Václav Cílek has a thing for caves. His friends put it down to his desire to get to the bottom of things. Fortunately for Cílek — a geologist by training, a philosopher by nature, and just about everything in between —the sandstone rocks just a short walk from his house on the outskirts of Prague in Prosek contain a lovely cave specimen. Cílek has explored it countless times.

The 51-year-old university professor, documentary filmmaker, essayist, traveler, amateur botanist and hip-hop aficionado seems most at ease in hiking boots, with his head ducked and a flashlight on hand.

When discovering a place, you need above all a sense of humility, Cílek says. "You must acquaint yourself with the spirit of the place. Only then can you fully enter both the inner and the outer landscape."

Krajiny vnitřní a vnější (Inner and Outer Landscapes) also happens to be the title of Cílek's first book, published four years ago to much acclaim, making him one of the Czech Republic's most widely read authors.

Books about landscapes don't often conventionally become best sellers. But there is nothing conventional about Cílek, who has an uncanny ability to make rocks, rivers, modern cityscapes and historic settlements seem both relevant and interesting. "He's always able to make connections between seemingly disparate things," says Marek Pečenka, Cílek's editor at the Nakladateství Dokořán publishing house.

For Cílek, places have a soul, and in his books he talks about the memory of rivers, the connection between China and the Czech baroque landscape, why people climb lookout towers and how every nation gets the garden gnomes it deserves. Two of the books — Landscapes and Makom, kniha míst (Makom, a Book of Places) — have earned Cílek the Tom Stoppard Prize.

Prague: Between History and Dreams was published in English in 2004 and focuses on the city's storied history, architecture and legends and how they relate to the capital of today. Cílek is also a prolific essayist and contributes pieces to publications such as Respekt and Vesmír.

Inner landscapes, for Cílek, are about the effect that different environments have on a person's soul. "Every person has his own landscape. You can have two, maybe three maximum," he says. "These are places where you feel like you belong."

Mental climate changes

A Romanesque-era church crouches behind stone walls and iron gates encircled by towering gray socialist-era panel houses. What was once a village has now been for decades a typical communist Prague suburb, with the brown stone church and a few low buildings poking out like anachronistic oases.

It's a quiet Sunday morning but construction workers mill about not far off, completing the skeletons of modern condo complexes that will soon stand shoulder to shoulder with the grimy paneláks.

"I'm actually glad these new condos are being built," Cílek says. "This place needs to be revived, to become part of the city."

This may sound surprising, considering that Cílek's house, a low, First Republic building with a creaky gate and an apricot tree out front, is just meters away from the construction's bustle. But Cílek has a point.

He gestures to the road that leads along the sídliště, or high-rise housing development. It's long, dusty and devoid of pedestrians. "These are dead spaces," he says. "You need shops and people to make a place alive."

This re-urbanization, a sort of filling out of the vacant no man's land that exists between the suburb and the city center, is a worldwide trend, Cílek notes, fueled to a large degree by rising gas prices.

"More and more people want to live closer to the city," he says. "Soon people won't be able to afford to drive as much.

"Now is a very unsettling time. The climate — both physical and mental — is undergoing a change. There are many speculations about what will happen. And some are very apocalyptic."

And with that Cílek ducks into a thicket of tangled bushes, where a narrow dirt path leads away from the construction and concrete and into a miniature wooded area, somehow miraculously remaining, that perches on a steep hill overlooking Prague.

A Renaissance man

Taking a walk with Cílek is like being on a high-school science field trip guided by a philosophy professor. No stone, tree or weed is left unexamined.

Cílek's sandstone cave has a small opening close to the ground and the air near it is cool and moist. On a rock wall by the entrance, someone has left behind a scattering of graffiti engraved in the soft stone. Is it vandalism? Or has it become an integral part of this particular landscape?

"It's more complicated than that," says Cílek, muttering something about the significance of street art in today's counterculture.

Without elaborating, Cílek moves on because he is puzzled by a group of tall plants growing nearby in a tiny, enclosed meadow. He hadn't seen them there before. "The seeds must have blown in from the gardeners' colony nearby," he finally decides. "Plants migrate like people. And it has sped up in this era of globalization."

Although he was born in Brno, south Moravia, Cílek spent part of his youth in Tanzania, where his father worked as a geologist, and he still travels widely. He went on to study geology himself at Charles University in Prague and now heads the Geology Institute at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

Living abroad helped shape how he perceives Czech landscapes, Cílek says. "It's always good when people travel. They need comparisons."

Those who know Cílek tend to describe him as a man with multiple disparate interests and an endless stream of ideas. "He's difficult to work with," says Pečenka, editor-in-chief of Nakladatelství Dokořán, half jokingly, "because he's an extremely busy person. He is a true Renaissance man."

Vlado Milunič, the Croatian architect who, along with Frank Gehry, designed Prague's renowned Dancing Building, and who is one of Cílek's friends, says the philosopher/earth scientist is accustomed to examining everything in-depth. "It must be a professional deformation," he says. "If you're a geologist, you have to go deep.

"They say that among his books and computers at the Academy of Sciences, where I haven't actually been, Cílek also has his pickaxes," says Milunič. "I think that's very fitting."

Pilgrims and atmosphere thieves

Cílek didn't bring any pickaxes along on his recent hike with a reporter, but this doesn't prevent him from occasionally getting down on his knees and scraping the top layer of dirt off some of the stones on the path.

He picks up a reddish-brown stone that is worn smooth and almost shiny. "Bohumil Hrabal used to carry these around in his pockets," he says off-handedly before settling down on a low wooden bench. Before us, Prague sprawls out in all its smoggy early summer morning glory.

"In the '90s, people started driving up here in their cars at night to park and watch the city," Cílek says. "They must have seen it in American movies. It's incredible how much people adjust their lifestyles to what they think they should be."

There is a palpable tone of disdain in his voice, which becomes even more pronounced when he speaks of tourists and how Prague has changed in the past decade.

"Tourists are thieves of atmosphere," Cílek says. "They have no connection to the place they're visiting, and they just try to steal as many experiences as possible. It's a form of spiritual consumption. It's the local people who give atmosphere to places."

Tourism, Cílek says, is above all about people looking for parts of themselves. "It's a selfish endeavor," he says. "A pilgrim, on the other hand, is someone who wants to attain some sort of understanding."

But Cílek is hopeful. "We are approaching an era of post-materialism," he says. "More and more people are rejecting commercialism. They have become saturated with things, and they want something more."

Achieving more for Cílek can be as simple as walking through a landscape with a group of people in complete silence. It's one of Cílek's favorite exercises for his students during field trips.