The water did not drain peacefully from Entry hall 272.
It rushed across the stone floor in a broad, churning sheet three spans deep, hissing against the fluted stone stands and tearing at the hems of Qiao Ming’s hemp trousers with the wild strength of a trapped river. This was the Blind Gullet. A transverse sound trench thirty deep-water lengths wide that cut directly across the floor of the nave, swallowing the drainage of forty halls and carrying it down into the dark deep pit shafts that cooled the Ark’s thermobaric engines.
Qiao Ming stood on the northern lip of the trench, his bare toes gripping the wet dark rock curb.
The drop before him was sheer. He looked down past the edge of his lamp’s yellow beam. He could see only the churning, white-flecked foam of the clouded eye where the black salt water plunged into the lightless throat of the shaft. The sound was not a roar. The volume of the cave swallowed high frequencies, turning the violent cascade into a heavy, rhythmic thud that shook through the bones of his chest like a muffled war drum.
He leaned back, checking the brass anchor-ring set into the floor behind him.
