At fifty feet of depth, pumping an ocean was a question of volume.
At five hundred feet, it was an unforgiving battle against the weight of the sky.
Giles Croft stood on the newly built intermediate pumping terrace, five hundred and twenty feet below the crest of the Great Cofferdam.
The terrace was a massive shelf of heavy concrete, anchored into the exposed granite cliff face of the southern headland by two-inch alloy rock bolts.
Around him, the air was warm, dense, and smelled of drying salt, ancient kelp, and ozone.
The air pressure had risen from one air at sea level to one point one two sea-weights down in the basin. It pressed against his ears with a steady, perceptible weight.
Beside him, Master Borin Bronze-Lung was adjusting the needle valve on a six-foot cast-iron empty pocket dome.
“Air pressure at this depth is sixteen point five pounds of pressure, Borin,” Giles said, reading the liquid silver column of the empty pocket gauge.
