The stairs dropping from the Lexicon Vault ended on a broad, circular gallery carved from a single, unbroken stratum of dark olivine dark rock.
In the center of this circular room, surrounded by an eight-sided low roof wall of dressed red stone two arm-lengths high, lay the mouth of the Seventh Sounding Shaft. The opening was twelve feet in width, yawning like the mouth of a dormant volcano, dropping vertically into an ink-black deep pit that emitted no sound, no light, and no draft of returning air.
Qiao Ming stopped at the low roof wall. He unslung his split-reed basket and knelt upon the dark rock floor, his bare knees sinking into a fine dusting of crystal-clear salt that had dried upon the stone flags. The stone beneath his bare soles was intensely cold, its heat governed by the deep-sea currents that circulated eighty deep-water lengths below the keel.
The silence here was different from the muffled quiet of the upper halls. It was vast, oceanic, and pregnant with the crushing water-pressure presence of eighty million tons of ocean pressing against the underwater flanks of the vessel. The air was ice-cold, smelling intensely of clean, unbreathed sea-salt water, bitter stone iodine, and the faint, sweet metal scent of native copper.
