The arrival of the evening flood tide in the Sunken Rows of pillars was not a sudden disaster. It was a sound transformation of huge mass.
They were walking along the fourth terrace of Entry hall 380, returning northward toward the dry shelter of the sick room. Just then, the first tremors of the incoming water began to vibrate through the soles of their bare feet.
Beneath their heels, the ribbed banded limestone flags seemed to hum with a deep, underground energy. In the central navigation canal forty paces to their left, the dark, glassy surface of the low-slack water began to swirl in long, oily ripples as the massive water gate gates of the lower tiers opened three miles away.
Then, from the hundred and twenty Pentelic marble giant pillars marching into the dusk, the sound emerged.
It wasn’t a roar, nor was it the high, whistling wail of the air-flow angled slats they had heard in the small nook. It was a vast, choral drone—a massive ringing chord shaking at exactly one hundred and fourteen cycles, the deepest hum of the Drowned Ark itself.
Each fluted column acted as a sound resonator. As the rising seawater pressed against the underwater lower third of the pillars, the striking force of sixty million tons of flowing salt water was converted by the stone into pure sound. The sound traveled up the curved fluting, bounced between the coffered ceiling rosettes. Then it washed down upon the terraces in rolling, velvet waves…
