The drafting table in Giles Croft’s survey pavilion was eighteen feet long. It was built from edge-glued pine planks supported by heavy sawhorses.
Across its surface lay unrolled the master water-system survey of the continent.
The parchment was so vast that Toby Karr and three apprentice land-mappers had to walk along its borders in stockinged feet to place brass paperweights along the margins.
Giles stood at the northern head of the table. He held an ivory drafting triangle and a six-foot boxwood scale.
Beside him, Captain Kenneth Drake and Aldous Swift-Current leaned over the blueprint, their faces lit up by the bright white glow of overhead carbon-arc lamps.
“Look at this land-wide drainage basin,” Giles said, tracing a sweeping blue line with his pencil.
“Every river on this landmass flows south and east, dumping seventy billion cubic meters of clean ice-slow meltwater into the salt ocean every spring.
Meanwhile, the central grain valleys suffer periodic drought because there is zero lateral conveyance.”
