As the ten-part polyphony of the ten thousand statues sustained its huge, rolling deep ring, a backup sound phenomenon began to manifest deep within the crystal-clear structure of the Ark’s stonework.
The deepest frequencies—the thirty-two hertz drone of the melted silt, the sixty-four hertz pulse of the foundation warriors. The five-hundred-and-twenty-eight hertz soprano of the Broken Slate—did not merely travel through the air. They pierced the three-mile expanse of porous marble. Then, hard speckled rock ribs, and gabbro foundation blocks, their waveforms intersected within the stone matrix, generating high-hum high-pitched micro-ringing tones at twenty-eight point four kilohertz.
To the human ear, this high-pitched hum was entirely inaudible.
Yet to the physical fabric of the ancient vessel, it was a purge of deep, tiny care.
For eighteen hundred years of flooding in the deep-sea ocean, bitter salt crystals—halite, white chalk-stone, and magnesium chloride—had precipitated deep within the tiny blood vessels of the stone. These stone-hard salt wedges had slowly pried the white spar-stone crystals apart, creating millions of micro-fissures along the mortar seams and choking the internal cry-holes that relieved crushing pressure from behind the walls.
Now, under the relentless, rhythmic scouring of the twenty-eight-kilohertz sound wave, those salt crystals shattered.
