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skus tuto:
Maclellan cites the testimony of one Antonin Horak, an expert speleologist and member of the Slovak Uprising, who accidentally discovered a strange tunnel in Czechoslovakia in October 1944.
Dr Horak kept quiet about the discovery until 1965, when he published an account in the National Speleological Society News. In his article, Dr Horak stated that he and two other Resistance fighters found the tunnel near the villages of Plavince and Lubocna (he is quite specific about the location: 49.2 degrees north, 20.7 degrees east). Having just survived a skirmish with the Germans, the three men (one of whom was badly injured) asked a local peasant for help.
He led them to an underground grotto where they could hide and rest.
The peasant told the Resistance men that the cave contained pits, pockets of poison gas, and was also haunted, and warned them against venturing too far inside. This they had no intention of doing, such was their weariness. They attended to the wounds of their comrade and fell asleep.
The following day, Horak's curiosity got the better of him and, while he waited for the injured man to recover enough strength to travel again, he decided to do a little exploring inside the cave.
Presently, he came to a section that was completely different from the rest of the cave.
'Lighting some torches, I saw that I was in a spacious, curved, black shaft formed by cliff-like walls. The floor in the incline was a solid lime pavement.' (27)
The tunnel stretched interminably into the distance. Dr Horak decided to take a sample of the wall, but was unable to make any impression with his pickaxe. He took his pistol and fired at the wall (surely an unwise thing to do, given the risk of a ricochet and with German soldiers possibly still in the vicinity).
'The bullet slammed into the substance of the walls with a deafening, fiery impact,' he wrote. 'Sparks flashed, there was a roaring sound, but not so much as a splinter fell from the substance. Only a small welt appeared, about the length of half my finger, which gave off a pungent smell.'
Dr Horak then returned to his comrades and told them about the apparently man-made tunnel.
'I sat there by the fire speculating. How far did it reach into the rocks? I wondered. Who, or what, put it into the mountain? Was it man-made? And was it at last proof of the truth in legends - like Plato's - of long-lost civilizations with magic technologies which our rationale cannot grasp or believe?' (28)
No one else, apparently, has explored this tunnel since Dr Horak in 1944. The peasants who lived in the region obviously knew of its existence, but kept well away.
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