Have you ever felt shiever in your spine while been too deep in basement of a mall or in a tunnel or in metro underground track. I am sure that we must have experienced fear atleast once when have been underground. But there is a town in this world which is entirely underground. This article is about Coober Pedy in Australlia. On the long road towards central Australia, as you travel 848km (527 miles) north from Adelaide's coastal plains, is a scattering of enigmatic sand-pyramids. Around them, the landscape is utterly desolate – an endless expanse of salmon-pink dust, with the occasional determined shrub. But as you venture further along the highway, more of these mystery constructions emerge – piles of pale earth, haphazardly scattered like long-forgotten monuments. Every now and then, there is a white pipe sticking up from the ground next to one. These are the first signs of Coober Pedy, an opal mining town with a population of around 2,500 people. Many of its little peaks are the waste soil from decades of mining, but they are also evidence of another local specialty – underground living. In this corner of the world, 60% of the population inhabits homes built into the iron-rich sandstone and siltstone rock. In some neighbourhoods, the only signs of habitation are ventilation shafts sticking up, and the excess soil that has been dumped near entrances. In the winter, this troglodyte lifestyle may seem merely eccentric. But on a summer's day, Coober Pedy – loosely translated from an indigenous Australian term that means "white man in a hole" – needs no explanation: it regularly hits 52C (126F), so hot that birds have been known to fall from the sky and electronics must be stored in fridges. At Coober Pedy, subterranean living helped the region's inhabitants to cope with the continental climate, which swings between hot, dry summers and frigid, snowy winters – while outside, it varies from well below zero to above 30C (86F), underground it is always 13C (55F).
