The digging of Chancellor Morn’s solitude wall was brutal, rhythmic, and choking.
Four drillers at a time swung heavy sixteen-pound sledges against the granite facing, their boots braced against the wet limestone slurry on the floor. Between each hammer blow, two men on their knees drove cold-steel chisels into the mortar seams with four-pound hand-hammers. The steel was ringing with high, sharp clinks that echoed down the drift like gunfire.
The miners worked in five-minute rotations. At that height and in that dead, stuffy air, no human musculature could sustain the violent percussion of an eight-pound sledge for longer without the heart threatening to burst through the ribs. When a driller’s breathing turned into a dry, whistling rattle, he stepped back without speaking, leaning his sweat-glistening shoulders against the cold oak uprights. Meanwhile, a fresh man caught the ash handle and took up the rhythm.
The southern drift was a dead end with no natural air-flow cross-cut. Because of that, the crushed rock flour couldn’t escape. It rose from the wall in thick, gray clouds that hung in the olive copper lantern light like dirty wool, coating the men’s bare shoulders, eyebrows, and lips in a bitter, bitter-salt frost. Every breath tasted of lime, chalk, and sulfur. Every spit produced gray, muddy paste on the stone floor.
