The silt in the Basin of Drowned Stars did not settle like common river mud.
In Entry hall 122, the floor was covered by a three-tiered settled mud layer that had piled up during the violent discharge of the preceding watches. Qiao Ming knelt in the shallow backwash, his calloused bare feet sunk in cold, bitter-salt water that felt dense as thinned oil. The water had pulled back to less than two arm-lengths, leaving the broad stepped stone bases exposed to the draft of the eastern air-flow chimney pipes. His toes, accustomed to the smooth banded limestone of the outer basins, gripped the rough phonolite stone floor with quiet certainty, finding the tiny chisel-marks carved by the ancient stonecutters.
Around him rose thirty-six massive stone pilasters of dark phonolite, their fluted surfaces crusted with rings of dried salt that marked the peak flood levels of the past thousand years. High above, the ceiling arches curved together in a vast cloister vault of dressed hard speckled rock, fully undisturbed by the tremors that had brought down the halite crystals in the western cross-hall. The air was cool and solemn, smelling of crushed lime, cold pond-silt, and the bitter trace of ancient copper scale washed down from the ceiling vents.
