In the western check drift, five hundred and twelve paces beneath the snow saddle of Windpit, the lantern light caught an abrupt, startling transformation in the stone.
Kezra Venn walked down the narrow gallery, her right hand bandaged tightly in Paxa’s clean linen. Her left hand carried her three-section brass-and-ash sounding rod. Beside her, Voss held his bullseye lantern high, sweeping the yellow beam across the rock face. Behind them, Paxa and Yseld brought up the rear. She carried the sixty-four-pace measuring cords, the graduated wooden rule, and the bronze inclinometer.
For thirty paces from the central circular chamber, the drift had been cut through uniform, medium-grained hard speckled rock. A salt-and-pepper plutonic stone flecked with hard black rock and white plagioclase pink rock. The tunnel walls showed the rhythmic, parallel flute-marks of hand-turned star drills, driven seventy years ago by the survey corps’ deep-trenching crews. Along the floor, paired iron tramway straps ran straight and true, their spiked mountings leaded into the bedrock to carry the wooden muck-skiffs that had hauled out broken hard speckled rock during the original digging. The air was dry, temperate, and smelled of crushed pink rock, old iron, and animal fat smoke.
Then, along a sharp, knife-edge plane dipping thirty-four degrees to the south-southwest, the hard speckled rock ended with total deep-rock finality.
