Deep beneath the stone floor of Entry halls 070 through 090 lay the Well of Trim—a tube-shaped shaft three hundred paces wide that plummeted through the dark rock foundation frames to the innermost keel of the Ark.
At the center of this deep-sea well, suspended from an overhead frame of forged glowing-bronze chains, hung the great spirit vein plumb-bob. It was a ball-shaped mass of dark meteoritic iron twelve arm-lengths in width, weighing eighty-four tons. The iron sphere hung dipped in a bath of dense, supersaturated salt water, designed twenty hundred years ago to dampen the violent pitch and roll of the underground ark during oceanic cataclysms.
For three hundred years, however, the plumb-bob had hung four degrees out of true plumb, canted toward the starboard hull.
The cataclysmic flooding of the upper galleries had deposited millions of tons of heavy mud in the eastern entry halls. Meanwhile, the western drainage chimney pipes had drained dry. This asymmetric shifted weight had twisted the Ark’s lengthwise frames, subjecting the central keel beams to seventy thousand tons of permanent twisting torque. Every mortal who walked the Great Silt Plaza could feel the subtle, nauseating list. A faint tilt of the stone flags that caused loose ball-bearings to roll eastward and made the bilge water pool in stale drain pits along the eastern row of stone pillars.
