[map.search.ch] offers a quick-zooming interface presenting satellite photos of Switzerland overlaid with maps. I was able to find my teenage home in Lausanne after one false start, which had me poking around the countryside to the north of the town.

We lived in a ville-radieuse of upper-middle-class apartment block towers, swaddled in Le Corbusier’s greensward and literally on the highest point in the city. The basement of the apartment complex, which included about fifteen twenty-story-or-so towers, linked all the buildings atop the shorn and flattened hill. The basement complex had at least five levels, each level equipped with hermetically-sealable blast doors and generous supplies of industrial-sized drums, marked with the Swiss symbol for civil defense. I never did actually find the bottom of the basement complex, as below minus five we never found a light switch. But it was very clear that the complex could house many more persons than the inhabitants of the apartment buildings surmounting it.

Asking my Swiss peers about this remarkable find – even more remarkable for the fact that it was not in any way locked or marked as off limits to the general public or nosy teenagers – yielded bored teen “pffoouh” sounds. Apparently the Swiss building code had required all buildings over a certain size to incorporate fallout shelters and provisions since sometime in the fifties.

The whole of the built-up countryside, then, in my imagination, grew enormous, unmapped complexes of cavernous underground spaces.

Many years later, in Brussels, my sister, her boyfriend, and I went to a secret party, a sort of proto-rave, held in an abandoned industrial building on the outskirts of town. The building, a decrepit mass of brick archwork looming unlit in the night, was host to a conventional nightclub on the main level.

But we squeezed into a sort of crevice in the women’s bathroom, which led to a long, narrow hallway. At the end of the hall, a shaven-headed fellow in a leather jacket was collecting vouchers and cash before admitting people to a square-plan spiral stair that went down, and down, and down.

As we descended, music began to be audible, and dust began to make people sneeze.

After a long descent, we emerged into a cavernous space, defined by what I now know are groin vaults and brick columns, towering fifty or sixty feet above our heads. A parachute draped low over a makeshift bar was illuminated by portable halogen lamps.

Flashing strobes from several directions illuminated three separate music stages on which performers strutted and yowled through the haze of gritty dust. The floor was the source of the dust. It was made of fine powdery dirt, possibly sedimental. It was not laid flat, but rose and fell across the vast interior space. The gentle hillocks and hollows combined in some places to entirely occlude lines of sight.

At no point while in that remarkable exile from Piraeus’s Piranesi’s prisons did I see an opposite wall.

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While there, I amused myself by imagining that it was possible – likely, even – that were I to set off into the darkness beyond the lights’ reach I would eventually emerge beneath my old apartment atop Lausanne.

Who can say that in another direction I would not have found myself emerging from a cavern in the vicinity of a small town called Lascaux?