the tunnel crew: the hilltop shaved level for tennis

The court as terraforming. E.T.A.'s tunnels were carved "at more or less the same time the hilltop's bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level for tennis" — the whole geography of the place remade so that a flat surface could exist to hit balls on. The institution's first act was to plane down a hilltop; the athletic body's arena is literally engineered out of the land, the playing surface a thing the academy imposed on a hill. Even the ground the regimen runs on was manufactured.