The heavy iron hoist cage rattled down the upright mining shaft of Sector Four. He dropped into the dark heat of the deep crust.
The hoist cage plummeted deeper into the eight-thousand-foot shaft. Then, the deep-rock strata flickered past the steel mesh like the pages of an ancient stone ledger.
First came the grey sedimentary shales of the surface basin, cool and damp. Then, past two thousand feet, the rock transitioned into dense, crystal-clear blue hard speckled rock. It was marked by the drill scars of Giles’s earlier foundation surveys.
By five thousand feet, the rock walls were streaming heat like the inside of a brick kiln, weeping trickles of scalding stone water that hissed into steam against the cage frame.
Corbin Cross gripped his heavy pipe wrench, his knuckles white.
“The air is getting thin, Giles,” Corbin gasped. He pulled his wire face shield down over his sweating face. “The air pressure down here is nearly thirty-six inches of liquid silver.
It feels like breathing warm soup.”
“Water-pressure air squeezing in a deep upright shaft,” Giles explained calmly, checking the cage descent speed on his pocket tachometer. “The weight of the eight-thousand-foot air column increases air pressure by twenty-five percent.
