It was hot; far too hot for April. I regretted taking my coat which was now screwed up and compressed in my now unwieldy rucksack
making access to my torches, water or food difficult. So I was weighed down, sweating and uncomfortable. Furthermore my reluctance
to fish out my torch in a darkened corridor meant I’d taken a fall down some concrete steps. My scuffed knuckles and ripped elbow ached
and throbbed; my pride at making such a fundamentally stupidly dangerous error compounded by the fact I was looking for a tunnel system anyway.
"Simon!"
Voices called but I couldn’t discern their direction. I was high up in the Battle Test House trying to get a shot of its interiors
without it looking like a huge random complex system of boilers, furnaces and pumps; which was proving to be a fruitless task as
Battle Test House was essentially a huge space stuffed and groaning with pipes and equipment. It lacked the space and air
of the other test cells giving it a cramped and claustrophobic feel. If Cell 1 & 2 had the appearance of a beast which had
outgrown its surroundings and smashed out its side walls as it grew then Battle was representative of the stage before
just as the walls started to bend and buckle.
"Hello?" I called down to them from my lofty perch as they walked below me.
"We’ve been looking for you for ten minutes."
It was due to the sheer amount of machinery in Battle Test House that we were separated from view, but in truth, I think my
exploring partners found it boring. Battle Test House was a little disappointing; you walked in and were met with a wall
of pipes and passageways and it simply didn’t have the sheer "wow" factor of the other buildings. Hence the others were keen to move on.
