They carried Len Vey’s litter through the high freight doors into the central tram repair shed and set the ash-wood poles across two sturdy oak frame stands beside the master check pit.
For five days, this cavernous expanse of riveted iron roof beams and corrugated sheet-metal had been an underground nightmare of crowded canvas dormitories, damp straw pallets. The choking reek of unwashed bodies, gangrenous wounds, and sour cabbage soup. In the green, flickering gloom of the curfew lanterns, a man couldn’t see six feet past his own boots without bumping into a frightened refugee family or tripping over a row of iron railway sleepers.
Now, with the vast glass skylights overhead scraped clean of twelve years of greasy soot by young volunteers with scrapers and wet rags, the shed had been transformed into an unsparing, sun-drenched cathedral of iron and stone.
The morning light poured straight down from thirty feet above, cutting through the high rafters in clean, slanted shafts of gold that lit up the dust motes dancing in the cold mountain air. But the brightness brought no luxury. It simply revealed the terrifying scope of human damage that twelve years of country darkness and eight hours of desperate release building had inflicted upon the workforce.
