The outward transit water chute was a huge hall of riveted boiler plate, forty yards wide and fifty yards long, boring straight through the granite roots of the southern ridge. On either side, heavy steel support posts supported the arched ceiling, their iron plates secured with three-inch rivets that sweated with cold, bitter-salt water drops. High above, suspended from rusted iron chains, hung an array of unlit arc lamps. Relics of the heavy-duty era before the sky was shut, their glass bulbs long since cracked by frost and choked with spiderwebs.
The floor of the water chute was built of linked steel tread-plates, cross-hatched with heavy diamond ridges to give draught horses purchase when hauling heavy timber wagons up the five-degree incline. The metal was cold enough to bite through the soles of Len’s boots, streaming a deep, world-size chill that smelled of iron filings, wet melted rock waste. The sharp, ozone-tinged mountain wind whistling down from the pass. Every gust of wind brought a low, booming hum from the steel walls—the sound shaking of eighty thousand tons of mountain rock pressing down upon the canopy.
Between the boiler plates, heavy spreading joints of hardened rubber and lead caulking were tightly packed tight against the stone, weeping thin trickles of rust-colored slow leak into the grated side gutters. Every four yards, a brass cry-hole drained groundwater from the solid mountain stone into lead runnels, gurgling softly beneath the iron grating. everyone could feel the bitter-salt stench of wet high-pressure lime…
