The Taking of MS-1921
September 4th, 2003




So my friend
and I




decided to investigate a mysterious tunnel
   
that we had known about for some time and had been meaning to get around to.


We believed from a previous foray that it was built in 1921, as the inscription over the entrance seemed to indicate. The letters 'M' 'S' to either side of the date suggested to us 'Minneapolis Sewer', although I have made no research to confirm this.



When we made our attempt, several months had passed, and the heavy gate hindering entrance was clearly in a worse state of affairs:



We armed ourselves with, among other things, a flashlight so powerful that when you turn it on, it has a kick:
3,000,000 Candlepower, you primates. Shop Smart; Shop S-Mart.


Our earlier scouting mission had yielded only one image from inside the tunnel, on the basis of which we were mounting this full-on tour:

   As you can see, we had little to go on. For all we knew, it might end after ten feet. As it turned out, it did not:


I know it looks kind of fake, like a matte painting of a tunnel. Let me assure you it is about as real as a 12 foot tall arched tunnel 150 feet under the city of Minneapolis can be. It turned out to be ray-shielded, so we had to use proton torpedoes. The above image was taken about 2500 feet into the tunnel, when we turned our flashlights back along the way we had come.
Every few hundred feet, a smaller tunnel branched off.

Following most of these led down smaller passageways

...most of which ended in vertical shafts with large cistern-type wells at the bottom.

Their purpose was unclear to us. We were unable to determine how deep they were, as the water was too murky and all we had with us was a 3 foot gorilla bar which we didn't want to get too wet (it was our camera tripod)

As you might expect, there was a fair amount of graffiti on the wall, though it petered out after about 500 feet in.

You can imagine our surprise and geekish delight at the discovery we made about 1000 feet into the tunnel.

Let's take a closer look at that:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel indeed. Anyone who knows elvish care to help us out with this?

UPDATE 9/5/03- Friend and former tunnel-hacking partner Cuthalion writes:
          I had some trouble matching up some letters of the script on the wall to my references, but it's clearly intended to be written in Tengwar, Tolkein's elven script. An obvious guess is the inscription on the ring, and sure enough, it's clearly a not-quite-right rendition of that text.

http://www.tlotr.com/middle_earth/ring.gif

Here's the inscription with a english phonetic transcription:
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/4948/tengwar/exlotrr.htm

In the tongue of Mordor (Which I dare not even speak, particularly not at this late hour), this is the first half of the One Ring's theme song: "One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them". Perhaps the creature writing in this long forgotten tongue got bored, thus failing to deliver the punchline: "One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" Or perhaps the rest was written somewhere that you didn't notice with your clearly inadequate lighting.

As an aside, most of the written text Tolkein depicts is engraved in stone, and thus uses the runic alphabet which is basically unrelated to this one.
         


So anyway, we made it to the end of the tunnel

where the largest vertical chamber yet rose about 50 feet to a storm grating or something. It was hard to get a good look at as it was showering filthy water down the entire time. The decrease in ceiling height was to be expected, as we had been following a slight incline the entire way in. I'm glad to say we made it safely back out, not encountering any sewer gas or crazies (although the gorilla bar had been brought for our protection), and the note I left for our other roommate to send a rescue if we were not back by nightfall was disregarded. The entire expedition took about 2-1/2 hours, not including the time it took to hike down to the tunnel entrance. We are looking forward to the next expedition, once we find an interesting target with an appropriate ingresse point. In the meantime we are two tunnel spelunkers available for hire.