From the high balcony of Entry hall 129, the inside of the Ark unfolded like a drowned empire of stone.
Qiao Ming stood at the stone railing, eighty arm-lengths above the floor of the Grand Nave. The stone railing was carved from dark green jade, its rail polished by hundreds of years of wind until it felt like cold jade beneath his calloused palms. Below him, stretching two miles toward the western gloom, lay the great central avenue: a hundred huge rows of stone pillars standing knee-deep in dark, mirror-smooth water that reflected the pale emerald soft glow of the ceiling vaults.
The silence here was vast, solemn, and complete.
He set his three horn lanterns upon the stone railing coping, spacing them six feet apart to cast an even light across the broad stone desk built into the balcony’s low roof wall. The desk was four arm-lengths long, carved from dense black slate, its surface cut cleanly with a permanent map point grid of fifty-four degrees.
The view from the eighty-arm-length height was a stone-built discovery. From this height, the true sharp-angled logic of the Grand Nave became visible. The rows of stone pillars were not laid in simple parallel lines, but in a series of gently converging curves that formed a massive hyperbolic funnel, designed to channel sound waves from the outer entry halls toward the central sound spire. Every pillar acted as a resonator. Every arch was a sound baffle. Every transverse beam was an equalizer that…
