The underground canal tunnel emerged from the western flank of the Sunder Ridge through a massive archway of dressed limestone, fifty feet wide, carved into the sheer mountain cliff.
Tomas Reed stepped out of the dark stone channel onto a broad, gravel-paved carriage terrace, his boots crunching softly in the alpine stillness. After the choking, ear-splitting roar of the enclosed vault, the night air was calm, cold, and intensely fragrant, filled with the scent of flowering mountain heather, clipped boxwood hedges, and damp crushed stone.
Above them, a brilliant full moon hung in a cloudless cobalt sky. They cast a cold, silver radiance over a landscape that looked like an illustration from a royal romance.
Before them stretched the High Valley of the Silver Tarns.
It was an artificial paradise of obscene, unbelievable luxury, created in the middle of a sovereign drought.
In the center of the high mountain basin, where nature had provided only a dry, rocky depression of alpine scree, three titanic artificial holding lakes stepped down the valley in broad, terraced basins. The lakes covered over four hundred acres of the high plateau, held back by massive retaining dikes of dressed white limestone with polished marble copings.
