The Iron Fissure Viaduct was the crowning jewel of the Northern Transcontinental Mainline.
Spanning an eighteen-hundred-foot deep gap of jagged black dark rock through which the roaring Celestine River plunged three hundred feet below, the bridge was a modern twin-tower mid-air structure.
Its two main cables were spun from seven thousand parallel zinc-coated steel wires, anchored into deep post-tensioned granite abutments on either cliff edge.
The bridge deck was composed of stiffened steel roof beams carrying a double standard-gauge railway line flanked by timber footpaths.
Before the Krell army had even reached the canyon rim, Giles and Master Borin had inspected the south cable anchorage tunnel deep within the dark rock cliff.
The massive seven-thousand-wire cable split into sixty-one separate strands, each strand wrapped around a cast-steel strand shoe bolted to heavy forged-iron eyebars embedded eighty feet into solid rock.
“Each eyebar was tensioned with high-pressure jacks to sixty percent of yield before grouting,” Giles had reminded Borin, shining his check torch along the dry stone gallery. “No slippage. No slow leak through the rock face. The entire mountain acts as our deadman anchor.”
Borin had tapped an eyebar with his pocket hammer. He listened to the high, clear ring of sound steel.
