The marble of Entry halls 101 through 250 was not the dense, glassy pale limestone of the outer sea-gates.
It was a porous, oolitic limestone quarried from the dry riverbeds of the pre-flood continent of Tianzhu, formed by the squeezing of billions of tiny calcium shells over three deep-rock epochs. In the stonework of the Ark Nadir, this stone had been selected with deliberate functional intent. Its open pore network allowed it to absorb high-pressure salt water like a hardened sponge, damping high-hum shocks while permitting sound shakes to propagate through its internal chambers with minimal glow. A solid granite pillar would have fractured under the violent water-hammer shocks of the outer tides. The oolitic stone simply breathed, yielding tiny fractions of an inch to the load before returning to true. The ancient master builders had understood that stiffness was the mother of ruin in a dynamic ocean basin.
For ten thousand seasons, however, that very air holes had been a slow death. The black tide had driven bitter-salt salts deep into the stone matrix. As the water evaporated in the dry cycles, the salts had crystal-hardened inside the pores. It stretched with huge high-pressure force, threatening to craze the statues from within. Each pore had become a tiny, high-pressure chamber where sharp halite crystals pried at the hardened shells, turning the polished surfaces into chalky, crumbly crusts that dissolved into the bilge. Without nonstop upkeep, the giant statues would have eventually turned to shapeless heaps of gravel resting upon…
