the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

Across from the fine shops and attractive girls on Rue St Sulpice in Paris is a nondescript wooden door set in the walls of the tall, spire-topped church that gives the street its name. On this summer day, no one notices as four men enter the door and descend a quick flight of stairs into a tiny room where two boys play jacks on a marble floor. Jacks is an ancient game formerly played with human knucklebones, so it's appropriate that the boys are here. Beyond them is another door, short and fat and medieval, that leads to the Paris of the dark and the dead. Here we hover. Our guide, a Frenchman named Lezard Peint, whispers, "Move quickly. Do not stop, do not talk, do not look around." We enter the wooden double·door into a marble anteroom and continue, door after door, with the air cooling at each stair until sudden Iy, magically, a chant rises. We are now surrounded by shadows, some on crutches trembling and others in pews bobbing. There is a distant sound of a woman sobbing. I notice a priest, bearded to his chest, at an altar, softly singing hymns. I later learn they are Coptics, an Egyptian sect, one of the oldest forms of Christianity. They gather here every Saturday. We pass like ghosts. No one notices us, no one looks up. Our target is a wide iron·studded door on the far side of the gallery, and at the sill Peint whispers, "Quickly, in!" This third door closes us in absolute night and dispels the singing. A pipe organ plays somewhere above. Flashlights go up: We're in a domed anteroom with a locked iron grille in an arched portal. Lezard dismantles the lock, removes it, then replaces it, relocking the gate behind us. We descend into a series of vaulted chambers that branch off at odd intervals deep under the cathedral. Along the walls are more gates, and beyond one of them are thousands of moldering bones, piled head-high, yellow in our light. We are at the threshold of the catacombs of Paris. "The crypt of St Sulpice is just one of many possible entrances into the catacombs," explains Peint, pointing at the bones and then at other gates barring passages disappearing into darkness. "In Paris, the doors are many and the best of them lead down." *** There are 560 miles of abandoned medieval quarry tunnels under greater Paris, the largest network of rock tunnels under any city in the world. The catacombs, as they're called, run at depths of anywhere from 20 to 120 feet, tunneling below the arrondissements of the Left Bank and the suburbs south of the city proper. They can be entered from Metro tunnels, utility systems, church crypts and the basements of homes, hospitals, Iycees and universities (there's even an entrance in the deepest reaches of Tour Montparnasse, Paris' one skyscraper) . In places they are multitiered, connected by ladders, stairs and open wells. Some are rough-hewn, vast and echoing, 100 feet wide and 12 feet high, some smooth-walled and only a foot wide. The oldest date back two thousand years, to the first Roman settlers, but the majority are products of the cathedral boom and urban expansion of the Middle Ages, when demand for the thick limestone deposits along the Seine reached frenzied heights. Around 1785, long after the quarrying had stopped, the Paris government availed itself of this convenient underworld: the entire population of the city's foul and overflowing cemeteries-six million skeletalized dead-were dumped into the tunnels, forming the largest mass grave on earth. You can see portions of this necropolis, legally, at the Musee des Catacombes, on the Left Bank, where a rock-hewn placard welcomes, "Stop! You are entering the Empire of Death!" Thirty-three francs buys a hushed promenade through two miles of human ivory, but the tourists tend to pile up against the bones. I came to visit the other 500 miles, the illicit underground where Robespierre once dumped his dead and prostitutes tricked in "Crypts of Passion" and World War II partisans fled Nazi troopers. Partisans of a sort still haunt the catacombs, well-educated middle class men who descend by the score weekly and often nightly to explore, throw parties and play cat-and-mouse with patroling "cata-cops." They call themselves "cataphiles," literally, "lovers of the underground." *** We crawled for miles through narrow feet-high tunnels that zigzagged to pools of clear cold shin-high water that shivered in our light. We continued through telecom tunnels lined with red and blue rubber pipes. For a fleeting moment I was afraid, the same way children are of basements, of the Thing that lurks. There was graffiti on the walls from the '80S and '90S, a palimpsest of tags and entreaties ("Lost in the catas! Help!"), and underneath the color were stonecutters' marks made as far back as the 17th century. We settled in a rocky alcove, a 13th-century quarry, poked candles into the soft wet walls, which steamed from our human heat, and cooked canned beans and sausage, drank wine, lolled in the sandy earth, and Lezard Peint, who claims to have walked some 9,000 miles in the underground, explained the culture of cataphilia. "There's something that touches you deeply, sensually and psychologically, when you go below, when you are alone with the stone," he told me. Lezard bears an uncanny

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