Speaking of Morlocks: The Malta Catacombs

From Drow elves to the devil himself, we rarely imagine good-natured, caring folks when we imagine secret underground races. Generally speaking, if it comes from the ground, we loathe and despise it. Perhaps we're compensating for some internal self-awareness of our more soil-bound genetic ancestors? Whatever the cause, it makes for some dang fine horror. The tales from the Maltese Catacombs may have more to do with superstition and poor history preservation than secret races, but they still get my imagination piqued.

via Listverse

The Malta Catacombs

"In 1902, in the town of Paola on the island of Malta, workers making way for a new housing development stumbled across a vast subterranean complex that dated back to Malta’s prehistoric period, some 3000 years ago. The sight has since became a UNESCO world Heritage site, and was officially named the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. A more extensive archaeological survey of the site was undertaken, and it became clear that all was not as simple as it seemed. Over 30,000 human skeletons were found in burial chambers dotted across the site, including men, women and children. Many skulls had unusually widened craniums and baffled scientists in terms of ethnic origin. Stories began spreading that it was tangible evidence of a subterranean human species.

"The islands earliest inhabitants engaged in human sacrifice to appease their god of the underworld, who they believed dwelled beneath the island itself. The name they gave to him roughly translates as ‘Serpent’. When Saint Paul was shipwrecked on the island as recorded in the bible, he documented this, and even claimed to have been bitten by the serpent himself. He also spent a great deal of time there converting the people from their primitive worship of a reptilian deity to Catholicism. It is believed, by some scholars, that the human sacrifices were involuntarily cast down into the catacombs, to be devoured by the serpent and prevent the islanders from incurring his wrath.

"Rumors of a cover-up, by the Maltese government and other authorities, are rife with stories including the scrubbing of texts and ancient drawings from the catacomb walls, and the mysterious and sudden death of the sites first head archaeologist. The underground complex still hasn’t been fully explored. A British embassy worker in the 1940’s, gave an account of foraying into the sites lowest room on the last level, after convincing the tour guide to allow her access to an area usually off limits to the public. Upon entering a small portal in the wall she claimed to have seen 20 reptilian beings covered in white hair on a ledge across from her. One raised his palm and subsequently her candle extinguished. She made a quick exit but upon returning some days later she was told that the guide who had shown her the portal had never been employed at the site and no such portal existed."

Cave Texting and Magic

Consider this item from Engadget:

You know what's really annoying? Teenagers. Even more annoying? Teenagers inventing legitimately useful things and getting awards for it. Meet Alexander Kendrick, the 16-year old inventor of a new low-frequency radio that allows for cave-texting, which isn't some fresh new euphemism, it just means people can finally text while deep underground. How deep, you ask -- well, Alexander's team of intrepid explorers went far enough (946 feet) to record the deepest known digital communication ever in the United States. What you see the young chap holding above is the collapsible radio antenna, though plans are already afoot to ruggedize and miniaturize the equipment to make it more practical for cave explorers and rescuers. Way to go, kid.

Now imagine if you were doing underground work in a world where any magic that existed were somehow atmospheric in nature. Magic would get fainter and fainter and eventually cease to function altogether the deeper you got, unless you had some kind of amplifying device, like this huge collapsible antenna. Beyond a certain point underground, in order for the wizard to be useful in combat, he first has to deploy (and defend) a huge wire cage to draw down magical energies from the distant surface. Afterwords he has to fold it all up again and cart it along, hoping everything still works the next time he has to cast a spell.

Lithoautotrophic Cave Engineering

Via Boingboing:

Lechuguilla Cave is part of the Carlsbad Caverns Natural Park in New Mexico and is regarded as one of the most beautiful caves, with some of the most unique geography, in the entire world.

You can't visit.

Because of the delicacy of many of the formations, the cave is only open to scientists and the explorers who are still figuring out what all is down there. Nobody else is allowed in. Or, rather, nobody else but David Attenborough.

This video from the Planet Earth TV series takes you down into Lechuguilla for some amazing sights and fascinating commentary on the chemistry and biology that make this cave so strange and lovely. Even more impressive, nobody knew it was there until 1986.

Psst, Nova has a whole page on Lechiguilla, if you want to read more.

I love that sentiment expressed at the end, that there may yet be many more such subterranean wonders beneath our feet. I also would like to know more about "extremophile bacteria feeding on the very rock" - could their processes be sped up and controlled to create planned caves in a less-than-geologic timescale?

Probably not, but its fun to imagine voracious colonies of lithoautotrophic bacteria carving out new chambers, selectively killed by spraying bleach or some other deterrent or fostered by spreading the dust of their favorite mineral compounds in the direction the cave engineer hopes they'll grow. Imagine if such a colony could grow cave systems on the order of feet per day. Let's limit their behavior to keep from excessive cave-ins by imagining that they leave behind directional cave systems that gradually wind their way down into the earth, with occasional branches but not expansion in every direction. In other words: they create lairs.

Warning: I am not a chemist: What will the bacteria leave behind? Well, as limestone is primarily CaCO₃, they'll be breaking it up and creating gorgeous, semi-organic-looking calcium deposits, and it'll be releasing carbon dioxide and oxygen into the air. Would lithophagic bacteria leave behind breathable cave systems? Let's imagine so. Let's also say they're of value to miners, because if you point them at a vein of rock with your favorite precious metal in it, they'll leave it lying around as they pass through it and you just sweep it up in their wake.


In an even more fantastic setting, you could have the equivalent of Gelatinous Cubes, but these 10' cubes eat inorganic matter instead of organic stuff. They excrete a solvent for rock, but only on one side of the cube at a time. Unfortunately they are impossible to control or predict, but their likely movements have carefully been modeled as a particular set of random dungeon-generating tables! All you have to do is add doors, denizens, and treasure! It's a bit over the line from where I like my fantasy, but if you're in a pinch to justify miles and miles of endless dungeon that no sentient being in his/her right mind would ever create (see how I carefully excluded us all there?), you might need rock-eating-cubes doing all your dungeonbuilding for you.

If you do have such things actively building in an underground setting when delvers, adventurers, or other denizens take up residence, it might be fun to track where they are and where the expansion is happening. Like the miners who sweep up gold dust in the wake of our lithoautotrophs, it might benefit a party to hang behind an excavator cube as it works, waiting to see if it connects them to an otherwise hard-to-reach part of the delve (while you roll dice on the 'excavator-cube-movement' [aka random dungeon] table to see what it does).

Or maybe you, a dungeon designer and builder, need to hire some delvers to go deep into the mazes created by such things in order to have them harvest autolithotrophs to bring to your nascent dungeon to get it started or help with that wing you've been meaning to expand. You'll have to pay them well, and I recommend not telling them the actual location of your underground construction lest they come and raid it later, but if you're looking to get your hands on these kinds of creatures, you don't really have many more options than to have those loathsome adventurers go on an underground retrieval mission for you.