Summary

In "First Chamber," the book's prologue, McFarlane takes readers on the first leg of the journey underground. The way into the underland, he writes, is “through the riven trunk of an old ash tree” (3). The book starts the journey in the late summer, following a path along a stream that leads to an ancient ash tree. The tree’s trunk splits at its base, leaving an opening wide enough so that “a person might slip into the tree’s hollow heart” (3). Beneath the tree, McFarlane describes entering a labyrinth.

In this labyrinth, readers and the narrator experience the underground starting 35,000 years ago and leading up to the present. “Time moves differently here in the underland,” MacFarlane writes. “It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows” (4). The first experience in underland involves watching a figure creating a cave painting with red ochre that is...