It took half an hour for the scalding steam to thin enough for anyone on the eastern ridge to see the bottom of the gorge, and when the vapor parted, the central basin was no longer there.
Where the stepped turquoise terraces and the forty-foot drilling tower had stood at daybreak, a raw funnel of black dolomite and shattered pine timbers sloped down into a dark, steaming mouth at the center of the bowl. Through that jagged throat, the diverted runoff of the thermal sluices poured with a hollow, echoing roar into the underground channel below.
Up on the solid limestone shelf above the cooling vents, the survivors of the camp and the rescue party sat or knelt across eighty yards of dry shale.
Twenty-two temple engineers, teamsters, scribes, and watchmen huddled near the upper mule line where Siv, Tern, and Moth had herded them out of the slide. None of them was reaching for a pike. At the edge of the group, the gray-stubbled night watchman who had shuttered his lantern on the lower catwalk was using his wool cloak to wrap the shivering shoulders of the young engineer Ashaun and Kiv had levered out from under the trench beam.
