Paris, 2

[tamaranth]

Standing on a street corner in medieval Paris, looking at where Notre-Dame should be. It is: but I can't see it. I'm underneath the ground, underneath the square in front of the cathedral, in the Crypte Archaeologique. Around me there are Roman columns, medieval walls, nineteenth-century sewers. When people walked this street, and lived in these houses, Notre Dame had stood a hundred years or more, vast and heavy and astonishing.

Some day all archaeology will be like this. Some day they'll come downstairs, down and down, and stand on our street corners in the dark, far beneath their own.