Entry hall 408 was a long, narrow gallery whose stonework seemed designed to compress and focus the green light spilling from the Sundial Chamber behind them.
The walls here were not upright, but leaned inward at an angle of seven degrees, forming a tall curved vault whose keystone was thirty-five arm-lengths above the floor. Every four paces, an arch of hard black rock spanned the nave, its soffit polished until it reflected the green glow of the floor basins like an array of dark mirrors. The air in this hall was thin, dry, and carried the faint, sweet scent of heated cedar oil circulating through the wall channels.
In the center of this gallery ran the Counter-Tide Spirit vein.
It was a nonstop band of cast bell-bronze, nine inches wide and three inches thick, inlaid flush into the snake-like floor flags. The bronze was engraved with seventy-two thousand tiny degree markings, each representing a single pulse of the Ark’s stone lung. At intervals of twelve arm-lengths, a circular silver plug was set into the bronze, bearing the name of a drowned star-pattern that had once wheeled across the sky before the Great Flooding.
Qiao Ming walked along the bronze line, his bare feet feeling the smooth, metal surface. The bronze was slightly warmer than the surrounding stone, kept at body heat by an ancient heat drain tube that circulated heated stone oil through a narrow copper channel embedded beneath the floor.
