Early in 1925, headlines across the United
States briefly focused on an intensely local and specific story: a man in central Kentucky
was stuck in a cave. His name was Floyd Collins, he was 37 years
old, and he had spent countless hours exploring the dark tunnels, chambers, and cascades under
Barren County. It wasn’t the first time he had lost his
light, underground. It wasn’t the first time he had faced a
squeeze. And he assumed, when he was found a day after
the cave-in that trapped his legs, it would be a fairly simple process to extract him
from the cave he so easily had wriggled into. It was not. Collins had underestimated his own caving
ability. What felt to him like an easy scramble- only
60 feet underground!- was a near-impossibility to most people, both physically and mentally. Sand Cave, where he was trapped, was unstable,
narrow, and (like all caves,) smotheringly dark. Men would go in to give Collins a drink of
water or a sandwich and come out trembling, having barely made it halfway to his position. 100 hours later, Collins was still in the
cave. A few people had made it to him- his brother,
a reporter, a firefighter. They planned to tie a rope around Collins
and pull him out- even though the walls of the cave could shred his body like knives. Even though, as a doctor warned, the rope
might stretch his organs like taffy. Collins begged them to pull him out, even
if they had to pull his foot off. But they couldn’t. While the folks in the cave struggled to think
of anything that could rescue Collins, the rest of the country was rapt, with newspapers
running headlines from coast-to-coast. People hung on every word. The horror of the situation, the drama of
the rescue attempts- it was electric. No one could tear themself away. 6 days after the first cave-in, officials
decided that their best chance of rescue was to dig an entirely separate tunnel in from
the surface. It indeed might have been their best chance
of rescue. But it wasn’t enough. 14 days, two full weeks after he trapped himself
in a cave that others could barely enter, Floyd Collins had died. And what was the rest of the country left
with? A gaping fascination at what lies beneath
us, a fixation with the blackness. Congress regulated the area around Collin’s
cave, in part to try and regulate the stream of wannabe-explorers plunging into their own
underground worlds. You might have heard of what resulted: Mammoth
Cave, National Park. Today, it’s the longest known cave network
in the world. Two million people visit the park a year. Because, despite its origins, despite the
involuntary shudder that descriptions of it cause, despite the fact that it is easier
in every single respect to simply stay above ground, we just can’t resist. It is, in one of the most literal ways possible,
a call of the void. For many years, we thought the bottom of the
world lay in the Krubera cave, 6,824 feet under the Caucasus mountains. What does being in a cave feel like? Let’s start with the basics. It’s dark. It’s really dark. Water and air may trickle past the first room
of a cavern, but light is bound to just a couple feet of the entrance. Once you’ve taken a turn deeper, you’re
surrounded by true black. No stars. You can stand in the dark with your light
off for as long as you want, and your eyes will never adjust. It seems like, after crawling through a passage,
that it should hold a little residual light. It feels like it should remember you were
there, that if you look back, the rock you just prostrated yourself on should look a
little less alien than the ones you haven’t yet touched. But it doesn’t. As soon as you turn your lamp away, that area
fades back into the void. And once it returns to the void, nothing is
familiar. I said multiple times, out loud, “there’s
no way that’s the way we came from.” I was wrong. And thankfully, I was with people in the cave
who were much smarter than me, but I couldn’t shake the “what-ifs” from my head. What if I had stumbled in here alone? What if my light went out? What if all I had was my sense of touch and
the sound of the caverns, trying to understand the walls of rooms that barely made sense
when illuminated? Caves are dark, but they aren’t silent. They sound...well, they sound wet. Because they are. Thousands of tiny currents of water, individual
drops and streams and rivers cutting their way through the rock on a timescale that none
of us will live to see. The sounds of water echo through a cave, precisely
enough that I felt like I could hear a single drop falling off a stalactite a dozen yards
away. Simultaneously though, caves swallow sound,
muting voices and movements within just a few feet away. And the combination of these two contradictory
effects is absolutely uncanny. It seems like everything about a cave is built
to mess with how we usually take in the world. The light is gone, the sounds don’t make
sense. And the space itself is…. This is the real map that my guide handed
me before I came in! Look at this! Oh, this clears everything up! And what’s more, I feel like I could memorize
this Hollow Knight-mare fuel and it wouldn’t even begin to scratch the complexity of the
actual cavern. Because there’s no way this paper can capture
the three-dimensionality of these passages. There were times when we’d be walking one
direction, drop down about five feet, and then turn around and start crawling back in
exactly the same direction, but somehow under the exact rocks we had been walking on before. I have no idea how many “floors” this
place had. Four? Ten? Thirty? Caves are, as much as any geological formation
can be, alive. “Caves breathe, have active circulatory,
digestive, and excretory systems; can contract disease and suffer injuries and heal many
of both; and are constantly growing- just like any other living body.” And I’ve already made clear my thoughts
on living spaces... The strangest thing of all to me though was
that, there always did seem to be a way forward. Hundreds of feet underground, through pitch
black rooms and shoulder-width hallways, there was always a way forward. It straddled this bizarre tightrope- obviously,
no human would have ever designed a space like this, and yet there were just enough
accommodations there that it felt like I should be traversing it. It hit me, like a stalactite to the face. I know this kind of space. Caves are superstructures. And few places portray that superstructure-like
depth and somehow welcoming hostility like the Krubera cave, stretching for miles below
the Western Caucasus mountain range. This is where a group of explorers thought
they would determine the true deepest place on earth. There are two main features of Krubera. First are the chutes. These are the things that allowed it to be
a contender for the deepest cave. They are what feel like bottomless pits, places
where the stone just drops away for hundreds and hundreds of feet. This is the howling nothing that pulled the
team forward. This is where it was exceptionally easy to
lean the wrong direction on your descent rig and fall until you hit the living rocks below. Then, there are the hard parts. They’re called “meanders,” and they’re
the warped tunnels in between the chutes. For the Krubera team, who were hoping to find
the bottommost point of the cave, meanders were what halted their progress. One such time, 5800 feet underground, the
team felt well and truly stuck. Until, a breakthrough. Cavers discovered a way forward, through a
300 foot long tunnel called the “Way to the Dream.” Ironically, the tunnel is about as nightmarish
as anything I can imagine. The walls and roof are jagged with knife-sharp
rock, and it was so tight that you couldn’t even fit on your hands and knees. It was a belly crawl the whole way. I seriously can’t stop thinking about those
spaces, underground. How elemental they felt, how untouched, but
how unnervingly...welcoming they were. I felt it most when I was sidling along a
passage too narrow to pass through straight-on, my hands bracing against the wall and my feet
skirting through the murky water on the ground. Why would this corridor be exactly this size? Why not so narrow I didn’t have a chance
of fitting through, or so wide I couldn’t see the other side? Why did it feel...made for me? And I could imagine just continuing down into
these caverns for days, always finding another passage, always squeezing myself through another
opening. I would tell myself that just down this route,
everything would make sense. I would push myself further, because the cave
seemed to ask me to. I would wander, in a constant conversation
with these growing, living walls. The call of the void is rarely more apt than
when talking about the depths- I felt it well within that cave. And in fiction, too, the depths are consistently
linked to that alluring feeling of self-destruction. In Playdead’s Inside, the game initially
appears to follow the language of many 2D games; that is, left-to-right. But there’s a much more insidious journey
here, one much more resonant to the game’s themes and one impossible to ignore once you
know it’s happening: a descent. Plotted out, it feels like the boy is in freefall. Always sinking deeper into the earth, into
the water, into the horrible depths of whatever’s happening INSIDE. One of the most chilling parts of the game,
for me, is the first moment that really highlights this descent. This submarine, when you first get it, feels
like a blessing. No longer do you have to worry about holding
your breath, now you can explore these flooded hallways with confidence and light and power. And then, just when you’ve started to get
comfortable, you smash through some loose boards in the floor and find yourself- Ugh. It’s just so big and so empty and so… This is the first time in the game we haven’t
been able to see the floor. It never even occurred to me that we wouldn’t
be able to see the floor. But here we are, floating above oblivion,
and it’s not claustrophobia anymore, and it’s not the fear of drowning, it’s just...those
depths. It’s why, by the end, everything feels so
off. This laboratory might almost be normal, but
how could it be when we’ve been tumbling downward for hours? How could it be normal, thousands of feet
below the surface? And when you burst out into what’s seemingly
“outside” again in the finale, it feels impossible. We know, implicitly, what shouldn’t be on
the other side of that wall. More labs, maybe. Or a sheer rock wall, or just blackness, infinite
and welcoming. But not the surface again, never the surface. We’re in too deep. In Jeff VanDerMeer’s Annihilation, a team
of scientists exploring a geographic aberration discovers...well, they find a spiral staircase
leading downward. But almost immediately, the protagonist recontextualizes
the staircase in her head. It’s not a [what do the others call it]-
it’s a tower. She insists that it’s a tower. She’s frustrated that the others don’t
recognize it as what it is: a tower. The book doesn’t really explain why she
insists on this nomenclature, but the dominance of the staircase in her mind- and in ours,
as readers- hints at the reason. Though the spiral sinks into the earth rather
than towering above it, it’s presence is always felt, implicitly “visible” from
every point of the infected area. Every event that happens in the story, every
clash with another character or new mystery that presents itself, the biologist mentally
returns to the tower, and I did as well. We both knew, from the second it was discovered,
that nothing could be truly known about this world without descending that tower. And in the end she does, plunging into what
ultimately is a genuine eldritch horror. But for me, the unexplored tower was the more
powerful idea, always beckoning her back, always present in our mind’s eye. The idea that you don’t even have to be
in the depths to feel their influence; that simply knowing they’re there is enough. After the “Way to the Dream,” the cavers
found themselves stuck, again, 5,888 feet underground. The only potential route deeper was an underwater
passage. And since the Way to the Dream was so narrow,
they didn’t have any scuba equipment. They would have to blindly dive into the sump,
hoping beyond hope that there was a way through. And they did. There’s a phenomenon called a Moulin, detailed
by Robert Macfarlane in his magnificent book, Underland. A Moulin is, essentially, an ice funnel. Glaciers are not solid. They’re perforated like the earth, with
tunnels and chambers and- in a moulin’s case- sheer, hypnotizing drops. The funnels are created by water racing along
the top of a glacier, eventually finding a weak point in the ice, and plunging down into
it. The walls of a moulin are smooth and blue,
like polished glass. They are, often, as deep as the glacier itself. They roar with the amount of water pouring
through them. Macfarlane notes that, across cultures and
countries, stories are common of explorers crashing through the ice into a chasm, presumably
dying, and yet re-emerging from the glacier days or weeks later. Their own resurrection from under the frozen
world. He, and other authors, have also noted the
uncanny pull that the Moulins specifically have. An outdoor blogger named Dave Gallagher referred
to a moulin as his own Moby Dick, living in his mind for years after he first experienced
it. I know I have also read, though I cannot find
where, stories of the near-hypnosis that this smooth glass can impart, stories of people
feeling driven to throw themselves in. For now, those stories exist as my own personal
mythos. In The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther, the protagonist
is reborn through caves, water, and depths. Delirious from fever and injury, he stumbles
once, twice, three times deeper into a cave on the apparition of a hebridean island his
mind has created. The first fall takes him from the surface
into the caverns. The second, from the caverns into a slick
waterfall basin. The third, from a luminescent stone chimney
to...a highway, underwater, lost in time. This is the underworld made manifest as it
exists in stories, religions, myths. The highway where his memories of his loved
one are trapped, the hospital bed where she took her last breath. It is everything about the depths, at once,
overwhelming. The darkest recesses of his mind, trapped
in the literal deepest part of the world, under so many miles of pressure he can barely
see the surface. His re-emergence from each underworld is,
too, simultaneous. Surfacing from the water, as clearheaded as
he’s been, walking out of the cave onto the shore. There is no separation of the mental and physical
depths in Dear Esther. They are one and the same. There is, sometimes, danger to unearthing
the depths. Like the undersea creatures that have lived
their lives with 26,000 feet of water as a ceiling, creatures that quite literally melt
when taken to the surface. They were never meant to see the light of
day. Or spent uranium, maybe the single most dangerous
refuse of our species. A material that will stay dangerous after
the death of our children’s children’s children. A power source, used once, then radiating
farther into the future than we can possibly imagine. What is it like, to create something that
could kill a civilization 100,000 years, a million years, from now? How do you bury something so deep it never
comes up, not after history and language and maybe even species has been wiped away and
started anew? It’s the absurd challenge that faces every
nuclear waste disposal plant. And, of course, it’s a challenge that’s
more or less impossible to test. In Underland, Macfarlane details the Waste
Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico, a tomb for our nuclear waste set to be sealed about
15 years from now. Half a mile underground, the rooms containing
the waste will be intentionally collapsed, then sealed with 13 layers of concrete and
soil. And then the salt will start to drip. Because the WIPP is buried in a salt bed millions
of years old, slowly that salt will crawl into every crevasse, fill in every space left
behind. The salt will confine the radiation better
than we ever could. We’re still not sure if it’s good enough. Acres of salt and concrete and radiation,
buried in a desert that frequently reaches over 105 degrees (40 C) seems like it would
dissuade anyone from coming near...but then again, so does living under miles of pitch-black
water. If it exists, we will attempt to uncover it. And so, there’s another layer of protection. The waste site in New Mexico will be surrounded
by dozens of 25 foot high granite pillars, surrounding a wall of earth, which surrounds
more pillars, which surround a granite room engraved with a warning written in English,
Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo. The warning will read: We are going to tell you what lies underground,
why you should not disturb this place, and what may happen if you do. The site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation
Pilot Plant SIte) when it was closed in 2038 AD. The waste was generated during the manufacture
of nuclear weapons, also called atomic bombs. We believe that we have an obligation to protect
future generations from the hazards we have created. This message is a warning about danger. We urge you to keep the room intact and buried. Will it work? I...I want to believe yes. But imagine us, a new species, finding an
ancient monument with strange lettering, ominous pictograms, and thousands of feet of obelisks
surrounding it. Imagine us, breaking into a tomb, disregarding
the cries and promises of long-dead civilizations. Past the underwater tunnel and the way to
the dream and thousands and thousands of feet of descent, the cavers reached a chamber from
which they could go no lower. 6,824 feet underground, they found the lowest
section of that room and gave it an appropriate name: Game Over. The Krubera isn’t the deepest cave in the
world anymore, by the way. Not anymore. Just two years ago, a team found a neighbor
that was some 400 feet deeper, the Veryovkina Cave in Georgia. It seems naive to think that this is actually
the deepest cave. There are always further passages. There’s always a way to keep going. But sometimes, there is no way to come back. Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero
is a game that takes place largely underground- sometimes specifically, sometimes in a more
nebulous sense. What’s everpresent, no matter the locale,
is a feeling of pressure. Because earth is rarely the only thing the
characters of this game are under. To a person, each is grappling with the perils
of the world above. Some are old horrors, like alcoholism and
grief. Some are a sadistic modern twist; as the game
refers to it, “a new kind of debt.” You get the sense that the characters felt,
on some level, like they’d be able to escape the surface’s horrors. The Zero, enigmatically referred to from the
very first scene, is supposedly an underground highway through the caves, to help the characters
get to where they’re going. But as the story stretches on, the promise
of escape and the promise of the Zero fades. There’s still a destination in mind, but
the steps to get there seem increasingly obtuse- they have to double back, stumble blindly,
struggle to stay afloat. And all the while, the horrors compound. All the while, the debt piles up. Far from an escape, the caves of Kentucky
Route Zero seem to magnify the pressures that each character is running from. What drove them from the surface world now
traps them here; that constant weight threatens to prevent them from ever returning. Kentucky Route Zero may resemble an actual
cave more than any other game in existence. It meanders. It’s dark. It feels impossible to fully wrap one’s
head around. It is absolutely bursting with strange beauty. And in the end, we’re faced, once again,
with death and rebirth. Like an explorer disappearing under a glacier,
or a man who disappears into his own underground world. Kentucky Route Zero takes place in Mammoth
Cave in Kentucky. It’s a national park, established on the
death of a man trapped in a cave. Floyd Collins’ cave is probably connected
to Mammoth Cave, somehow, if you followed those sandy tunnels deep enough. That discovery has been walled off for now
though- Sand Cave is gated, bolted, and welded closed. You’d think this wouldn’t be necessary;
that no one would want to enter the hellish chute where a man died a prolonged death in
the dark and the still. But we gate it regardless. Because there is an inexplicable, irrational,
irresistible pull to these worlds. There is a void, and it indeed does call. Come. See what lies a little deeper.
Quite possibly one of the most evocative video essays I have ever seen, absolutely masterclass.
Surprised neither Dark Souls nor Silent Hill 2 were brought up, they also engage in similar themes. Dark Souls uses descent as a major motif, showing the discovery of long lost civilization. Silent Hill 2 features a section where you descend and descend further and further, impossibly deep into structures that should not exist, only to walk out onto the city dock at the end of it.Both are absolutely fantastic examples of what he discusses in the video.
Ugh, he needs to stop terrifying me with these premises.
The guy's really got a great grasp on the "short story" of youtube. Not quite video essay, a bit long for poetry (though poetry nonetheless), but absolutely evocative and thematic.
I'm a huge fan of this guy's channel, and this might be the best video he's ever made. Caves are some of the most terrifying things on this earth, at once being entirely hostile to human existence, while still being, somehow, just barely, at a scale we can comprehend. It's no wonder that so much of our art is inspired by caves
Incredible work, Jacob Geller really is (along with Noah Caldwell-Gervais) one of the most thoughtful and consistently insightful video-makers on youtube.