WE ALL THINK we know what the absence of light looks like, but nothing prepared me for the totality of it.
For four hours, I had been hiking, running, wading, shimmying and crawling deeper and deeper into the limestone beneath Odessa, Ukraine. Through the ground there courses the longest network of catacombs in the world, and the only one that has not been fully mapped.
In one hallway, we turned our headlamps off, and the darkness swallowed us whole. It was like being in the belly of a whale at the bottom of the ocean.
Odessa's Catacombs: A Hidden Jewel in Ukraine
In Ukraine, a 1,500-mile-long tangle of corridors and rooms beneath Odessa wraps under and over and in upon itself. A tour reveals hidden treasures long forgotten
Then my guide, Sasha Levchenko, struck a match and lighted a pile of gunpowder from a Soviet partisan's bullet he had found in the catacombs. The flames illuminated the gold, white and pink layers of limestone around us. In them, you could see the countless clamshells compressed under ancient oceans, the history of the Earth laid bare.
It's not illegal to enter Odessa's catacombs, though it's not exactly encouraged, either. Every so often, someone disappears into the darkness for good.
This January, I joined the Search, an informal organization of some 40 men and women who gather in the catacombs each winter. Led by the quiet Mr. Levchenko, they spend four days straight underground, banqueting upon limestone blocks, sifting through relics of wars long past. More important, they create a record where there has been none, mapping the immense labyrinth.
The 1,500-mile-long tangle of corridors and rooms under Odessa wraps under and over and in upon itself. If it were laid out in a straight line, the labyrinth would stretch five times longer than the world's second largest catacombs, underneath Paris.
No one knows how old Odessa's network is, but the catacombs were greatly expanded in 1794, when Catherine the Great sought limestone to build her city by the sea. Today, Odessa is a cosmopolis of a million people where wide beaches coexist with Stalinist tenements, and women walk cobblestone streets in high heels. At the summit of the Potemkin Stairs, which run from the sea up into the city, looms a breathtaking opera house. (While much of the surrounding area was reduced to wasteland in World War II, it's almost as if no one could bring himself to harm this icon.) But even if the culture of Odessa is above ground, its soul is in the catacombs.