The archway of the Central Anchor opened into an underground space that defied the terrestrial imagination. Entry hall 650 was not merely an underground chamber. It was a vaulted stone sky, a titanic round hall three leagues in width carved from the solid black dark rock of the land-wide baseplate.
Above them arched a huge dome of stone-hard stone branches. Tens of thousands of stone-hardened limbs, thick as warships and dense as star-fallen iron, interlaced across the ceiling vault in a maze-like ribbed canopy. The stone-hard boughs did not simply hang. They formed a self-supporting dome of living stonework that braced the weight of ninety miles of overlying mountain strata.
Around the outer edge of the huge dome ran a fine, detailed network of ancient high-pressure aqueducts, carved by the First Dynasty to capture the dropping water drops of the entire upright deep gap. These fluted dark rock troughs channeled thousands of gallons of pure stone water every minute into underground water tanks, preventing the huge weight of the upper underground water beds from fracturing the vault.
Suspended from the intersections of these huge boughs hung thousands of weeping stalactites of fossil amber. Soaked with radioactive stone salts, the amber glowed with a deep, pulsating chartreuse light, casting long, emerald shadows across the vast floor of the round hall. Each stalactite was the product of uncounted eons, slowly distilling the vegetative essence of the canopy into crystal-clear pendants forty arm-lengths in length.
