would all align "like a forest", says Hirose, pointing at the poles.'
Things were quieter now, but the trainline intermittently grinded against my teeth, rattling the spaces between my ribcage. Wet mud squelched through the hole in my jeans.
I ran and knelt down here in the park, because I thought I heard something I had never heard before. It was coming from the ground. I know it sounds like a strange thing to run towards something you have never heard before, but the sound was so strange that it grated against my own sense of self, destabilising; it dislodged a part of me, dislocated a bone, and I needed to piece it back. It is hard to put into words what it was like, but hearing it filled me with a sense of utter dread and terror - it felt like it was coming for me, this sound, calling me.
Then it came again: a thudding? (badly described) but it emerged from the ground in waves. I don’t know why but I knew this sound came from somewhere deep inside the earth; it was old, prehistoric, and like I said, not of this earth.
I think I heard it again: this sound passing through the layers of sedimentary rock; then through soil; worm kingdom; up, up to land, touching my knees; skimming through the strands of my veins; through strands of cotton thread; up through the synapse strands, motor neurones; then up-down, like a curve on a graph, through the strands of my hair stopping at the tip of the long, tight plait, resting on my back.
Compelled, I dug the spot tensing my fingers together like shovels and milking the dirt. It felt like I was pulling out clumps of fur, scrappy, my hands cupping balls of earth and grass.
After a few minutes of digging, I found metal: not deep; shallow, flat, 5 inches into the soil. I wasn’t quite prepared for this; my fingers broke nails as I scraped the metal; it cut. And sucking my dirt finger, with one hand, I wiped the soil away from the flat surface: it was circular, concrete-grey, 30 inches in diameter: a manhole. The patterned surface was odd though; brushing my hands over the top, I had the sensation it was braille.
Looking around me, I reached for a nearby stick to wedge the manhole open. I moved my hands around the sides of the metal plate and heaved - it was leaden heavy. Opening up a gap, I slipped in the stick, and levered it open; the metal plate rasped, sliding across the mud, revealing a dark hole behind the curtain; I peered down. A gaping wound, I had ripped off the plaster. Then I heard it again: seismic waves; metal wailing; concentric circles; phosphorescence; milky - it spangled me.
Before I knew it: it sucked me down…
Darkness. Whizzing down the hole, I felt my legs rise up over my head. Vacuum packed. My body - a sack of blood and water - felt the air pressure kneading my skin, rippling and poppling. Choking air, rushing scream, pulsating cortisol, my muscles cramping sharp: I was readying myself to smack the bottom - my skull a cracked egg, a wet yolk spill. Helpless, flailing, I imagined my body as a popped balloon, fluids released from their shell and dissolving back into the earth, seeping down through porous rock, mixing with other bodies of popped fluid - plant bodies, fish bodies, animal bodies - into one singular body of fluid lying in pockets underneath the earth’s crust.
Seconds passed, minutes passed…(what?) my muscles can only cramp for so long, as I was bracing to hit the bottom of the pipe and die. Half an hour passed and my heartbeat slowed, allowing me to think more clearly, as I started to question the lack of sense of my situation. My plaited hair stood upright, as if pulled up by string, and the wind pressure made my skin wobble in upward currents like jelly. I was certain I was falling. But when you fall, you fall quick, you die quick…
How long was this pipe?
My mind flashed to an image from years ago, of the man I saw fall from a building. He was half naked in front of a growing crowd at Glasgow Queen’s Street train station. In less than two seconds, I saw him somersault (not intentionally) into the ground, though I remember the somersault in slow motion, cinematic - I think my memory altered events, as if replaying wasn’t enough, I need it to make it 3x slower. I didn’t actually see him hit the bottom; I was watching from my desk - I worked as a bank-teller - and was separated by a large glass window. He was 30 metres away. I didn’t see him hit the ground, I heard it: a cracked egg in a china bowl, then I saw someone in the crowd turn away and projectile vomit onto the pavement. Two seconds to fall 60 metres then…
How long was this pipe?
It was hard to keep my eyes open because of the constant flush of wind and dust. The darkness surrounding me gained dabs of colour and flashed like light-spots under the eyelid, then stretched out like elastic bands bleeding back into the darkness. Experiencing vertigo, I had to hold my breath and close my eyes to not regurgitate fluid, but I do think I was slowing down - falling less steeply at least, less wind and suction popped, and my plait falling softly on my back, I felt less sick. Slowing down allowed me to discern my surroundings, and I concluded I must be very deep inside the earth after all this falling. I wasn’t in complete darkness, though perhaps my eyes had adjusted. I noticed that the metal pipe was merged with the rock as if it had grown out of it; so although it was shiny and rusted in parts, I could also see the stratas of rock, like icing layers. I was amazed to see that these stratas, rather than being different shades of brown - as one would expect being deep inside the earth’s crust - were varying hues of violet. A beautiful geode, the stratas were like melted sugar that glistened, luminous, as if emitting energy.
The pipe was widening now, and I was no longer so close to its surface but metres away, and growing in distance. Differently too, I was no longer falling straight down, but I had the sensation of feeling incredibly light, and now rocked like a falling feather from side to side. I felt so flimsy and jelly-like after this falling ordeal, but it felt comforting to be so gently put down on the floor. I felt oddly mothered, and desired it too; feeling as helpless as I was falling, my mind was stripped back and vulnerable - I needed softness.
I was on the floor now. I was no longer in what I would call I pipe, but a giant cavern. And this cavern glistened and gleamed, refracting light like an incredible kaleidoscope: I was staring at an innumerable mass of translucent crystals. And dizzy swaying as I was, the crystals refracted multi-coloured reflections. The crystals shot upwards in columns, sprouting out more clusters of crystals like flowers in bloom. These columns went high above my head till they touched stalactites on the ceiling, so that it was as if I were in a forest whose glassy leaves dappled, and looking down at my body I saw I was dipped in a halo of prismatic light.
Quiet and whispered distant, I heard the sound of lapping water; and although it was different to the sound I had heard in the park - vertically upwards 6,371 kilometres on the earth’s surface - I felt a strange similarity, that milky irk, eeling for attention. And the closer I came to the sound, the more the floor crunched with shingle: a mixture of crushed glass, crustacean shells, and mother of pearls, iridescent in the light. Feeling sensitive and raw, and uncomfortable in my skin at the sudden rush of impossible information, I felt anxious about treading softly. I felt watery, as if making too much noise might ring through the crystals and shatter something, chandeliers dropping from the ceiling till one anchored itself in my body. I became palpably aware of the soles of my shoes as a barrier against the shards of glass that could slice through my foot, and hoped that my trainers were sturdy enough to protect me. The lapping waves got louder, but it became incredibly hard to hear it and I had to focus very carefully because something odd was happening: the lapping waves moved in unison with my breath, copying the irregularity and breaks in my breathing, so that it was a trouble to discern the difference between the two. I did find it soothing though, and my tight chest began to relax. I felt watery still, but in a good, sort of fluid, way now.
The crystal trees opened out, stopping abruptly to reveal a flat expanse of black glittering water that went as far as the horizon. Not water but oil: jet black, with an iridescent sheen, thick yet silky smooth, and strangely seductive, expanding across the landscape. The oil sea undulated, glittering stars, alternating between the rise and fall of its surface. I was shocked to see that the oil sea had a tide; I would have imagined that deep inside the earth’s core, the world would be stunned into stillness, since without the light of the sun, nothing would be able to survive.
Though, thinking about it, it did make sense that there would be a tide; Nell had told me that night, when as teenage-adults, we had skinny dipped in the sea. She said that tides in the sea are mainly caused because of the gravitational attraction (pull) of the moon, and sun, on the rotating earth. Fizzy and manic, we had spun around the kitchen table, orbiting in occult worship, firecrackers circling in the numbing cold.
And thousands of miles below the ground, the moon and the sun still communicated with the earth; the world of giant burning orange and silver balls - orbiting zeniths, the gods responsible for the origin of time - still communicated with the minuscule, the molecular; far down below, cell to cell, the lowest of the low; birthing life and movement through a symbiotic circling dance.
I felt the warm feeling of trust envelop me. Fizzy, giddy, entranced, I stepped into the oil sea, looking down at my body as it disappeared, level by level, into the black liquid that swirled around me, eddies of marbled metallic purple. When the oil was up to my chin, I felt the seabed fall away from my feet. It was deep now. I could no longer feel my legs, as my brain reached for them to start treading, instead it felt the in and out of the tide stretched out; I no longer felt singular; I no longer felt like an ‘I’.
One, felt one, felt wholeness; felt nothing; felt happy. The oil was up to eyes - was breathing with the sea. Last look at the sparkling stalactites, descended into blackness, tasting metallic in mouth. Down at the bottom of the seabed, lying thick in oil slick. Powered off for a bit, before making the journey home.