The sixty-cycle ground wave traveled through the dark rock bedrock with the speed of sound in dense iron.
Qiao Ming knelt on the striker-flag, both palms pressed flat against the cold stone, feeling the shaking race outward from the impact point. The sixty-cycle tone did not bleed away into the vast foundations. It was captured and channeled by the twenty-four underground chimney pipes carved beneath the floor of the Grand Row of pillars. Chimney pipes engineered during the First Dynasty to act as sound wave-guides. He reflected the sound between polished granite inner walls until the wave doubled upon itself in positive interference.
In the shadows of the row of stone pillars, the first eighty-four statues caught the hum through their eight-sided stone bases.
These were the statues of the First Epoch astronomers and stone-masons. Figures carved from dense Carrara marble, hollowed along their upright axes with tube-shaped sound bores. As the ground wave entered their stone stands, the stone vocal folds within their throats began to hum. It shook at sixty cycles per second with a soft, ringing warmth that sounded like a huge bronze bell struck in an underground cave.
He raised his Folded brass star-compass from his breast pocket and checked the hum slope.
