The Cloister of Seven Thousand Murmurs was the sound heart of the Upper Entry halls.
It was an elliptical tiered arena two hundred paces across, roofed by a soaring barrel vault eighty arm-lengths above the floor. Around the outer edge of the hall, carved into the solid living limestone in twenty-four nested climbing terraces, stood seven thousand statues of ancient cantors, poets, sages, and scholars of the Second Epoch.
Every statue was carved from semi-clear Carrara marble, life-sized, depicting a master in the act of chanting, praying, or reading from an open scroll.
Inside the chest of each marble figure, the ancient sculptors had hollowed out a complex maze of sound deep ring chambers connected to the statue’s nostrils and mouth by narrow stone air-pipes. The thirty-six-hour tide shifted and the air pressure within the Ark fluctuated by a fraction of an air. Then, the air moving through these chambers produced a soft, nonstop murmur. Seven thousand linked voices whispering ancient sutras of the Drowned Dao.
Under normal conditions, the sound was majestic, calm, and infinitely comforting. A low, musical drone that sounded like distant summer bees humming across a field of clover.
Qiao Ming stood on the high upkeep narrow high walkway seventy arm-lengths above the lowest terrace. He looked down into the vast, shadowy bowl of the tiered arena.
