Beyond the western spillway of the inverted lake lay one of the most haunting and poignant landscapes in the entire underground cosmos: the Garden of Calcified Hands.
Entry hall 615 was a huge, stepped terrace of dark, stone-hard humus that sloped gently downward over three leagues. Emerging from this ancient soil were thousands of stone-hard branch-sculptures, each one hewn from the living limbs of underground boxwood trees, carved in the form of human arms and hands reaching upward toward the distant ceiling.
They didn’t look like the cut limbs of a battlefield. They looked like living flora that had chosen to grow in the shape of human devotion. From slender, child-sized wrists to massive forearms the thickness of royal pillars, three thousand four hundred hands rose from the earth in various postures of ancient prayer. Some held their palms open and cupped to receive falling dew. Others had their fingers woven together in the mudra of the Deep Root. Still others reached with splayed, desperate fingers toward the dark vault above, as though trying to catch the falling sky before it crushed their children.
Every finger was carved with tiny botanical fidelity. Fingernails rendered from semi-clear green chalcedony, skin-creases formed by the natural fissures of the wood grain, and veins traced in delicate relief by the stone-hard sap-channels.
