In Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth, there is a section where the protagonist, Axel, experiences complete darkness. Travelling through the deep tunnels of the dormant Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull, Axel is separated from his uncle and their guide. He carries no source of light, and wanders through the tunnels disoriented and overwhelmed with fear. He cannot see his own hand in front of his face, and all seems lost.
One of my favourite things in life is difference. I love experiencing reality in ways that I often don’t. So, when I was writing ✓ Project Bucket List, the idea of experiencing true darkness didn’t take too long to appear out of the shadows. I remember when I was younger, my mum told me about how in cave tours, they sometimes turn off the lights, and you can’t even see your own hand in front of you. I connected the two together, and thus, exploring a cave in the dark became something I wanted to experience.
It was the day after I’d proposed to my fiancée. We’d climbed a glacier, and while trekking our way back east across Iceland, we planned to stop off at Aa very special place. Raufarhólshellir, or, in English, The Lava Tunnel. It’s one of the most famous of its kind in Iceland, and formed 5,000 odd years ago during a volcanic eruption. And now, it’s got a little bridge in and tour guides run in and out of it 9 times a day. Things just aren’t what they used to be, ya know?
We don our little helmets, stick some crampons on, and get a little safety lesson from our tour guide. Then, we step out of the back door of the reception into a blizzard, stumbling across the ground to meet the entrance to a cave, and inside, something that I still don’t quite believe was real.
Giant, Tim-Burtonesque piles of snow and ice beneath collapsed sections of the roof. It was beautiful, the snow swirled gently through the roof collecting neatly on the top of the pile. Above us, icicles hung perilously from the rims of the maws. I took a moment to appreciate having a helmet on. We walked through the first part of the cave, stopping in a wider area as our guide gave us information about the tunnel itself, and about how the ceilings cave in.
He explained that Iceland is full of these sort of things, thousands undiscovered, because, without a cave-in, they just exist hidden underground. It turns out that if you discover one, you actually get to name it. The problem is, if you do discover one, it’s likely because you’ve fallen into it and broken both of your legs. So there’s a chance that the name you grant the tunnel could be something like “Help!” or “I’ve fallen down a lava tunnel and I can’t get out!“
As we progressed deeper into the tunnel, ice stalagmites rose out of the ground, creating bulbous formations, clipped by drips and drops of water from the ceiling above us. Looking straight up granted you amazing views of metal ores snaking across the ceiling, but also gave you a 50% chance of getting water directly into your eye.
We reached a large open section of the cave, where our guide started to explain about some of the more mechanical aspects of the tunnel. I’m going to do the same.
When a volcano erupts, hot molten rock spills out of the crater. Lava rolls down the slopes of the mountain, and cools and solidifies, but sometimes, something special happens. As the surface of the lava grows hard, sometimes, the lava flowing underneath keeps on flowing. It’s like a frozen river, there’s ice on the top, but water flowing below.
Tubes form, and over time, the rock hardens, shifts, and the lava level flows down, creating these interesting etched lines across the wall. It’s like when you drink coffee, and it leaves ring stains around the inside of the cup, remnants of lava levels. The lava eventually drains out, leaving these little clues behind. Lava straws (stalactites but made out of hardened lava) hang from the ceiling, many of which were stolen by tourists years prior.
High above, on the ceiling, splodges of ore veins glitter down at us, copper, iron, and sulphur. Our tour guide quips that many people think that the yellow sulphur is gold. He laughs and explains that, if it were, he would be living somewhere else by now, maybe somewhere warm.
What this all means if you have a constant barrage of interesting fingerprints left by a literal volcano, something that I promise you, you will not find on your doorstep.
Finally, stood in the vast empty cave, our guide picks up a heavy mechanical remote, and asks the room “shall we turn out the lights for one minute?“. He tells us to turn off all devices, nothing can emit light, we’re going to experience true darkness. In a flash, everything is black.
In the 1960s and 1970s, French Geologists Maurice Thaul, and Michel Siffre separately conducted experiments in caves. Thaul spent 2 months deep in a cave in complete darkness and isolation, with no time cues. He maintained a log of his experiences, and found that, interestingly, he lost complete track of time. He experienced visual and auditory hallucinations, ranging from random flashes of light to hearing phantom voices in the dark. He became confused, anxious and depressed, and he struggled with sleep deprivation.
Later, Siffre conducted a similar, albeit more structured experiment. He was interested in time dilation, and found that his internal clock stretched to around 48 hours – 36 hours awake with 12 hours sleep. He believed he’d spent 25 days in the cave, while it was actually 2 months. He hallucinated, just like Thaul, though in his case, he experienced phantom figures appearing at him out of the darkness as well as the auditory whispers.
I tell you this now, because this is the information I had in my head when the lights went out.
Kymberley is holding onto me, and there’s drip, drip, dripping sounds all around us. Someone breathes, about 3 foot in front of me, my senses are heightened, and I try to look around. There is nothing.
It’s darker than any dark I’ve experienced. It’s probably darker than any dark you yourself have experienced, unless you’ve been in similar situations. I wave my hand around in front of my face. Nothing. I try to count my fingers, before realising that this is a bad experiment, because I inherently know how many fingers I have held up at one time.
As we step into our minute of darkness, I keep trying to look around and notice, there, in one direction, from where we came, there’s an ever so slight misty shape. I look around, making sure that I’m not hallucinating, and realised that, where a minute ago was complete darkness, my eyes have now dilated to the point where I’m picking up the sun, desperately pleading through a snowstorm to creep through the ceiling of the entrance to a cave a half an hour back towards the entrance. It’s amazing how keen your senses become once you remove stimuli.
Considering we’ve been in the dark for a minute, it certainly felt like a lot longer. That being said, I don’t know if I experienced the same thing that Thaul and Siffre did, or if our tour guide just decided to go over the 1 minute mark. The lights flash back on, and our guide says that he really hopes we didn’t lose anybody.
We get to the end of the basic tour (there’s a much longer, more intense, more expensive tour), and then, it’s time for the holiday snap. Just look at us, aren’t we cute? If you look very closely at me, you can probably see a hint of disappointment that I didn’t get to meet the shadow people that the French geologists did.
In fact, that’s a lie, I loved it, the whole experience was great, and being inside what once was an eruption is pretty damn tootin’ cool. And even if I didn’t see the shadow people, the next part of our trip took us somewhere immensely more haunting.
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