The floor of Entry hall 156 was invisible beneath twenty inches of black slurry.
Qiao Ming waded through the center of the hall, his bare feet moving with a slow, sweeping glide to avoid catching his toes on the raised stone margins of the drainage flat stone slabs. The slurry was dense, thick as cold buckwheat porridge, resisting each stride with a heavy, sucking drag that burned the muscles of his calves and hips.
At every step, small bubbles of marsh gas and trapped void-air broke through the black surface, popping with faint, sulfuric puffs that smelled of rotten eggs and charred copper melted rock waste. The sound of his passage was a nonstop, wet squelch that echoed off the high banded limestone walls, returning to his ears as a hollow whisper.
Across the ceiling, thirty arm-lengths overhead, the ribbed vaulting of the hall was weeping. Moisture, condensed from the warm, foul vapors rising from the silt, gathered along the transverse stone arches and dripped steadily onto his shoulders. The drops hit his boiled oilskin coat with dull, rhythmic taps: plip, plop, plip.
He carried his sounding gear upon his back, secured with the broad leather chest-strap: his twelve-pound six-sided lead sinker-bob, his horn box of rendered sheep fat, his slate tally tablet, and two bone measuring rods.
