Free The Plato Papers by Peter Ackroyd

‘Plato is impious’? I am not impious! I am simply telling you the truth. The darkness began to lift, very slowly, and I noticed that a sombre radiance seemed to emanate from the stone around me. It was the colour of fire or blood. I was still walking down. Forgive me. I can only express it as ‘up’ and ‘down’. Perhaps I have become like them.
    I knew, somehow, that I was following a circular path. It was growing warmer and I noticed that in the glowing light my body cast a strange shape upon the ground. It was called a shadow, or a wraith created by the false light of their sun. Theirs was a world of shadows. Then I found myself before a flight of broad stone stairs. I had no choice. I stepped upon the first stair. I began to descend, but once more it was as if I were not moving at all; I might have remained in the same place, except that various layers of dark and light passed over my head. I experienced the strangest sensations of stupor, and of anxious restlessness, until I recognised that I was experiencing night and day as they once were in antiquity. The intervals between them grew longer, until I was able to glimpse points of light in the darkness. I looked up. I looked up and saw the bright objects once called stars. There was a firmament stretching above me, and the position of the night sky was very like that which I had studied in the old charts of Mouldwarp. These were the ancient fixed stars, shining below the level of our world!
    Then the noise began. At first it was the merest whispering, but it grew steadily louder until it filled my ears with chiming, and tapping, and rhythmic thudding. There were more violent indistinct sounds, but the path had become so steep that there was no chance of turning back. But why should I wish to return, when I could run towards my vision? I had come into a great cavern extending in every direction. It was impossible to gauge its depth, or its height, although I could see the fixed stars still turning overhead. And there, stretching below me, was London! It was no longer night but broad day and I could see great towers of glass, domes, roofs and houses. I saw the Thames itself, gleaming in the distance, with wide thoroughfares running beside it. The avenues and buildings were more elaborate and extensive than anything we had ever surmised; yet, somehow, this was the city of which I had always dreamed.
    How can I describe to you all the strangeness of my journey among the people of Mouldwarp? They were short, little more than half your height, and even I had to walk carefully among them. You ask if they were alarmed by my appearance, but the truth is that they could not see me. It was as if I were a ghost or spirit. Why do you laugh? I believe that I was not visible to them because I still existed in dimensions other than their own. That is why they were so compact, so densely formed, and why all their activity was curiously restrained. They moved in preordained patterns— sometimes it seemed that they did not know in which direction they were travelling. Their eyes were focused ahead and yet they seemed to see nothing; they might have been wrapped in intense thought, but of what were they thinking?
    I bent over to listen to them; I tried to speak, but of course they could not hear me. I travelled down Old Street and saw that it was once a track in the wilderness. I came into Smithfield and flinched at the anger of those who lived beside it. In Cheapside the city itself had established intricate patterns of movement, and all the activity of the citizens was for its own sake. In Clapham I listened to them talking—
have you got the
time please he obviously wants the best price but he wants to
sell as well I shall be off then shall I he never wants to hear
the truth can you possibly tell me the time
. And so their lives continued. They had no way of knowing that their earth was in a great cavern beneath the surface of our world. Their sky was the roof of a cave, but for