BILLIONS UNDERGROUND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 67, 21 March 1938, Page 3

BILLIONS UNDERGROUND

Mysterious Vaults of Bank of France, with Billions in Coined and Uncoined Gold, a Treasure such as No Croesus or Mortal Man Has Ever Set Eves On

r pHE most peculiar and modern structure of Paris, technically speaking, is strangely enough not visible from the outside. Every day, thousands of people walk past it without seeing it, w-rites Stefan Zweig in the Neues Wiener Journal, Vienna. They walk through the Rue de Montpensier or Rue des Petits-Champs and all they see besides the majestic old building of the Eank of France is a wide open space, fenced in with boards, something like a building site waiting for the work to start. But this work has. in reality, been completed long ago except that the unique structure does not rise above the surface of the earth. It is sunk six stories deep underneath it. Under this innocent looking sandy stretch of land in the heart of Paris lies, clad in steel and concrete, the richest gold mine of our time—the mysterious, almost legendary safety vaults of the Bank of France, with billions in coined and uncoined gold, a treasure such as no Croesus, Caesar, or mortal man has ever set eyes on, since the world began. The elevator whizzes down. 85 feet into the earth, through a round, smooth shaft of concrete. If the engineer who acts as our guide had not told us, we would never have suspected that on our vertical downward journey we were traversing the bed of a streamlet. When they began this troglodytic work, the streamlet was considered an obstacle. But the miracle which is modern technique can turn even obstacles into advantages, so they drove the gallery undernearth the stream, and the layer of water became an additional protection against attempts to break into the vaults from above. The galleries extend at such depth that the inhabitants of the houses, which were still standing then on what is an empty space to-day, did not even suspect the work that was going on underneath their basements. They led their normal life and pursued their regular occupations without noticing that gallery after gallery was being driven beneath their own inviolate homes. At the entrance to the artificial mine, the silence and quiet that reign here are marvellous indeed. It almost frightens one at first, but soon a delicious sensation of complete relaxation and rest overcomes one, for not a sound of the turmoil above penetrates at this depth. This silence, moreover, is luminous. Perpetual daylight in these modern catacombs, diffused by innumerable electric lamps. In white corridors, which might be those of a sanitorium, the air is as pure as on a high mountain-top, for, ceaselessly, the giant metal lungs of electric compressors pump down the health-giving oxygen. Unlike outside, here you breathe a pure and filtered air, free of dust and moisture, calm and uniformly warm: pure ozone in a word. Most certainly the atmosphere here is more healthful than that of the immense city, its parks, and water expanses. Thus technique attains, even surpasses, the finest achievements of nature. We enter by a door which is big and heavy but moves so smoothly on its hinges that a child’s finger could open it. It is a bomb-proof door, of heavy armour-plate of the thickness of a human body, cast from a block of cool, bluish, gleaming steel. This is w’hat we expected, because from the very first, from the emergence of the world, the two metals, gold and iron, have ben closely allied. Wherever gold is, it calls its stronger brother iron to defend and protect it. Where gold becomes money and property, iron turns into armour and sword. Where gold sleeps, iron wakes. Always they are linked ogether and nobody can say whether it is gold

that buys iron for its defence, or whether it’s iron which snatches gold as its prey. Through the forbidding-looking door you enter a narrow passage and you can’t help shivering slightly. What if this door were to shut behind you and you remained entombed alive! No earthly power could lift this lid of steel. And then you smile at your own simple-mindedness, for you thought that you were entering the fortress and leading to the interior of the maze, and you are only in the vestibule. The armoured door is nothing but the soft green husk around the nutshell proper. Here we are still on public premises where workmen and officials are moving about, but we have to go farther down, for il Dante's Inferno has seven pits, the vaults of the Bank of France have many more. In this flood of electric light which creates a perfect illusion of daylight you think of the tales cf Arabian Nights, for. smooth, hard and rigid, there rises before you the lodestone-rock of your childhood: a gigantic wall of steel which obstructs the view in the middle of the gallery. In vain do your eyes scour its surface for a door, a keyhole, a crack. There is absolutely nothing. The smooth, polished surface is bare. Only a magical password, a new “open, sesame!” could open it. And then the fairy tale comes true. The sign comes, not from heaven through, but from some invisible realm, where some invisible one sits watching our progress on this subterranean voyage. The rigid wall comes to life, it shifts like the wall described by Edgar Allan Poe, but it is still an inaccessible wall. Something shifts inside it, like a stage-wing, a gigantic invisible force lifts or drops "or turns something from within, and works a change on the smooth surface. It is neither a door nor a keyhole, but you have the impression of a design gradually being outlined on the surface, where there was nothing an instant ago. But the wall stands immovable, still, and stern. You step aside to make way for an electric locomotive gliding on rails you had not previously noticed. It is attached by suction to the wall. Another sign from heaven and it recoils, dragging along with it a piece of massive steel, as though it were pulling a cork out of a bottle, But this “stopper” is higher than a man and it is as broad as six or seven full-grown men standing side by side; it is a load such as a whole regiment could not budge. But the engine achieves it with the quiet, matter-of-course, almost mocking indifference, which technique often uses to demonstrate that there are no miracles. By this stopper of steel we may gauge the thickness of the wall, compared with which the armour of our dreadnoughts is no thicker than rose leaves. No shell could produce more than a superficial scratch on it, no force could penerate it and reach its heart of gold. The idea of breaking into this sanctuary of gold is absurd in the face of this collectively conceived defence, tested by the technique of war and peace, this gigantic complex of muscles of steel, of invisible and movable walls and turrets, for here truly is a concrete proof of how matter and spirit together collaborate to guard and defend gold. You walk through a tunnel of steel and a maze of passages, flooded with a pure, uniform, white light. You do not know where exactly you are: under private homes, or under the Place des Victories, or, may be, under the National Library. Only our guide knows whither the thread of Ariadne leads. The maze comes to an end, finally, and you

find yourself In an enormous hall, something like a church or theatre, the ceiling of which is supported by hundreds of short, thick pillars of concrete, a forest of stone reminding you of the Mosque of Cordoba or the famous temple of Madras, hewn in the rock. But while those shrines are plunged in semi-darkness which makes them appear mysterious, this hall is flooded with light and it is therefore seven times more mysterious in its absolute silence and emptiness. What is it An abandoned refectory, a monastery, or a modern catacomb, 85 feet beneath the surface? What purpose could it possibly serve. No mass is celebrated here, no drama played, no meetings held, there is nothing whatever to indicate the kind of activities that might be indulged therein. The few wooden tables and chairs in one corner look as though they had never been used. Yet this absurdly large and empty hall serves a wide, a timely, though terrible purpose. It is being saved for the ghostly hour, when the prophecies of the Apocalypse will come true again, when war and upheavals will rock the world and the city and the bulwark of finance will face direct and immediate danger. Like a submarine, which plunges to safety when it sees itself surrounded by the enemy, so the whole Bank of France with its offices, employees, books and files and typewriters will dive down to safety into this enormous hall, deep below the surface, and continue to function. The armoured doors will close hermetically on it, the entrances will be sealed over, and not even the faintest echo of the happenings'above will disturb the smooth running of the colossal machinery in this unique haven of safety. But how can people live down there, cut off from the outside world, from sources of supply, from light, heat, and water? Our guide smiles: everything is provided for. Enough foodstuffs are stored in the adjoining chambers to last eighty days. There are electric kitchens, dormitories, beds, everything a human being needs to live. Water comes from a special conduit which cannot be cut off. The electric plant is independent. Like gigantic antediluvian creatures, the grey machines stand silently in a separate chamber. They need only to be fed oil and they will start manufacturing the power that will pump oxygen, and heat to dry the air, the power that is the essence of force, electricity, magically captured by the brains of man and held prisoner in the gigantic flywheels, to be released with one stroke of the lever. You are stunned by such cold, almost cruel calculation. The world will be submerged by chaos, rebellions will rock the world, planes sowing death will circle above our cities, and the drunken war-god will again rage from one end of the globe to the other, but here in this small, armour-clad fold of the earth’s crust the microbial existence of a couple of hundred humans will go on as before. They will see nothing and hear nothing of what is happening in the universe above, for even the blood of thousands of human beings, should it soak the earth again, would not trickle down to this depth, into this hermetically closed refuge of steel. Typewriters will click, pages will be covered with figures, cheques will be written and turned over, and still the gold will sleep untouched, inviolate, inaccessible, and when the clock of the world stops, because its works are broken, this one tiny wheel will continue to turn. When all Europe, perhaps the whole world, is trembling with fear and horror, safety and stability will prevail during eighty days in this one enormous empty hall.