The avenue of columns unfolded in the twilight with the measured grandeur of a stone-hard forest.
Qiao Ming paced the distance between the piers, his bare feet making a wet, rhythmic suction against the granite flags. Every eight paces, he set the brass tip of his boxwood measuring rule against the stone, noting the depth of the water. The sheet of salt water was thinning. Where it had reached the midpoint of his shins at the threshold arch, it now barely lapped against the calloused skin of his instep. The water was so see-through that every chisel mark on the floor was visible beneath the lantern light, sharp and clean as though the masons had laid down their mallets only yesterday morning.
To their left and right rose the huge cylinders of the pillared hall. Each column was twelve paces in outer rim, carved not from segmented drums of dressed cut stone, but hewn from solid giant pillars of dense, pitch-black ancient dark rock. The surfaces were not fluted in the classical manner of the middle entry halls. Instead, they were cut cleanly with shallow, spiraling relief bands that climbed into the dark vaults above.
Yan Zhiqiu held her lantern high, angling the beam against the face of the seventh column. Her fingers traced the cold dark rock, brushing over the stone-hard relief. “These are not decorative arabesques, Caspian. Look closely at the tooling. These are load-bearing blueprints.”
