Underground, days are made from watch-hands. Late morning ticking into early afternoon ticking into late afternoon with us walking tunnels, upping and downing ladders, shining our torches over wide flat dark spaces with low ceilings, kicking our way through old newspapers and empty cans and thrown-away things. Places and spaces came and went. Service corridors, access chutes, flood drains, an old basement factory floor where our torchbeams found the rusted necks of over-sized sewing and winding machines and cast Jurassic shadows up across the brickwork we passed through—history sinks downward—and then on through underground car parks, abandoned archives and vaults, storage bays. Us squeezing through gaps, climbing rubble, descending PERSONNEL ONLY concrete stairwalls into the roots of abandoned and still-living buildings.
(from The Raw Shark Texts)
