The Western Gate

As I awoke from dream I was aware I had had a dream that was not lucid, usually all my dreams before awakening are lucid to some degree or other. The dream concerned a violation within a large Roman temple. Now I’m a fervent champion of Medusa, and call upon the Goddess of Law to rectify the injustice served upon her by Athena,¹ so wondered whether this was the crux of the story, but it had dispersed from memory, discarded by the conscious mind almost immediately.

This sparked a memory of a conversation I had with my, then, boss. It was a story that could’ve been relayed to me by a discourse with Rumi, or a lecture from Jerome, both of whom represent the Orphic and the Logic revelations within my Lucid dreamwork.
At the outset, this story was not one of those, “I heard from so and so” or a story repeated, Chinese whispers, from a ‘bloke down the pub’. I can vouch for the source of the story, he is honest and trustworthy and is not in the habit of creating tall stories to give himself a bolstered ego, nor does he seek acceptance or appreciation. However, his fault would probably lay in a philistine attitude towards anything concerning the arts and culture. He would loathe a holiday, for instance,  where for the main part the whole objective was to visit museums or sites of antiquity, to him these were piles of rubble from those that didn’t have the fortitude to survive.

The story began in the Kensington/Chelsea area of London, the location known as ‘Worlds End’ to be precise. He was working and overseeing the completion of a Sub-sub basement of a huge house owned by then, wealthy Russians. The basement consisted of a swimming pool, a whirlpool and to the side an annexe that originally was to be a changing room, however the disparate Russian family decided they wanted a Sauna built. It was decided to bore a hole down into the ground and with the use of a heat pump to circulate a ‘closed circuit’ water system, inherent heat from deep underground would prewarm the water which would then be additionally heated to required temperature. This would then serve a steam façade, and together with the heated coals -an elaborate ritual of throwing water, scented or otherwise could be envisaged, a showboating exercise. Everyone was happy, the work commenced.

My storyteller then tells me it wasn’t long after the bore hole was initiated that a huge structural collapse occurred. The whole area in the annexe and indeed into the main swimming pool area occurred. The borehole drill was an automatic system, set up on a jig and frame and initiated with the operator at a safe distance from the machine, no-one was hurt as the whole floor of the area, some 8ft square collapsed deep into whatever was below.

Preliminary investigations had already been undertaken, there were no deep service tunnels, pipes or systems in this location, certainly no underground railway system nearby, nor ‘secret’ tunnels which would have been noted prior to building regulation acceptance of all the works commencing on the property.

He told me the collapse had revealed a large area below that looked like a small tunnel with little side passage rooms, although each passage was small the area underneath them was extended far back into a larger room. He told me it was filled with green moss algae type substance that he confirmed was caused by the presence of copper that was mounted throughout the walls. On each wall he then told me, and relayed this part as dismissively as if it were of no concern whatsoever, were murals crafted in very small mosaic tiles, they looked, he said, like figures from a Roman film.
My first initial response was to ask, excitedly, where this was exactly and is it now open to the public, however the story teller continued with following, ” of course, the general foreman in charge of works ushered everyone away with a free trip to the pub on condition nothing was said. I, being leading hand in charge of the electrical infrastructure stayed. To avoid works shutting down and a lengthy, years, wait,  the hole was filled with back rubble and vast amounts of wire-meshing, enough to facilitate the pouring of only two trucks of cement to completely fill the area.”
He was livid but not about the covering up of the site of antiquity but as he said, “this set the completion of the works back two weeks”, and more despairingly had a team unable to work for two weeks, and even more insulting he wasn’t allowed to go to the pub for a freebie on the day of the find. Also he said, “they couldn’t use the bore hole- deep heat system they had planned, instead telling the occupants it was not feasible as the ground below was fragile and they had to shore up, to strengthen the substructure. We lost a lot of money, missed the time-completion bonus. But it looked really nice when finished”
He added, and this irony perhaps was the whole cause of his story~ the sting in the tail, they had commissioned an artist to come and create a, rather nice mural of a beautiful naked Russian looking lady emerging from a lake.
“Who knows what’s under our feet ?” he asked whilst taking a large bite of an apple that spat back at him as his teeth bored down upon it.

Well we don’t know, obviously……because its all covered up.

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¹According to Greek mythology, Medusa was turned into a serpent-headed monster by the goddess Athena as a punishment. The story goes that Medusa, once a beautiful maiden with long, flowing hair, caught the attention of the sea god, Poseidon. Poseidon and Medusa had a romantic encounter, though in other stories she was violated and raped,  in the temple of Athena, which angered the Goddess. In some versions of the myth, Medusa is punished by Athena for desecrating her temple with her actions. In other versions, Athena is angered by Medusa’s beauty, which she perceives as a threat to her own virginity and power. In either case, Athena transforms Medusa into a hideous monster with snakes for hair and a gaze that can turn people to stone.