These stones (Jerusalem stone was used here — a goodwill gift from friends former, they’re doublefistsized, about the hurt of a head if they’d tumble atop), they exert pressure, they push and they pull up against each other from both sides, from every; they ache, one against another, along their ways to the top.
They’re irregularly shaped, rough’s the word and unmortared.
Ages of pressure, of all this madinsane I’m talking tectoniclike pushpull — like, too, the process by which coal becomes diamond, it’s offered by way of example — will eventually annul the arch, destroy it, lay it to waste…will finally let’s say excommunicate the stone of the crown, casting it forward to B’s feet, without sin; and then with it, the other stones they’ll fall, too, with nothing to hold them up anymore, how they’ll fall to lie in two piles loose at the feet, as He turns to wander His on…
On the Island, amid the ruins of the Garden, which have been at pains staked preserved, made rubblesafe, they tour the subterranean tunnels, take in the vaults: arches barreling high, the groined crosses, lancet and ogee, passing through passages of all possible lean, of every potentiality for their own destruction; they walk in the dark, feeling their way toward a voice, following its light, that of their Guide what with the microphone and the miniature speaker clasped to his belt and the flash, the sentinel of his hardhat. As they’d descended from the floor of the Great Hall, there’s a sign:
This began with the cross, there before the crown’s what we’re looking for here, the keystone, the foundation stone, the rock of all ages…then, Let there be the crucifix, and there was, heretically or not, here it crosses; the whole Group nods and they grumble, once an hour, on the hour, they nod and they grumble, like this, shuffly grumble, just so, six days a week nod again. And it was good, the Guide says, was good only because it lacked meaning, was not yet a symbol, not yet this curse, not so blasphemed underground: how they’re encouraged to think of the form as just two pieces of wood, really, merely material, nature’s own exuviæ, one actually a length longer than the other, these branches if you want them to be, sticks even, twigs; kinder poke each other, their mothers shoot them this look.
You must be this tall to…in the dark.
