Forty cubic miles of seawater are removed from a basin forty miles wide. Then, the result is not an instant garden.
It’s a huge, stinking desert of grey marine silt drying under a blazing sun.
Giles Croft stood on the timber tailgate of an all-wheel-drive steam tanker truck, his rubber boots planted firmly in the newly steadied crust of District One.
The basin floor, three thousand five hundred feet below sea level, was warm, windless, and thick with the heavy scent of drying minerals and crystal-hardened salt water.
Around the truck, four heavy rotary sprinkler heads were spinning at two hundred turns a minute, throwing wide, overlapping arcs of amber liquid across fifty yards of drying mudflats.
Beside Giles, Toby Karr was testing the surface crust with a pocket penetrometer.
“Surface shear strength is two point four tons per square foot, Master Giles,” Toby called out, reading the tuned spring dial.
“The soil polymer has pierced four inches into the silt layer. The crust is holding.”
