An Elegant Solution(142)

The passage was different than it had been before. It was well-lit and short with a flight of steps at its end close by. It must have been that I was seeing the visible inn. Floating beside me was my tricorne! I grabbed it and slogged through the water, now at my knees, and up the steps.

At the top, I saw the front door and the Common Room thirty feet away. I stopped. The water was still rising below me. I ran to the door, and outside.





19

THE DELUGE





I stepped into pouring rain. My tricorne spewed like a house gutter. My soaked shoes and stockings were soaked now more. It was a long way across the Square and took me a long time to cross.

The downpour in the Barefoot Square seemed so heavy! The church floated in the falling sheets, and Noah steered it. Jonah hung to the upper window, to throw himself out. Peter stood ready at the corner to walk out on the waves. Still the waters came, and the Spirit moved on the face of them, to divide them. But as I came closer to the church’s warmth and glow, I felt the rain less.

I reached its porch. I looked in the door and saw the quiet, unmovable place, with its column-mounted candles making more light than candles could anywhere else. The stone floor was dry and cool and smooth, and the air was warm. I felt the soak lifting off of me. I stood for minutes, then turned to watch the river falling from the sky.

Back from where I’d come, I saw the embrous windows of the Boot and Thorn, flame within flood, fire in the waters, all the rain flying futile off the steep roofs. I had the feeling of standing on a river bank watching unmoored boats moving. The whole roof of the inn seemed to be pitching like a ship. I and the church were Daniel’s hourglass in a heaving world.

Through the pounding rain and wind I heard something else, too, the roaring of moving water. I knelt down at the edge of the dry church floor and put my ear to the stones. I heard it more: a river flowing beneath, somewhere. I even recognized the specific stream sound: it was the Birsig Flow, in its hidden channel beneath the city. I stood and looked out again.

What I’d seen before of the inn’s roof might have been my own sight of invisible motion, but now it wasn’t invisible. The center of the roof, four stories above the Square, had moved. It had settled lower and inward.

But the fires inside were furious. The Common Room windows were red and bright as a setting sun. Through the rain, through the whole width of the Barefoot Square, I could feel them. The hearth must have been like a smelter.

Then the roof settled in again, and I could hear it. I was in wonder at it. At first I thought the fires had finally broken loose from their stone places and were consuming the pillars, but the place was in essence earth; it couldn’t have burned. And I still felt the rumbling beneath.

All the servants of the place, the cooks and maids and laborers, and the patrons of the Common Room, all emptied the building into the Square, scattering to cover under eaves of houses, and off to their own houses.

The front of the inn split. Its plaster suddenly had a hundred cracks, and it was the wall cracking behind. Smoke poured out of the windows, denser and blacker. Then it was smoke and steam.

The Birsig, flooding from its tunnel, had filled the cellars of the Boot and Thorn and now was consuming the foundations.

The flames returned the attack, violently. Great pools of water were boiled out the windows. The fire had grown enormously and struck at the incoming flood. And it was of no use. The disquiet, unleashed Birsig was a fountain in the Common Room. All the floors above were being pulled down into it.

A mad rush issued from the tunnel as the panicked horses, and a panicked Willi and Fritz, escaped the stables. They fled out to the Square, and then into the streets. Fritz ran on but Willi reached the middle of the Square and turned in the rain to watch, as I was. There seemed to be no one else.

The windows went dark, one by one, each with a violent billow of steam. Then with a shaking I think the whole city must have felt, the fire of the Boot and Thorn was submerged, and quenched. All of the Birsig was flowing into the Common Room, opening a void to take the inn. The roof sank lower; the walls collapsed inward and the swelling water spewed from every open part.

Then it was gone, swallowed and extinguished, and there was only a wide, deep hole of water.



The rain decreased. There was a beginning of light in the west.

I was still in the door of the Barefoot Church, and there was a feeling, like a motion, though I couldn’t see movement. But the feeling was as if a weight had been cut from a spring, a heavy weight, and a very strong, slow spring; a slow up-and-down oscillation, like a wave. All of Basel was part of it. And the church rode peacefully on the motion.



The streets were rivers, all flowing into the Rhine, cleansing the city of its dry dust. The sky to the west had opened of clouds. I walked home through the lessening rain. Light shown from my grandmother’s front window.