Cryptonomicon

The tunnel has abruptly broadened into a flat-bottomed chamber with an arched ceiling, shaped like a Quonset hut, lined with concrete, the concrete massively ribbed every couple of meters. The floor of the vault is perhaps the size of a tennis court. The only opening is a small vertical shaft rising up from the middle of the ceiling, just barely big enough to contain a ladder and a human body.

The General folds his arms and waits while the aide goes around with a tape measure, verifying the dimensions.

"We go up," says Goto Dengo, and, without waiting for The General to bristle, mounts the ladder up into the shaft. It only goes up for a few meters, and then they are in another drift with another narrow-gauge railway on the floor. This one's shored up with timbers hewn from the surrounding jungle.

"The haulage level, where we move rock around," Goto Dengo explains, when they have all convened at the top of the ladder. "You asked about the waste in those cars. Let me show you how it got there." He leads the group down the tracks for twenty or thirty meters, past a train of battered cars. "We are headed northwest, towards Lake Yamamoto."

They reach the end of the drift, where another narrow shaft pierces the ceiling. A fat reinforced hose runs up into it, compressed air keening out through tiny leaks. The sound of drills can be heard, from very far away. "I would not recommend that you look up this shaft, because stray rocks occasionally come down from where we are working," he warns. "But if you looked straight up, you would see that, about ten meters above us, this shaft comes up into the floor of a narrow inclined shaft that goes uphill that way--" he motions northwest "--towards the lake, and downhill that way--" He turns a hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the vault.

"Toward the fool's chamber," The General says, with relish.

"Hai!"answers Goto Dengo. "As we extend the shaft up toward the lake, we rake the broken rock downhill with an iron hoe drawn by a winch, and when it reaches the top of this vertical shaft that you see here, it falls down into waiting cars. From here we can drop it down into the main vault and from there hand-tram it to the exit."

"What are you doing with all the waste?" asks The General.

"Spreading some of it down the riverbed, using it to make the roadway that we drove up on. Some of it is stored above to backfill various ventilation shafts. Some is being crushed into sand for a trap which I will explain later." Goto Dengo leads them back in the direction of the main vault, but they pass by the ladder and turn into another drift, then another. Then the drifts become narrow and cramped again, like the one at the entrance. "Please forgive me for leading you into what seems like a three-dimensional maze," Goto Dengo says. "This part of Golgotha is intentionally confusing. If a thief ever manages to break into the fool's chamber from above, he will expect to find a drift through which the material was loaded into it. We have left one there for him to find--a false drift that seems to lead away toward the Tojo River. Actually, a whole complex of false drifts and shafts that will all be demolished by dynamite when we are finished. It will be so difficult, not to mention dangerous, for the thief to work his way through so much rotten rock, that he will probably be satisfied with what he finds in the fool's chamber."

He keeps pausing and looking back at The General, expecting him to tire of this, but clearly The General is getting a second wind. Captain Noda, taking up the rear, gestures him onwards impatiently.

The maze takes some time to negotiate and Goto Dengo, like a prestidigitator, tries to fill up the time with some convincing patter. "As I'm sure you understand, shafts and drifts must be engineered to counteract lithostatic forces."

"What?"

"They must be strong enough to support the rock overhead. Just as a building must be strong enough to hold up its own roof."

"Of course," says The General.

"If you have two parallel drifts, one above the other like storeys in a building, then the rock in between them--the floor or the ceiling, depending on which way you look at it--must be thick enough to support itself. In the structure we are walking through, the rock is just barely thick enough. But when the demolition charges have been set off, the rock will be shattered so that reconstructing these drifts will be a physical impossibility."

"Excellent!" says The General, and again tells his aide to make a note of it--apparently so that the other Goto Dengos in the other Golgothas can do the same.

At one point a drift has been plugged by a wall made of rubble stuck together with mortar. Goto Dengo shines his lantern on it, lets the General see the iron rails disappearing beneath the masonry. "To a thief coming down from the fool's chamber, this will look like the main drift," he explains. "But if he demolishes that wall, he dies."

"Why?"