From his position hanging suspended over the forty-foot drop, Len Vey watched the ceiling rafters forty feet above him explode into motion.
The canvas rescue cradle was not an elegant piece of passenger equipment. It had been designed by quarry riggers to snatch injured powder-men off collapsing benches before a backup dynamite blast could bury them in limestone rubble. It consisted of a three-sided yoke of four-inch white ash timber, four feet across on each side, from which hung a heavy sling basket of four-ply flax canvas heavy with double-stitched harness webbing.
The cradle was counterweighted by two thousand pounds of falling pig iron. It wasn’t dropping vertically. It was swinging on a sixty-foot swinging weight cable anchored to a heavy bronze pivot block set into the granite top door beam of the hoist arch.
Len knew the arithmetic of that swing because Urel had drawn the height sections on a pine board in the tram sheds thirty hours earlier.
Urel had sat by the coal fire bowl with a brass compass and a carpenter’s rule, sketching the upright flight path of the extraction rig in white chalk. The archway above Junction Four is seventeen feet wide, Urel had explained, his voice quiet and precise. The balance weight drops eighty feet on the quarry rim. The swing cable has a radius of sixty feet. When the cradle enters the chimney pipe, it will speed up to twenty-five miles an hour at the bottom of its sweep.
