Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 26).djvu/105



HE mouth of the Mont Cenis—or, more properly, the Frejus—Tunnel is guarded on the French side by an armour-plated fort and on the Italian by guns, Gatlings, and a detachment of artillery.

Between the Italian sentry and the French guard there are eight English miles of black hole, surmounted by a snow-capped mountain more than a mile high. A French lieutenant of Engineers was taken by his colonel to the mouth of the tunnel and asked:—

"Suppose the enemy blew up our fort and was sending twenty thousand invading soldiers through by train, how would you stop them?"

The lieutenant of Engineers hesitated.

"I would block the tunnel," he said.

"How?"

"By causing the mountain to fall on them before they emerged."

The ingenious lieutenant went, sketch-book in hand, into the tunnel to explore. The colonel waited ten—twenty minutes—an hour. Then the Italian express came thundering through with the dead body of the French lieutenant borne upon a portion of the engine. His clothing had caught at the moment he was struck, his bull's-eye lantern was still alight, and the colonel was saved the task of exploring the Frejus Tunnel.

This is merely one incident in the story of modern tunnels. To show what the tragedy is on a large scale, let us turn to another of these subterranean cylinders. The St. Gothard Tunnel was conducted with skill and energy; thousands of human moles burrowed incessantly through the foundations of the Alps at an average temperature of 100 deg. Fahrenheit, and no fewer than six hundred lives paid the penalty, including those of both the engineer and contractor.

Few themes of the kind present more fascination than tunnels, both as monuments of human engineering achievement and as objects of curiosity and mystery. A tunnel is a means of escape—to prisoners in a beleaguered fortress, to a railway company wishing to avoid a chain of mountains, or, as in London at present, to avoid a too congested surface traffic. New tunnelling projects are put forth yearly, almost monthly, and the dawn of the twentieth century sees the genius of the world's civil engineers striving to cope with the problem of how to burrow under ground, sea, or river as cheaply and effectually as a surface road can be built. Those mighty schemes the Channel Tunnel and the Irish Tunnel are merely in abeyance, and now that a way has been discovered of lessening the great sacrifice of life the Hudson River Tunnel is to be continued. The bill of mortality from what is known as tunnel sickness of this latter work has been already as great as a small war.

But we must not dwell too much on the tragedy; there is a comedy of tunnelling as well, as we shall mark in a moment. Before going any farther, the reader may be in-