The North Gallery of the Ferry Museum, which on Day Eight had been an unvented steam chamber filled with the smell of scorched heat padding and bursting pipes, was now fully transformed. The party wall shared with the old academy intake had been underpinned with eighteen inches of dressed blue granite cut stone, its mortar joints pointed with high-pressure lime that gave the room a clean, crisp, underground coolness.
The tall high window row windows, cleaned of fifty years of river grime and coal soot, flooded the gallery with clear, pale autumn sunlight. Along the whitewashed walls, instead of the gold-trimmed portraits of former High Summoners that had earlier lined the halls, hung large, hand-drawn linen technical sheets. Original construction diagrams of the lower canal locks, water-system speed maps of the Gray Rush, and the hand-written check journals of eight ages of town water-court guards.
In the center of the gallery stood the restored working scale model of the Great Sluice. The 1:50 timber and brass model Hal Rook had built with his own hands thirty years prior.
Kel Dorr, the former academy apprentice, stood beside the model with a small watering can made of hammered copper. With him were thirty schoolboys and girls from the Lowbank Common School. Their eyes were wide as Kel pointed his brass pointer toward the model’s tiny river channel.
