Fiery heat was simply high-thickness heat energy waiting for a boiler tube.
Beneath the central command casemate of Underground Bastion Number Eight, the dark rock floor had turned the color of ripe cherries.
Giles Croft stood on a temporary timber narrow high walkway suspended four inches above the sizzling stone. He held a sight disappearing-filament fire gauge to his eye.
Through the smoked-glass filter, the glowing fracture looked like a river of liquid sunlight.
The dark rock bedrock had parted along a lateral fault. It exposed a rising tongue of tholeiitic magma at twelve hundred degrees.
The blasting heat was intense enough to scorch wool trousers at three paces, and everyone could feel the rotten-egg fumes of outgassing fiery silicates.
Giles lowered a quartz-weighted sounding wire into the crevice, measuring the liquid surface height.
“Magma head is rising at fourteen inches per hour,” Giles recorded in his math book. “Quartz dust content is about forty-eight percent, indicating high-iron tholeiitic dark rock.
