The southern granite canyon had never heard a noise like the rotary table.
For three hundred years, the gorge known as the Devil’s Deep gap had known only the rush of spring meltwater and the periodic crack of frost-shattered boulders tumbling into the scree. Now, ninety feet of cross-braced spruce timber and hot-rolled iron tie-rods towered over the ravine. It shivered to the bone-shaking rhythm of twin one-hundred-and-twenty-horsepower steam donkey winches.
Giles stood on the raised narrow high walkway of the derrick, his gloved hands resting on the shaking-dampened timber rail.
Through the soles of his heavy work boots, the shaking came in sharp, relentless shocks.
Steel teeth were gnawing into river-bed gravels four hundred feet below the floorboards.
High above his head, the heavy four-pulley wheel crown block swayed gently against its braided steel guy-wires, groaning under seventy tons of hanging drill string.
Behind Giles’s eyes, the test model screen tracked the drill string’s downward progress foot by foot.
Down on the greasy deck, Corbin Cross leaned his full weight against the heavy wooden lever of the draw-works band brake.
