In the lower water chute of Hal Rook’s cedar rig, the red dye was no longer a flowing ribbon. It was a swirling, boiling storm of scarlet foam that clawed at the wooden sidewalls like an animal trying to dig its way out of an iron cage.
Pella Rook pointed a long ash pointer directly into the center of the churning channel. ‘Watch the boundary layer, Councilor Vesk! Notice how the red silt dye is separating from the wooden bed! Instead of moving downstream toward the river mouth, the bottom current is reversing, surging backward against the incoming flow!’
Councilor Elna Vesk stepped to the very edge of the wooden frame stand, clueless to the fine mist of red-dyed water that speckled her velvet bonnet and beaver-fur collar. She had never seen water behave like this. Water was supposed to obey gravity. It was supposed to tumble downward from the hills to the sea. But here, trapped within Sorell’s unvented loop, the heavy bottom water was climbing uphill, fighting itself in a series of violent, stationary blast waves.
‘Why is it climbing?’ Elna shouted above the shrieking shaking of the copper bypass. ‘What is pushing it backward?’
‘Sound glow, Councilman!’ Korr Var explained, his voice booming across the transfixed crowd. ‘When the high-pressure pulse strikes the closed lead cap, the pressure wave rebounds off the solid metal. That rebound wave travels upstream at four thousand feet per second—the speed of sound in water. When it collides with the incoming mountain…
