Anubis was also known as "the lord of the sacred land," with the world beneath the ground creating a spiritual as much as a material presence. The journey under ground prompted strange transformations. The Egyptian god of the underworld, Anubis, was a man with the head of a jackal. A dog with three heads, Cerberus, guarded the gates of the underworld in classical myth. The minotaur, half man and half bull, lived in a labyrinth buried beneath the palace at Knossos in Crete. The lower depths have been the object of superstition and of legend as long as there have been men and women to wonder. The majority of pedestrians do not know or care that vast caverns exist beneath their feet as long as they can see the sky, they are content. It must be said, too, that there is little interest in this vast underworld. The dangers of sabotage are considered to be too great. There are maps of gas facilities, of telecommunications, of cables and of sewers but they are not available for public perusal. The roads that converge on the Angel, Islington, have their counterparts beneath the surface. Beneath Piccadilly Circus is another great circus of myriad ways. The underworld is haphazard and wayward, with many abandoned passages and vast tunnels of brick leading nowhere. It was said of the Victorian Londoner, wrapped in fog and darkness, that he or she would not know the difference between the two worlds. It is a shadow or replica of the city like London itself it has developed organically with its own laws of growth and change. Our activities are governed and sustained by materials and signals that emanate from beneath the ground a pulse, an ebb, a flow, a signal, a light, or a run of water, will affect us. Like the nerves within the human body, the underworld controls the life of the surface. In a previous book I have explored the city above the surface now I wish to descend and explore its depths, which are no less bewildering and no less exhilarating. The clay surrounding the tunnels has absorbed the warmth. It was once a little cooler, but the heat of the electric trains has quickened it. A hundred feet beneath the ground the temperature hovers at 19° Celsius or 65° Fahrenheit. It exists still as the companion of the present city. You are also treading on the city of the past, all of its history from the prehistoric settlers to the present day packed within 24 feet of earthen fabric. Rooms and corridors have been created for the settlement of thousands of people in the event of calamity. Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.Ī vast concourse of people, buried deep within the clay of the Eocene period, move beneath your feet in underground trains.
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