The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,352

as it was tonight, and the doomed church surrounded by a rampart of half-buried corpses. Presently they came out of the churchyard onto Cheapside and trundled east to the threshold of the money-district where the way forked into several streets: Threadneedle, Cornhill, and Lombard. They chose Threadneedle, and went up but a short distance to the fabrique of the Bank of England.

After a brief conversation with William Ham, the night porter suffered them to enter, and even offered to relieve Saturn of the burden in his arms: a strangely heavy locked chest. Saturn politely declined. William Ham dismissed the porter and sent him back to his bed. Lanthorns were distributed. Monsieurs Kohan, Waterhouse, Hoxton, and Ham moved through the Bank in their own pool of light, quickly leaving behind the parts of the establishment that looked like a bank (finished rooms with windows and furniture) and descending into its cellar.

By no stretch of the imagination could this be understood as a proper and rational basement. The ground under the Bank was a foam of cavities, some recent, some ancient, but mostly ancient. Most were connected to at least one other. This made it possible to navigate through the foam without resorting to shovels and blasting-powder, provided only that one understood the graph of their connexions. This was a job for a banker if ever there was one. Mr. Ham changed direction incessantly, but gave them all some reassurance by only rarely stopping to think, and only once backtracking. Anyone who had even a layman’s knowledge of structures could see at a glance that, over the ages, more than one building had been erected on this site, and many a builder had stayed up late at night worrying about whether the foam could support it. The diverse vaults, arches, timbers, pilings, footings, and rubble-walls that threw back the light of their lanthorns, and forced William Ham into catastrophic reversals, were what those builders had effected when they had gotten worried enough. The timbered tunnels, linteled doorways, and arched passageways through which William conducted them were evidence that other builders had gambled that the inter-locking foundation-works were strong enough, and would not give way if judiciously undermined.

“It is just the sort of hidden mare’s nest about which one has bad dreams when putting one’s money in a Bank,” Saturn reflected, at a moment when he and Daniel were several convolutions behind Mr. Ham and Monsieur Kohan. But a moment later they caught up to find William Ham looking a bit huffy. He was directing their attention to a Gothik arch sealed off by a new portcullis of iron bars. Pyramidal beams of lanthorn-light, shining through the interstices, careered around the space on the other side. Slivers of gold and silver winked between the planks of crates. “The inherited complexities of the property,” said Mr. Ham, “are, as you can see, giving way to a steady programme of rationalization. Where weaknesses are found, they are made strong. Several entire chambers have been infilled. Where sound vaults are discovered, they are fortified, as here.” Mr. Ham then took them on a lengthy detour intended to bolster these and other assertions with evidence visual and anecdotal. By this point Daniel could no more have made his way out to the street than he could have balanced the Bank’s accounts on his fingers. But he did feel that they were on average descending, for the air got damper and colder as they went, and the architecture changed. There was less wood, and what there was of it was rotten, and being replaced by masonry. They passed through a Gothik stratum into a Romanesque, or perhaps Roman—boundaries were ambiguous, as the site might have gone unchanged for half a millennium after the Romans had pulled out. Evidence of dampness was all round, though actual standing water was rare. It looked, in other words, as though they had found a way to channel groundwater and drain it out of the place—probably to Walbrook, a local creek that was famous because, at some point after the Fall of Rome, it had gone missing.

They came at some length to a chamber, sealed by a massive ironbound door, which William unlocked with a key big enough to double as a bludgeon should the Bank come under attack. It was large for a subterranean vault, small for a parish church. Like a church, it had an aisle up the center, which had been made useful as a gutter. A trickle of groundwater