From the summit of the tower either you beheld the cities of Ur and Larsa and Erech, like wisps of white smoke from a single hookah, or you beheld nothing except your own reflection magnified in cloud. If we follow the calculations of some who made measurements with compasses and T-squares, a trowel dropped from the last tier to be completed is falling to this day; whereas others, marvelling less at the majesty of the building than at the mayhem it occasioned, described displaced masonry regularly showering the city of Babel, threatening the safety of anyone who took bareheaded to the streets, but especially those whose livelihoods depended on their performing augury or fairy-stories around the tower’s base.
One eyewitness tells of an almanac salesman with raisin eyes, killed because the quantity of paper tied to both his feet hampered his escape from a flying tile. But it was also said of him that he deliberately stood his ground, while others fled, declaring that there was some fatality in his family, that the curse had come upon him, that it was written — ‘Pass it on.’
As to how many masons and hod-carriers and plasterers and carpenters and surveyors and sculptors and mosaicists and mathematicians were employed on the edifice — no estimate bears any similarity to the next. By some reckoning the total workforce, not including wives and shuris, was five hundred thousand; but there were, and still are, those who maintain that Cain worked alone on his mausoleum, completing a storey every three months, performing single-handedly all the functions mentioned above, always without having recourse to materials that included earth and water in their composition, and always without recourse to wives or shuris.
Citizens of Babel fearful of the structure claimed they had irrefutable evidence that its atmosphere induced morbid retentiveness of memory, and forbade their children to go within a thousand royal cubits of its influence. But many workmen on the tower who returned to the community either because they had grown old in Cain’s service, or because they had been fired for refusing to work twenty-four-hour shifts, or because they had suddenly lost their enthusiasm for elevation, swore that their powers of recall had deteriorated out of measure as a consequence of labouring close to the magnetic fields of other planets, and supported this assertion, in the presence of elders, by forgetting what they’d just asserted.
For obvious reasons, opinions have always been still more divided over what took place in celestial circles as heaven’s guards and watchmen observed Cain’s progress. The view most commonly held by scientific and rationalist commentators is that scepticism, and even pity, must have prevailed; since the most rudimentary assessment of likely danger or damage would have established the impossibility of Cain’s posing any serious territorial threat had his life been extended to ten thousand times its expected span. Quite simply, the tower was never going to reach.
But those of more fantastical turns of mind imagine a God beset by petulant and panicked counsellors, who saw the zooming ziggurat as a symbolic if not an actual threat to their hegemony, and a promise that matter would at last, however long it took, assert superiority over spirit. They had opposed the original creation of Adam on just such grounds. True, they had softened when it came to judgement on the fratricide, because Cain’s murderousness seemed then to be their own best hope for the future — matter, left to itself, would destroy itself. But now they insisted that he should be reminded of the sentence leniently passed on him: that he be a wanderer and a fugitive in the earth, not among the clouds.
Pull him down, was their advice.
At last, as everyone agrees, the decision was God’s alone. There is evidence that He never did much care, aesthetically or practically, for buildings. The sublunary world was His idea, was put together after a blueprint of His own, and He knew how He wanted it to look. He was also familiar with the incidence, among city dwellers, of imploded humanism: put a man within doors and he quickly comes to believe immoderately in himself.
This was reason enough to raze a pile capable of housing half the world. But when the hour finally did come for Him to wield His arm, He made no bones about the thing that had upset Him most. His mighty ear, upon which not the slightest or least formed thought was lost, had picked up an intention buried beneath the lowliest brick in the building. It was to make a name. Which does not mean merely to find fame, but to speak it. To pronounce sufficiency. To word itself abroad. To glorify expression.
Nomenclature had been at the heart of God’s disagreement with His creatures from the start. He had foreseen evil as a problem, He had anticipated knowledge, pride, sex, snakes. But He was not prepared for names to come between them, forgetting how essential to His idea of Himself was His Own. I AM WHAT I AM — Cain’s refusal to offer sacrifice was nothing other than an unwillingness to accept the obligations of obeisance inherent in That Name. YOU ARE, Cain as good as told Him, WHAT YOU ARE NOT.
And what God will tolerate a mortal telling Him Who He Isn’t?
Height was therefore purely incidental to what ensued; it was the tower’s tongue that Y-H-W-H, the G-d who had forbidden vowels, went down and severed.
‘Come, let us descend,’ He said, ‘and there confound the thing they speak with.’
Th thng th spk wth.
As for Cain, return to spongy earth was a blow more terrible to him than death. Away from it for many years, he had forgotten its burial-ground smell, its longing for decay, its oblivious, incessant mulch-making. Insects had grown noisier in his absence; he could hear them scratching at their shells, pulling out their own feelers, even when he was far from fields. The maggots in his dead meat were plumper than they’d been before, quicker, hungrier, whiter. He didn’t dare kick a stone, for fear of what he’d find underneath. For fear of its colour. It was the colour of life he most couldn’t bear on his return.
At least the colour of death cannot be worse, he consoled himself.
The dispersal of language was a further setback to one who was more a story than he was any other thing, and who was therefore compelled to tell himself in the way that other men are compelled to raise a family or an army. He understood no one in Babel now, and relied on signs to secure him approximations of what he wanted. A shave became a hit or miss affair — they either cut him too close, or not close enough, they left the hot towels on his face longer than was comfortable. At the baths, the aches in his back that most troubled him, the pains he couldn’t point to with his fingers, were the ones the Anatolians always forgot to assuage. Lacking language, he at last let his body go, let it fall back into nature like his father’s, did not bother to distinguish himself from a berry.
But language came into being at the behest of wretchedness, marbled with misery, and eventually its loss was a solace to him. Where there is silence there is no betrayal. Now, no one could accuse him of apostasy or tourism. He excited no one’s expectations and let no one down. He didn’t nightly exhume his brother. He didn’t expose his mother’s muddy breasts to the curiosity of a well-dressed audience. He didn’t open and close his father’s hands.
Rendered to all intents and purposes mute, Cain found few pleasures in the hundred or so years of life that were left to him; but slept easily, without dreams, now that he was no longer naming names and had forgotten the word for God.