Adams and I walked back to the car. As we did so, he revealed himself as being pro-tunnel. "It's a tragic thing, this tunnel business, I think. If the tunnel had been built forty or fifty years ago, just think of what an asset to Europe it would have been," he said. We packed ourselves in, and Burgess drove us down a very rough, narrow road to the level of the railroad line. There, by a maintenance shed, a small, thin workman was waiting for us. He was wearing an old cloth peaked cap, a white duffel coat, and rubber knee boots, and by his feet he had ready-lighted Tilley lamps—similar in appearance to miners' lamps but operated by kerosene under pressure, like a Primus stove. Adams and Burgess jumped out of the car, and Burgess unlocked and opened up the rear trunk. I got out of the car, too. Then the workman, whom Adams addressed as Jim, disappeared briefly into the shed and came out with a pile of knee boots, which he began flinging into the car trunk. "We'll be needing these," Adams remarked to me. Next Jim brought out an enormous wrench, at least two feet long, and slung that on top of the protesting rubber boots, and then he came up with an armful of duffel coats, which he handed around. We put them on and all of us got into the car; the little workman wordlessly, with a wide gaptoothed grin, squeezed into the back seat with me and settled back with the two big lighted Tilley lamps on his lap. The lamps gave off a gentle roaring sound, like subdued blowtorches, and they gave off heat that warmed the whole back of the car. We drove off down a narrow, steep, tortuously winding, and very rugged road, through a kind of wilderness of concrete rubble and piles of old heavy wooden construction beams, toward the base of the cliffs, and when we finally got there, we continued along the wide top of a concrete sea wall for a considerable distance until the wall suddenly narrowed and the car could go no farther. We all got out, and Adams, Burgess, and I took off our shoes and put on the knee boots that Burgess got out of the trunk; and, with Jim and Burgess leading the way and bearing between them the glowing Tilley lamps and the giant wrench, we continued on foot along the sea wall, now as narrow as the sidewalk of a small city street. The chalk cliffs towered perhaps a couple of hundred feet above us. "The tunnel is about three-quarters of a mile ahead along the sea wall," Adams remarked as he walked beside me, and as we went along he explained that his primary job at British Railways was the design of sea defenses between Folkestone and Dover to combat erosion. "It's a good job you didn't pick a later time in the year to visit the tunnel," he went on. "This sea wall would hardly be negotiable on foot when the water's rough, and in winter, with the sou'westers blowing in especially, we have some real shockers."