The descent from Tier Two to Tier Four was a sense assault of swinging copper shadows, bitter-salt limestone dust. The bone-jarring shaking of heavy boots pounding over wooden narrow high walkways suspended above the deep pit.
The Quarry Ward was not merely an open pit. It was an inverted mountain city, home to two thousand three hundred living souls who inhabited narrow shelves carved into the sheer outer edge cliffs like rows of ledger volumes stacked inside an archive vault. The terraces varied from eight to thirty feet in width, their outer edges protected only by rough-hewn pine poles lashed to iron eye-bolts with rusted wire. Below each tier, the cliff dropped fifty or sixty feet to the next shelf, an endless stairwell of white rock dropping into the black sump of the Great Sink.
Between the tiers ran a spiderweb of clockwork public works: thick hemp hoist cables stretching between timber headframes. Zinc-coated iron water pipes leaking cold, chalky spray over the pathways. And suspended iron narrow high walkways that groaned and swayed with a sickening, pendular rhythm whenever a laden ore wagon rolled past. The air was colder here than in the upper water chute. But it was thick with human habitation. He smelled of wet wool, boiled turnip mash, coal soot, and the bitter, raw mutton grease used in the miners’ lamps.
