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The portal’s mouth — a furrowed pit about half a mile wide — spirals 1,250 feet into the ground, expos­ing a marbled mosaic of young and ancient rock: gray bands of basalt, milky veins of quartz and shimmering con­stellations of gold.

At some point not long after our planet’s genesis, in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy — a hot spring, an impact crater, a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor — bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells.

This deluge is partly a consequence of geographic serendipity: Intense equa­torial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean and bordering moun­tains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense.

Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffus­ing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which pro­tected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radia­tion.

Conceived by the British scientist and inventor James Lovelock in the 1960s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the animate and inanimate elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.”

The tunnels and chambers were decorated with strange and beautiful formations: massive chandeliers of frostlike gyp­sum, lemon-yellow sulfur pods, pearly balloons of hydromagnesite, transparent selenite spears and calcite lily pads hovering over turquoise pools.

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