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By Root 211 0

the previous days, the lamp wick raised to burn out odour. They can hear the mules and pit-horses who live down here, transporting the dug earth and mud barrels to the ladder. When these creatures were lowered down the shaft by rope they had brayed madly, thinking they were being buried alive. Patrick and the others walk silently, remembering the teeth of the animals distinct, that screaming, the feet bound so they wouldn’t slash out and break themselves, lowered forty feet down and remaining there until they died or the tunnel reached the selected mark under the lake. And when would that be? The brain of the mule no more and no less knowledgeable than the body of a man who dug into a clay wall in front of him.

Above ground, like the blossoming of a tree, the excavations and construction were also being orchestrated. The giant centrifugal pumps, more valuable than life, were trolleyed into place with their shell-shaped impellers that in Commissioner Harris’ dream would fan the water up towards the settling basins. Cranes lowered 800 tons of steel sheet piling rolled in Sault Ste. Marie. Trucks were driving in the bricks from Cooksville.

From across the province the subcontractors brought in their products and talents to build a palace for water. Richie Cut Stone Company, Raymond Concrete, Heather & Little Roofing and Sheet Metal, ornamental iron from Architectural Bronze and Iron Works, steel sashes from Canadian Metal Window and Steel Works, elevators from Otis-Fenson and Turnbull, glazing from Hobbs Glass, plasterers from Strauss & Scott, overhead doors from the Richard Wilcox Canadian Company. The Bavington Brothers sent painters, Bennett and Wright were responsible for heat and ventilation, the linoleum came from T. Eaton Company, the mastic flooring from Vulcan Asphalt. Mazes of electricity were laid down by Canadian Comstock, Alexander Murray composed the floor design. The tiling and terrazzo were by Italian Mosaic and Tile Company.

Harris had dreamed the marble walls, the copper-banded roofs. He pulled down Victoria Park Forest and the essential temple swept up in its place, built on the slope towards the lake. The architect Pomphrey modelled its entrance on a Byzantine city gate, and the inside of the building would be an image of the ideal city. The brass railings curved up three flights like an immaculate fiction. The subtle splay on the tower gave it an Egyptian feel. Harris could smell the place before it was there, knew every image of it as well as his arms – west wing, east wing. The Depression and the public outcry would slow it all down, but in spite of that half of it would be completed within a year. “The form of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal,” Harris liked to remind his critics, quoting Baudelaire. He was providing jobs as he had in the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct, the St. Clair Reservoir, the men hired daily for grading, clearing bush, removing stumps, and rip-rapping the sides of streams. The Commissioner would slide these facts out, bounce them off his arms like oranges to journalists.

But Harris was building it for himself. For a stray dream he’d always had about water, water they should have taken across the Bloor Street Viaduct as he proposed. No one else was interested in water at this time. Harris imagined a palace for it. He wanted the best ornamental iron. He wanted a brass elevator to lead from the service building to the filter building where you could step out across rose-coloured marble. The neo-Byzantine style allowed him to blend in all the technical elements. The friezes depicted stylized impellers. He wanted herringbone tiles imported from Siena, art deco clocks and pump signals, unfloored high windows which would look over filter pools four feet deep, languid, reflective as medieval water gardens.

But first he needed to finish the spear of tunnel a mile out under the lake, and organize the human digging and the human and mule dragging of pipes all the way out there for the intake of water. This was the other tentacle of his dream. The one that reached