Entry hall 430 was a massive, castle-like threshold that separated the non-Euclidean galleries from the underground Salt-Crusher Crypt.
The hall was sixty arm-lengths wide and thirty arm-lengths deep, flanked by massive rusticated piers of hard black rock that rose to support a huge transverse groin vault. In the center of the southern wall, framing the entrance to the salt-crushers, stood the Great Bronze Gate of the Fifth Century. A huge double portal ten arm-lengths high, its leaves cast from four-inch glowing-bronze plates carved with the likeness of twenty-four sea-sovereigns holding sounding plumbs.
The air here was freezing, scented with the sharp, stone bite of ancient halite and the faint, sweet smell of rendered sheep fat.
Qiao Ming stopped at the threshold of the great bronze gate. He knelt, pressing his bare palm flat against the cold hard speckled rock flags.
Beneath his skin, the stone was shuddering.
It wasn’t the light, rhythmic shaking of the last hounds, nor was it the deep, sixty-cycle breathing of the Ark’s stone lung.
It was a heavy, earth-shaking thrum—a slow, heavy, slow clockwork stride that made the dust dance in the floor joints and set the bronze leaves of the gate to humming in their stone sockets. Each footstep fell with the weight of five hundred pounds, with the deep, rhythmic chug of a twin-spreading spirit-fire running at forty sea-weights of internal pressure.
