The second watch of the dredging operation began with the clockwork overhaul of the upper tackle.
Qiao Ming climbed the upright iron ladder to the overhead frame sixty feet above the sump, his bare soles cold against the round rungs. The high platform was a narrow high walkway of cast-iron grating, slick with water drops and oil mist from the overhead guide-blocks. From this vantage, the vast eight-sided chamber stretched out beneath him like an inverted dark rock pyramid, its shadows swallowing the yellow circle of his horn lantern.
He knelt beside the main mid-air pulley wheel—a huge bronze pulley sixteen inches in width, mounted on a forged iron pivot pin bolted into the ceiling arch. The hemp rope was fraying at the eye-splice where the steel hook met the thimble, its outer strands chafed to pale lint by the gritty magnetic iron dust suspended in the draft.
To drop a bucket of mud from forty arm-lengths was to risk fracturing the bedrock floor below or tearing the guide-cables from their anchor-plates. Upkeep was not a backup duty. It was the sole partition between survival and total load-bearing collapse.
He unslung his rigger’s kit: a hardwood fid of polished boxwood, a spool of greased sailmaker’s twine, a palm-iron, and a jar of warm sheep fat.
