In the first-class compartment of a Eurostar train, we polished off the chocolate chip croissants and waited for something to happen.

My friends and I were a couple hundred feet beneath the sea, speeding through the English Channel Tunnel: A $16 billion feat of science and diplomacy which, for the first time since the ice age, joins Europe with Great Britain. Adventure, we thought, was imminent.

And, sure enough, somewhere between the land of wine and truffles and the isle of tea and crumpets, our yellow-nosed train groaned to a halt. Pressing our faces to our windows, we saw that we were no longer inside the tunnel, but had emerged in a flat and barren field. Dark birds circled over a rusted freight train. Was this London? Or, had the notorious "Chunnel," like the storybook rabbit hole, carried us through the center of the earth, all the way to Wonderland? ...

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