In Entry hall 112, the stonework revealed its internal organs.
Here, in the Crypt of the Mason’s Siphon, an ancient ground-shaking fracture had sliced through the northern wall, cleaving a huge seated statue of a First Dynasty master builder cleanly in two from crown to stone stand. The two halves of the statue had separated by three feet, exposing the internal cross-section of the granite figure to the damp air of the vault.
Qiao Ming stood between the cut halves of the statue, his horn lantern held high to light up the exposed stone. His bare feet gripped the cold dark rock floor, which was coated with a thin layer of fine granite grit that had crumbled from the fracture line during the last tidal shift.
What he saw was not solid, inert rock.
The inside of the statue was honeycombed with a fine, detailed, blood-vessel network of tiny channels. Thousands of hairline tubes carved directly through the dense grey granite, branching and re-branching like the lung pathways of a human lung. Each tube was lined with a paper-thin sheath of black slate-lacquer, polished to a mirror-like smoothness to allow fluids to pass without stone pushback.
“They didn’t carve a shell,” Qiao Ming whispered, his rough fingertips tracing the tiny channels in the cross-section. “They built an organism.”
