Underground Australia

摘要

There you are, driving across the hot, dry centre of Western Australia. It's desert really. Not sandy like the Sahara, but red and rocky with a sparse covering of mulga scrub. The dirt road throws up red clouds of dust, and other than the occasional termite mound or stunted tree there's nothing to break the monotony of the landscape. Then you see him. Out in the waterless desert, there's this guy sitting on a little stool -fishing. Fishing? You slow down, not too much - you get some strange people out here - but enough to see he is reeling out a line. If you stopped to ask, you would discover that the line doesn't run into the dust but passes through a small hole in the ground and down into a subterranean world as unexpected as the sight of a man fishing in the desert. The man isn't crazy, he's a stygobiologist and he's fishing for stygobites. Named after the river Styx, which in ancient Greek myth carries the souls of the dead to Hades, stygobites are the creatures that inhabit the watery regions of the underworld. Just a few years ago Australia wasn't even on the map as far as stygobiologists were concerned.