The shaking came up through two miles of alloy steel casing not as a tremor, but as a musical tone.
It was a forty-hertz sound hum, deep and pervasive, that made the timber planking of the derrick floor buzz beneath the soles of Giles’s boots.
In the tool shed, iron files rattled against oak benches.
Down in the mud pits, ripples formed nested rings on the surface of the grey slurry like water inside a ringing glass bowl.
Giles stood beside the rotary table, his eyes fixed on the downhole tracking data gauges mounted on the timber console.
The morning air in the canyon was twenty degrees below freezing.
Frost rimed every timber truss and iron guy-wire of the ninety-foot derrick.
Yet down in the derrick cellar, the air felt like midsummer.
