The air in the high overhead frame above Sluice-Gate Nine smelled of scorched pine-tar and hot animal fat.
Qiao Ming stood beside the huge oak rope winch ninety arm-lengths above the flooded basin. His bare feet were planted firmly in the traction grooves of the circular stone dais, his calloused palms resting flat against the main ash rope winch bar. The four-strand Manila rope—two inches thick, soaked with Stockholm tar and rendered mutton fat—stretched from the rope winch drum across the lignum vitae pulley wheels to the traveling block, humming with a low, bronze shaking that rang in his ribs.
Below him, through the square opening of the floor hatch, the deep gap was lit up by four brass lanterns hung from the overhead frame stone wall-brackets.
The time had come to lower Sluice-Gate Nine.
The void-cutter’s crushed boiler had been cut and tumbled into the overflow pit. The four-hundred-ton lead balance weight in the eastern pylon had been re-lined up to its upright axis. And the bedrock doorstep had been shoveled clean of three thousand tons of black magnetic iron mud. Now, the nine-hundred-ton dark rock drop-gate hung suspended by the compound block-and-tackle and the balance chains, waiting for its keeper to release the strain.
