Entry hall 912 was a huge tiered arena of tiered galleries. He rose two hundred arm-lengths from its circular banded limestone floor to the vast coffered dome that spanned the ceiling like the vault of an unstarred night. Built during the height of the Second Dynasty as a grand convocation hall for the guilds of stone-dressers and water-navigators, its curving walls were lined with sixteen tiers of broad stone roof ledges, each top stone ledge thirty paces wide, originally designed to display the ritual banners of thirty-six extinct kingdoms. Every top stone ledge was edged with a low roof wall of carved white limestone, ornamented with deep friezes depicting the construction of the Great Sluices.
Now, those high roof ledges were home to two million souls.
As Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stepped onto the walkway of the eighth top stone ledge, the scene that opened before them was one of staggering, somber order. Thousands of small tents, improvised from coarse grey hemp sacking, oiled sail-canvas, and dried reed mats, stood in neat, sharp-angled rows along the curving stone shelf. Between the rows ran clean pedestrian alleys four paces wide, marked out with lines of powdered white chalk-stone to prevent congestion. Small clay stoves, fueled by briquettes of dried peat and hardened sheep-dung, burned with low, smokeless blue flames, heating iron kettles of boiling water and pots of thin barley gruel.
