The Gate in the Mountain

The gate does not announce itself. A road, a cliff of green, and then the bore: a concrete arch tall enough for trucks stacked on trucks, mint-green lattice gates swung open, a red star mounted at the crown like a period at the start of a sentence. Beyond it the tunnel runs into warm electric dusk further than the eye agrees to follow.

I walked in on foot ahead of the visitor cart because I wanted the transition at body speed: daylight thinning behind me, the mountain's own temperature taking over, my footsteps acquiring the acoustic of enclosed enormity. The scale is not architectural, it is geological. Sixty thousand builders took eighteen years to persuade this mountain to contain a factory, and the persuasion is what you are walking through.

Signs in polite red type direct you to the boarding point. A tourist tunnel now, with lighting design. But the first fifty meters, where the day still reaches in and loses, are not tourism. They are a threshold, and the star overhead knows exactly which century it is guarding. Tomorrow, the hall itself. I barely slept and consider that appropriate.