The little workman unloosened the nut, and, with various groans and creaks, the door to the tunnel allowed itself to be pulled and shouldered open. Then, one by one, we stooped down and entered the tunnel through the small opening. When my eyes adjusted themselves from the light of day to the light of the Tilley lamps we had brought with us, I found that we were standing in a square-timbered heading perhaps six feet high and about the same in width. The floor, like the roof, was timbered, and from the roof, as well as from parts of the sides of the heading, a pale fungus growth drooped down. The atmosphere was pretty dank. Just inside the entrance, either hanging from big rough nails protruding from the wooden walls or lying to one side on the floor, there was a clutter of various objects—rusty chains, augers, lengths of decaying rope, candles, and a couple of lobster pots, the presence of which Adams explained to me. "They get washed up from time to time, and our lads, when they find them, put them in here for safekeeping," he said. Slowly we made our way into the tunnel. There was room for a set of narrow-gauge rail tracks, but most of the thin rails had been torn up, and a number of them lay piled to our right by the wall. On the left, untracked and abandoned, lay one of the rail trolleys that obviously had been used for hauling out spoil. The little rusted wheels on which it rested were of clearly Victorian design, with spokes elaborately arranged in curlicued fashion. "This is the access heading we're in," Adams told me as we found our way along, heads down. "The chalk carted out from the Beaumont boring machine was taken through here and dumped right into the sea outside the entrance. But this access heading wasn't the first to be built; it was dug by hand from the direction in which we're going, from the bottom of a vertical shaft sunk from the level of the South-Eastern Railway line seventy-four feet up above this concrete lining we're coming to now. As you see—" Adams took a Tilley lamp from Burgess and flashed it on the roof of the concrete lining—"the shaft has been closed up long ago. Now we'll go on. This first stretch is taking us in a northerly direction."