The upper terrace of the Diverter was a broad granite apron fifty paces wide, paved with dressed four-ton blocks of gray dark rock that had been keyed together without mortar eighty years before. But right at the rim where the haul-road crested the stonework, the shift from roadbed to tramway had created a lethal clockwork hazard.
The fifty-ton hard dark metal gate, still lashed to its heavy timber carriage, had to be winched laterally eighty yards to align with the permanent cast-iron tramway tracks that ran across the crest to the bypass overhead frame.
To execute this lateral transfer, Master Hal’s stonecutters had driven the master snatch-block anchor directly into the bedrock coping at the western corner of the dam. The anchor was a four-inch forged iron eye-bolt, three feet long, set into a hole drilled deep into the solid dark rock and poured around with forty pounds of molten lead.
Tomas stood by the leaded anchor, his hand resting on the shivering four-inch wire thick ship rope. His wool coat was soaked through to his shirt, his scarred left wrist wrapped in stiff calfskin that throbbed with a cold, unrelenting fire.
Through the thick ship rope, he felt the huge lateral strain. The carriage was resting on wet granite flags. But the static pushback of fifty tons was fighting the sideways pull. Sixty men from squads eleven and twelve were hauling on the backup messenger line, their boots slipping on the frozen stone.
