The light did not behave like the heat wave of an oil lamp or the flare of a pyric match. It didn’t flicker, it didn’t smoke, and it cast no shadows through the dark salt water. It was a solid, clear beam of pure, crystal-clear soft glow that cut through two hundred and twenty deep-water lengths of light-absorbing black water like a chisel of frozen diamond, lighting up the suspended silt grains until they hung in the liquid void like floating stars.
Black glass Diving Bell Number Three drifted to a halt fifteen paces from the stone stand, held suspended on its star-fallen cable in the center of the vast, drowned tiered arena of Entry hall 935.
Through the forward quartz porthole, the Giant statue of Primordial Light towered eighty-four arm-lengths from its stepped stone base of black dark rock to the crown of its hairless head. The statue had been carved from a single, unbroken monolith of semi-clear white quartz-veined granite, its surface dressed with such exact perfection that the water sliding across its chest showed neither ripple nor eddy. Every plane of the stone was polished to a sight flatness, reflecting the surrounding darkness with an unearthly, silver sheen that seemed to repel the black salt water.
