The ascent to the High Cambium Chimney pipe was an ordeal of pure friction and balance.
Eighty arm-lengths above the domestic warmth of the Hollow Burl, the massive trunk of the fifth Dawn-Redwood tilted outward at an unforgiving angle of seventy-eight degrees. He rose like the stone-hard flank of a huge black giant beast into the swirling mists of the upright chimney.
Here, the sheltering galleries fell away. A howling heat updraft, heated by the earth-heat underground water beds far below, roared upward through the chimney pipe at forty knots. He carried clouds of fine stone spray that coated the upright bark in a slick, glassy sheen of water drops.
Qiao Ming climbed with his body pressed flat against the seventy-eight-degree dark wood face. He wore only his canvas trousers, rolled above the knees. His bare, calloused feet gripped the fluted bark ridges with relentless living memory, his broad toes sinking into the moist crevices to find purchase against the three-hundred-foot drop behind his heels.
The skin of his soles had been seasoned by decades of salt decks and granite scree, but here, against the wet lignite, he had to rely on the stretch of his foot arches. When he planted a foot, he didn’t merely rest upon the bone. He flared his metatarsals, pressing the calloused outer edge of his sole into the rough fissures to create an airtight seal against the bark.
