Folio one hundred and fifty was written with a brush that had begun to run dry of ink.
The characters on the final page of the future ledger were sparse, stark. Then he spaced across the ivory cotton leaf like solitary channel markers set across an unmeasured bay. The black silt-ink had soaked deep into the sizing, its edges drying with a faint bronze sheen where the crushed magnetic iron had crystal-hardened under the dry air of the writing hall.
Qiao Ming stood above the desk, his hands resting flat upon the pear-wood bench, his shadow cast long and steady across the north wall by the three oil lamps. The quiet of the Ark was complete—a huge, listening stillness that stretched from the granite foundations ninety deep-water lengths below to the giant stone ceiling arches eighty deep-water lengths above.
He read the final words of the Twelfth Book:
The ink is drying. The water in the channel outside is rising toward the sixty-fathom mark. In three watches, the moon-tide line-up tide will reach its peak, and the current will sweep through the trash-racks of Conduit Gate 03.
I must take this metal tube down to Sluice-Gate Nine now, before the mud settles over the dark rock shelf. I must place it beneath the stone-hard cedar beam, seal the joinery with mountain beeswax, and re-arm the high-pressure drain tubes so that when the next version of myself digs through the settled mud, he will find the compass I have left him.
