Bath

Leave the United States behind.

You are in the English countryside, near the town of Corsham in Wiltshire, roughly twenty kilometres east of Bath.

The surface here is the England of postcards and period dramas, rolling green hills stitched together by dry stone walls, sheep grazing in fields that have been farmed for centuries, lanes so narrow that two cars cannot pass each other without one of them reversing into a hedgerow the light is soft the air smells like grass and rain the landscape has the particular calm of a place that has not been dramatically changed by modernity where the rhythms of agriculture and weather still dictate the texture of daily life, where the pubs are old and the churches are older and the hills have been green since before anyone thought to write about them.

Beneath this landscape, beneath the sheep and the stone walls, and the soft English rain, lies something that makes the Greenbrier look modest.

Burlington was a functioning underground city built inside abandoned stone quarries beneath a Wiltshire hillside.

The quarries themselves are part of the story.

The Bath stone quarries near Corsham have been excavated since at least the 17th century, providing the honey-coloured limestone that gives the city of Bath its distinctive appearance.

Over the centuries the quarrying created a vast network of underground chambers, caverns and tunnels carved into the limestone, some of them enormous with ceilings high enough to accommodate multi-storey structures, During the Second World War, parts of the quarry network were requisitioned by the British government for munition storage and aircraft engine manufacturing.

I mean, Paul Dirac, who was the predictor of antimatter, the British physicist in 1930 or whatever, he said, "God is a mathematician of a high order." And we don't know that answer.

Why is the universe mathematical? You know? So previously, like, you had to actually go and find things, but the first person to, to make a prediction from a piece of paper was Urbain Le Verrier, the French, uh, astronomer, and he could see from the motion of, uh, Uranus or Uranus, uh, which had been discovered in Bath in England in 1783, uh, he could see that its, uh, motion was not...

Every time he predicted its orbit, it kind of fluctuated from its orbit, and he, from that, he was, he was able to predict there must be a more distant planet, obviously Neptune, which was tugging on it.

And he was able to predict exactly the constellation it would be found in, and someone went to look from Berlin, and they found it within an hour.

In Tehran is Alam Salehi, a senior lecturer in Iranian studies at the Australian National University.

And Patrick Bury is in Bath in the UK.

He's a defense and security specialist at Bath University and a former NATO analyst.

Gentlemen, welcome to you all.

Uh, David, let's start with you.

Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

Mr. Allen who owned the chief of the property about Fullerton the village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived was ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution.

And his lady a good-humoured woman fond of Miss Morland and probably aware that if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village she must seek them abroad invited her to go with them.

Mr. and Mrs. Morland were all compliance and Catherine all happiness.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Chapter two.

In addition to what has already been said of Catherine Morland's personal and mental endowments when about to be launched into all the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks residence in Bath it may be stated for the reader's more certain information lest the following pages should otherwise fail of giving any idea of what her character is meant to be that her heart was affectionate her disposition cheerful and open without conceit or affectation of any kind her manners just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl her person pleasing and when in good looks pretty and her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.

When the hour of departure drew near the maternal anxiety of Mrs. Morland will be naturally supposed to be most severe.