My queasiness about the underworld flickered on somewhere just off the Great North Road, past the Peterborough stop. I was 100 feet under Gibraltar's Rock Hotel, on the periphery of the 30 miles of second world war tunnels. The Great North Road and Fosse Way are two main thoroughfares within that system. They are breathtaking; vast arches into the void, stone manifestations of curious conceits, the Rock Drill, Whitehall's secret states of the mind.
In the other world, we had driven up the west side of the cliff-face, past the hotel and parked by an anonymous, gated opening into the Rock. We walked inside, and a few hundred yards on, a series of narrow tunnels culminated in a Nissen hut inside a man-made cave, the stuff of post-bomb Bed Sitting Room surrealism. The British have not only scattered the planetary crust with Nissen huts but sandwiched them under it as well. The hut had windows, an antidote to the claustrophobia, my submariner guide observed, homely reassurance to soldierly troglodytes.
I was not reassured. The damp heat enveloped me.
"In time, the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble," I thought, "they're only made of clay." But Ira Gershwin got it wrong. Gibraltar, the Moors' Djebel Tarik (the mountain of Tarik) is not clay but bedded limestone, good tunnelling material. And the military in general, and the British armed forces in particular, like few things more than a good burrow.
During the second world war, the Royal Engineers were digging up to 180ft a week. Under the Rock, the material was accumulated for Operation Torch, the 1943 allied invasion of North Africa. Here, they resolved that, if Gibraltar finally fell after two and half centuries of British occupation, some dogged band would remain, walled inside some tunnel, pedalling up bike- powered electricity, padding across cork-insulated floors, keeping an eye out, waiting for something to turn up.
We strolled on, past Maunsell's Wind joint-operations centre, the Admiralty Tunnel, and the "Durham Adit". There, someone had left a heap of anti-submarine netting. Later, we came across a spectacular shopping mall for the military; a cavern space devoted to ventilation equipment, sucking in the oxygen supply for the stone machine; a vast 1950s diesel-turbine engine - suitable for Alien's prehistoric spacecraft; the sickly smell from a drained wartime sea of oil and an underground hospital. This had its showers and baths and Vulcania lavatories and a mortuary slab as the centrepiece of the nurses' dormitory.
Beyond were more skeletal Nissen huts, down alleys, up stairs, with crazy lurching bedsteads where once squaddies slept and dreamed of Barnsley and Chatham.
In that urgent present of the 1940s, the Royal Engineers dug back into several pasts. Occasionally, they broke into the cave system that was a home to our ancestors and to the last survivors of our rivals, the Neanderthals.
The second world war sappers extended the tunnel system of their predecessors from the Spanish-French siege of 1779-82. The British and the Dutch had taken Gibraltar in 1704 and the British held it. The legal battle with Spain has dragged on until this week.
The men of the 18th century constructed emplacements in the North Face from which they had showered La Linea (the line of the Spanish border) with cannon balls and "hot potatoes" - red-hot shot. Looking up at the North Face today, what seem to be blots on the landscape are those 18th-century emplacements and their successors from the 20th century.
There is about Gibraltar a sense of frozen time, frozen history, unfinished business from lost empires, Roman, Moorish, Spanish, British.
Its Main Street follows the line set down by the Moors 700 years ago. As for La Linea, it is now is a border town, huddled at the foot of the Rock, ludicrously near, an unresolved siege turned into mundane bricks and mortar and sharing its EuroDisney modern architecture and council high-rise style with the Rock.
One sunny evening, I floated on the funicular to the ridge, above orange-tiled houses, birds, and barbary apes and looked out across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, Europe and Africa. Below, along the line of Charles V's 16th-century Spanish defensive wall - built on a Moorish wall - a 19th-century English cemetery provided a last resting place for casualties from the nearby Battle of Trafalgar.
West across the bay was Spain's Algeciras; just to its north was an oil refinery, built on the site of a 3,000-year-old Phoenican trading town; 14 miles south was Mons Abila on the African mainland which, with Gibraltar (Mons Calpe) comprised the Pillars of Hercules two millennia ago.
When the Moors arrived 1,300 years ago, they placed a mosque down at Europa point. When the Spanish began their forays, the mosque was sacked and transformed into Our Lady of Europa, a warning to the Moslem world. When the protestant Anglo-Dutch arrived they threw Our Lady into the Bay, a warning that north Europeans - and booze has been a scourge of the British presence - don't mix with alcohol. Salvaged, Our Lady was returned to her elegant white church. Three years ago, the Saudis funded the construction of the "Mosque of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" nearby, a calling card in marble.
Meanwhile, the Spanish and Gibraltarians fret about the children of the Moors across the straits and their dreams of Europe's industrial paradise. On the Rock, within the Rock, the British still track the passing traffic.
Anyway "Mammon is the God of Gibraltar," according to Richard Ford in his great Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845). Gibraltar was an "arid and torrid rock" where "all creeds are free and all agree in exclusive money worship" and where the traveller was tormented with "cads and touters". The town, he went on, "is stuffy and sea-coaly, the houses wooden and druggetted and built on Liverpool pattern, under a tropical climate, but transport an Englishman where you will, like a snail he takes his home and his habits with him."
The fleet was the core of that world, and it has gone. The Gibraltarians, more British than the British, are now self-governing - unrecognised by Madrid and ignored by British public opinion. Yet 300 years as dinner lady to RN has taken its toll. The Gibraltarians derive from a splendid mixture of races - Genoans, Arabs, Jews, Spanish, et al - but the British tunnelled into their soul. Take a walk down Main Street and count the pubs threatening steak pie and chips and a pint of Websters. Stand in the 18th-century Casemates Square and con template California Real English fish 'n' chips and adjacent Burger King. Then retire, as I did, to a blue-tiled Kosher restaurant, out of the 1930s, up Bomb House Lane and over the road from the ruins of the wonderful 14th-century Moorish baths.
I stared at the North Face as I flew out of that curious fortress-cum-tiny city state. Long ago, the ancients had another belief about Gibraltar. On it was the gate to Pluto's land of the dead, Hades lay within the Rock. They were right of course. They just got the timing wrong - and forgot about the Nissen huts.
The practicals
Nigel Foiunatin flew from Luton by Monarch Airlines Crown Service (07800 405040), £114-£228 return. BA (0345 222111) from Gatwick return £136-£299 plus taxes. He stayed at the Elliot Hotel (00350 70500). Cadogan, Cresta, Crystal Holidays First Choice and Prestige Holidays offer three-night packages includongfligts and accomodation from £249-£416 per head. Hercules Travel (00350 76070) arranges transfers, accomodation and excursions for independent travellers. the 18th century tunnels are open daily. To visit the second world war tunnels, contact the Tourist Board in Gibraltar (00350 74982) giving at leats 48 hours notice. Admission is £2 per head.
