'Two or three stops and the train fell into the station. A big interchange. A number of lines meet here. I need to get out here and change lines. Another train to get there. A long winding tunnel which steps, bends, and cuts in and out of unseen layers of the London deep. Sewers, cables, pipes, ducts, deep roots of buildings, soil, clay, debris of many centuries back, all stratified, measurable heritage that people fought over in the way they don't about people. At this depth in the system it's about the turn of Christ and just about as much use.'

'This means this line delves further into the past than the one of the others which is the first and oldest.'

'Of course, we may well be all down here in the past but its the present where we are and the past is a few important centimetres of concrete, steel, and tile away. Imagine all that history swirled up in the slime and rubble waiting to break out onto the unassuming traveller. At some stage you must get so deep down, the mass transit system gets so deep down that we are transported through layers of pre-human history.'

Just bone
no artefact
perhaps
pre-human technology.
Whatever is out there
no part of the tunnel
perhaps?
Definitely?
Under pressure - to take a nostalgic swipe at any unwary chronicler fighting to avoid coming to terms with the late bronze age on their way to work. Down here in the bowels of history, if not the history of the bowels of London.

The future seems
a long way off
anything but
daydreaming
pure fantasising
is a long way off.

Yet?

Slithering apart, the doors open.

'Had to get up, leave the seat, shuffle with all the others towards the start of the tunnel. Definitely here and now, out onto the platform, hemmed in by people and tunnel walls and subway furniture.'

'Keep shuffling.'

'The doors let us out by the entrance to the connecting tunnel that finds its way to the other line somewhere else.'