The final boundary of the Outer Octant was guarded by a wall of solid star-fallen iron sixty arm-lengths high.
Entry hall 348 was narrower than the great naves that preceded it, closing inward from three hundred paces to a tight, funnel-like gorge fifty arm-lengths across. Along this massive defile, the dark rock walls were dressed with massive, rust-resistant plates of nickel-iron, pinned to the bedrock by thousands of four-inch copper studs that formed long, streaming lines like the spokes of a star compass.
At the narrowest point of the gorge stood the Gateway of the Outer Mile.
Qiao Ming stopped ten paces before the threshold, the cold draft from the southern depths whipping his wet hemp trousers against his shins. His oil lamp flickered in the wind, casting jumping, knife-sharp shadows across the huge valves of the gate.
The gates were fifty arm-lengths tall and four spans thick, cast from a single, seamless pour of black star-fallen bronze that had resisted the scouring of the ocean for ten thousand years without developing a single fleck of green rust. Across the entire frontal plane of the two valves, carved in raised seal-characters four arm-lengths high and inlaid with pure, beaten white-gold, was the Great Prohibition of the First Epoch:
