A Big Week for Tunnels
Previously in subterranean studies: “Possibly the rarest kind of fossilized footprint is called a mortichnia, or “death march” — the fossilized footprints that terminate in a fossilized body, the last-ever footprints that body produced before dying. It is the closest thing the natural world has ever come to creating a movie; it is a continuous document of motion that survives the motion itself.”
We seem to have had a bigger-than-usual week for news about tunnels:
“Pensioner, 71, plunges 130ft to his death down hole he dug under his kitchen floor.”
“West Virginia man breaks into neighboring businesses by making a tunnel.”
“Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters [ordered] to be vacated due to a tunnel illegally dug beneath the sanctuary.”
“This woman is building a tunnel under her house and documenting it.”
Personally I’m all for it. I have a corresponding affection for tunnels and caves that matches my fear of heights; getting on a plane is at best an exercise in containing panic, but I am nearly entirely unaffected by claustrophobia.
One of the things I like best about tunnels is their ability to reproduce ad infinitum in the human imagination. News of one tunnel always leads to speculation about the existence of more; we do not seem, as a species, able to believe in the idiosyncratic of singular tunnel. When we see one tunnel, we assume there are a dozen more just out of sight. Because we can only see it occasionally, and never in full, we attribute to the subterranean world a physically-impossible degree of activity.
[Image via]
One of my favorite legendary tunnels is the Euphrates Tunnel. The first tunnel successfully built beneath a river was the Thames tunnel, completed in 1843; the Euphrates Tunnel was supposedly built in 2180 BCE by Queen Semiramis.
Diodorus writes that “She made a passage in form of a vault, from one palace to another, whose arches were built of firm and strong brick…the river flowing over the whole work, Semiramis could go from one palace to the other, without passing over the river.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Chatner to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.