The roar of the Eleanor Gorge grew from a distant, hollow murmur into an ear-splitting, gut-deep thunder as the mountain path reached the eastern bridge pillar of the Grand Aqueduct.
Tomas Reed paused on the edge of the limestone cliff edge. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his canvas sleeve. Before him, soaring across the two-mile deep gap like a bridge built by mythical giants, stretched the Grand Aqueduct of Saint Eleanor.
It was one of the supreme building achievements of the ancient empire. Three titanic tiers of rusticated stone arches marching across the gorge. He rose nearly two hundred feet above the churning, white-water torrent of the Eleanor River far below. Each massive pier was forty feet square at the waterline, tapering slightly as it climbed through the three successive arcade levels. It was built from thousands of dressed blocks of gray Sunder granite held together with ancient, lead-bound volcanic cement mortar.
Along the very top of the third tier ran the covered channel. A nonstop stone trough, six feet wide and eight feet deep, through which the entire snowmelt of the upper Sunder tarns was conveyed across the land-wide divide to the high plateaus and the lower valleys.
