After another fifteen minutes or so of walking along an area where the cliffs rose back beyond a sort of terrace formed by old landslides—the railway line ran along this terrace in the open—Adams told me that the tunnel entrance was not far off. A few hundred feet farther on, we finally reached it—a small recessed place in the grassy rubble at the base of the cliff terrace and, set into it, a four-foot-square door of rough, thick wood encased by a frame of very old and very heavy timbers. The door was hinged with heavy gate hinges and secured not by a padlock but by a very large metal nut, which Jim now attacked with his great wrench. As he wrestled with it, Adams, smiling, remarked that the entrance wasn't a very big one, considering the size of the Channel-tunnel project. "I once brought a Canadian executive, a rather impressive-looking fellow, down here by request, in '57, I think it was," he recalled. "It seemed very important to him to inspect the entrance to the tunnel. When I took him along the sea wall and showed him this entrance, he took a look at it and just burst out laughing. I asked him what was up. He went on laughing, and finally he told me why. He said he was employed by a large American oil company, and that his company had sent him over here to spy out the possibility of buying up land for filling stations near the entrance to the proposed Channel tunnel. Actually, of course, nobody knows precisely where a new tunnel would come out on the English side, and it would be very doubtful whether they would make use of any of the old workings."