Len Vey stood ankle-deep on the drainage wooden walkway planks at the southern entrance of Level Five. His right hand gripped his ash sounding pole like an iron mooring stake.
His braced left arm was bound tight against his torso with strips of oiled canvas, throbbing with a steady, sickening ache that intensified with every shaking of the rock floor. He didn’t look at the water rising around his boots. His eyes were fixed on the far wall of the chamber. There, three massive Cornish walking-beam pumps were mounted inside arched limestone recesses.
The pumps were the clockwork heart of the Quarry’s drainage system. Built forty years ago by the Old Provincial Council to drain the deepest limestone drifts, each engine consisted of a twenty-foot cast-iron walking beam driven by steam cylinders on Level Three, connected to thirty-inch suction cylinders underwater beneath the floor of Level Five.
Under normal mining conditions, the three engines could pump six thousand gallons of slow leak an hour without straining a valve. They were solid, dependable machines, their massive iron beams moving with the slow, hypnotic rhythm of a cathedral clock. The heavy balance weights on the gallows frames rose. Then he fell with heavy, slow dignity, sucking the underground drainage from the rock fissures and hurling it through upright discharge water chutes to the high marsh above.
