New Zealand’s fjord-land lies in the bottom left-hand corner of the southern island. As its name suggests, it consists of deep lakes and fjords gouged out by glaciers between high peaks. It is a place of austere beauty, largely untouched by civilisation. There is only one road in, passing through Te Anau on to Milford Sound. And here, in the midst of nature’s mightiest wonders, technology has built a hidden sanctum and secret wonder.
Appropriately enough for a sacred domain, there is no road; instead, as in so many mythologies, you must board a ship, symbolically leaving this world for a journey to the next. Lake Manapouri is vast: around 30km at its greatest extent. It is also deep: the second deepest in New Zealand at nearly 450 metres – a quarter of a mile. Crossing it seems like passing over the abyss. In appearance it is strikingly similar to its near-antipodes, the great Lake Saimaa in Finland: a huge sheet of ruffled silver water broken up by island after wooded island.
On reaching the other side, you board a more prosaic holy vessel: a bus. A short drive takes you to the side of the mountain, and to a great opening there. The bus enters, and begins its huge circling descent to the heart of the rock. Two things are noticeable. First, that though traffic drives on the left in New Zealand, here, as if invoking an ancient prerogative, the coach stays on the right. Secondly, that the tunnel curves round to the left – what would be naturally widdershins, except that in the southern hemisphere, the sun itself moves confusingly to the left.
The tunnel falls 200 metres in two kilometres. It is cold and dank; occasionally a side tunnel is visible, sometimes a mysterious door. At its end, there is a walkway, protected by a canopy from the water which pours down from the roof. Following it, you pass into a small room with a metal stairway. In this confined space you are suddenly conscious of the millions of tons of rock surrounding you, held up by nothing more than its inherent strength. At the end of the stairs you pass through another door – and into the great hall itself.
A huge cathedral of space, carved out of the pure granite, lies before you; 100 metres long, 20 wide, 25 high. The walls are made of raw rock, still showing the wounds form the excavation. It is unexpectedly warm, and there is a rich odour in the air: of metal, of oil, of machines. And there is a sound: perceived first as a strong, low fundamental note, but then splitting into two, three, tens, hundreds of harmonics, all building into a huge quivering chord which hangs in the air and seems to fill the hall with its almost tangible presence. We are in engineering’s cathedral, and this is its great organ, its self-generated symphony.
The sound is born of the seven great turbines below us which turn seven dynamos. Water from the lake above surges through more tunnels, down to this hall, and then wends its way through ten blind kilometres before attaining the sea at Doubtful Sound. This huge feet of construction is a shrine to technology; to smell and hear in this temple is to know the incense and anthems of a modern god whose power is a thousand megawatts.
(12.12.89)
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