On the morning of Day 109, the entire survey operation shifted across the valley floor to the southern margin of the basin. The Southern Quarry Cut Quarter Bench.
While Voss’s miners moved the heavy timber derrick, canvas wind-sails, and hand-bellows to the southern shaft collar, Kezra and Fellis spent the morning walking the broad, level rock cut that sliced cleanly through the low pale limestone ridge beside the disused quarry.
It was an extraordinary piece of ancient road building. Two hundred and fifty-six paces long and forty paces wide, the cut provided a gentle, six-degree slope connecting the valley floor to the outer quarry margin. Right now, because of the historical parcel placement, this traversable rock cut sat off to the side, ending in a blind limestone quarry pit where nobody lived. Meanwhile, the pack-carriers entering from the southern Coldwork gallery had to scramble over a steep, forty-degree scree bench to reach the storehouses.
“Look at the symmetry, Fellis,” Kezra said, laying her brass dividers across the master Needlehouse plates on a flat quarry block. “When we exchange these two benches, the thirty-foot stone berm from the north moves directly across the turnpike, sealing the defile from cliff to cliff against Hest Vale’s pikes. But look what happens here in the south.”
