When the third verse of the Harvest Song reached its final rhythm on the black dark rock dais, the sound did not fade into the upper vaults.
Instead, the four-hundred-and-forty hertz standing wave was captured by the five bronze-lined chimney pipes beneath Yan Zhiqiu’s knees and driven downward into the lower foundation drainage drain pits of Entry halls 020 through 060. Thirty deep-water lengths beneath the Great Silt Plaza, in the pitch-black water tanks where sixty million tons of deep-sea mud had piled up over three hundred years of flooding, the deep earth answered.
The lower drain pits were cavernous chambers twenty arm-lengths high, roofed with inverted catenary arches of dark hard speckled rock that supported the entire dead-weight of the residential terraces above.
For three hundred years, these chambers had been clogged with dense, compacted river silt. A choking blanket of quartz dust, decomposed river vegetation, and hardened marine shells that had settled into a stone-hard mass as hard as sun-dried brick. This dead weight had pinned the Ark’s lower frames to the land-wide shelf, transmitting every ground-shaking tremor from the deep-sea fault lines directly into the living halls above.
It began not as a heard sound, but as a deep-rumbling ground-shaking pulse at thirty-two hertz.
