The Avenue of the Seventy Teachers stretched three hundred paces through the heart of Entry hall 105, flanked on either side by huge statues carved from sea-lithic marble.
Unlike the peaceful judges of the outer rows of stone pillars, whose hands rested calmly upon their knees or cradled scrolls of forgotten law, these statues bore the violent marks of an ancient disaster. Their stone robes were carved with deep, wild folds, wind-whipped and ragged, as if frozen in the middle of a sky storm. Across their broad stone chests and folded arms ran irregular patches of glassy, dark-green turning to glass. Areas where the marble had been subjected to such huge heat that the white lime-chalk had melted into a smooth, fiery glaze.
Qiao Ming walked between the two rows of giants, his bare soles stepping across flat stone slabs of dark red stone. The water here had pulled back to knee-depth, clear and cold, revealing fine, detailed mosaic patterns laid into the stone floor. Sharp-angled diagrams of sky orbits whose stars were inlaid with circular disks of mother-of-pearl and pale river-jade. The water was remarkably pure, free from the thick, curdled scum of the hanging halite crypts. It held the clean, stone chill of deep snowfields melted underground.
