Ch1: Passageways

All right, three points first:

1. The date, June 1882, belies many intentional anachronisms to come, though it has a significance which will become apparent later.
2. The name Ragnar Maria Eisenwod with its odd, archaic surname suggests the poet Rilke (seven years old in 1882) and Ragnarök.
3. The motif of lying on one's right side will be explained later.

The most interesting thing, at the beginning, are the passageways---covered corridors that can stretch for miles, perhaps many miles, allowing indoor travel, from building to building, across continents. Inside, the passageways are like any furnished room.  

I think they are pure invention (unlike most of the strange things encountered in the book), but this blog has made me wonder whether I could have been influenced by any antecedents.  First, there are the historical ones:  The Maginot Line:

and two others due to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China (3rd C. B.C.):  The Great Wall:

and the network of secret passages and tunnels said to interconnect his many palaces in Xianyang:

These first two aren't really like the passages in Remittance Man, but the third, the Qin emperor's, come closest---whatever they were really like.

Then there are the personal ones, though real passages in the world today are rarely longer than what is needed to cross a street.  The Winnipeg Walkway, 2 km of passages that interconnect downtown buildings are famous, but I've never been there.  On the other hand, I grew up looking at the BFGoodrich headquarters on Main Street in Akron, Ohio:

The yellow oval is the approximate position of my father's office.  Then there is one I used to use every day, the one connecting Cardiff University's department of Physics and Astronomy (left) with its library and Trevithick Refectory (right):

The yellow arrow points to my office, room 13 in the basement.  I don't think any of these are really the origin of my fictional passageways (in which more novels should be set).  Before you go off to imagine backpacking across Eurasia indoors, here is one last aside.  Turn to the left in the last picture and you will see a stairway that appeared for a few seconds in an episode of Doctor Who: