The chamber housing the Grand Expansion Joint in Entry hall 911 smelled of smoldering bone-charcoal, rotten-egg melted rock waste. The heavy, sweetish vapor of melted lead that coated the back of the mouth with a thin film of metal bitterness. Here. There, the dressed coarse grey rock foundations of the gatehouse met the living bedrock of the upper pylon, ran a nonstop spreading fissure two inches wide and one hundred and twenty arm-lengths around the entire outer rim of the lower gallery. The bedrock was dark green hard black rock banded rock, cold and unbending. Meanwhile, the coarse grey rock had been quarried from the deep-sea reefs of the First Dynasty, possessing a dense, crystal-clear structure that rang like fine china when tapped with a brass rod.
If that seam were left open, the crushing water-pressure head behind the sealed granite drop-gate—now climbing past ninety deep-water lengths of black tide—would force water through the rock layer seam like needles through cloth, scouring the mortar and eroding the bedrock until the entire gatehouse snapped away from the mountain. Under ninety deep-water lengths of head, water became a gritty saw. A leak no wider than a straw could widen into a clouded eye within four hours, dissolving hundreds of years of stone stonework in a foaming roar.
