The Grand Nave of Entry hall 930 was a stone-built deep pit of staggering, massive scale. An underwater pillared hall three hundred arm-lengths wide and two miles long. It was flanked by huge eight-sided columns of dark hard speckled rock seventy arm-lengths high, supporting a ceiling of vaulted giant cut stone that had stood without timber centring since the First Epoch.
When Qiao Ming activated the external chemical search-lanterns—igniting the high-pressure canisters of phosphorus and shark-liver oil mounted in the upper overhead frame of the bell—two twin lances of packed, emerald-white light cut through the black salt water outside the quartz discs. The light did not scatter as it would in shallow river water. It traveled in two sharp, solid cylinders of bright glare through the dense, high-pressure liquid, lighting up the suspended silt grains until they looked like drifting clouds of powdered silver.
The sight that opened before them was breathtaking in its solemn, drowned magnificence.
The water here was clear, free of the violent churn and rotten-egg foam of the upper drain pits, holding the calm, timeless clarity of an ancient mountain lake that had never seen a wind. The twin beams of light lit up the fluted sides of the hard speckled rock columns, where hundreds of years of full-body VR had coated the stone in a delicate, velvety forest of deep-sea crinoids, glass sponges, and sea-lilies. Their hardened, feather-like arms swayed all at once, pulsing with slow, hypnotic grace in the gentle 0.4-knot current that drifted…
