Plumbing the Depths
UNDERLAND: A Deep Time Journey
BY ROBERT MACFARLANE
Norton, 488 pp., $27.95
ROBERT MACFARLANE’S NEW book, like his earlier ones—about the hold of mountains on the human imagination, about wild places of the British isles, about walking along ancient routes, and about the language of nature writing itself—is exuberantly rich in its range of references and associations, poetically reflective, and breathtakingly well written. It takes him from the earth’s seemingly solid surface into the cracks and hollows beneath, from relatively shallow time—a few hundred or thousand years of recorded human history—to the deep time
