An Elegant Solution(38)

But they’d withstood the anger. They had a deep foundation in their faith.

Eight years later an earthquake shook Basel. All the accounts spoke of terrible devastation, and greater in Basel than any other city, though it was felt from London to Berlin to Rome. It was a great woe, and so soon after the plague. Houses were broken to rubble, the Walls were damaged, and every church in the city fell. All but one. The Barefoot Church had a deep foundation. Besides, it was held from above.

This Barefoot Church stood then, and stood now, like Daniel’s hourglass. I walked back to the door to look out on the Barefoot Square, and it surely was pitching and rolling like a sea, and the people in the Square oblivious to their motion. I took a step out and felt the momentary dislocation, as stepping from a dock to a boat. Then all seemed still and normal. But I knew it wasn’t; the Square was still spinning, and I was just spinning with it. If somehow the church was to be found one morning in a different part of the city, I would be sure that Basel had moved, not the church. As I stared at its solid, still, white walls, I felt again the movement beneath my feet.

I had a book in my pocket. I was surprised to find it there, and then I remembered: It was Boccaccio, the volume I’d borrowed from Master Desiderius, put there the last time I’d worn my coat. Boccaccio wrote in Italy in the time of the plague:

How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfasted with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ship’s hold and covered with a little earth.

The plague has returned many times since the first terrible appearance. The last outbreak in Basel had been only thirty years ago, though there had been single deaths more recently. The latest great outbreak in Europe was Marseilles just five years ago. The news had been that a hundred thousand died. More than war and siege, Black Death was the greatest fear of Europe’s cities. The most severe laws applied to it to prevent its spread. Even the clothing and bed-clothing of a victim must be burned; there have been reports of how even a tatter of a sheet could start a contagion, and even years after its owner had died.



As I watched the Square, I imagined the city’s frailty in the face of such illness. As I did, the paving stones before me began a slow circle inward toward their center. I stepped quickly back into the church. Their motion accelerated and I held tight to my unmoving foundation. The Square became a Charybdis. Everything in it was pulled down into the center. The buildings tore loose from their moorings and began their descent. Only the Barefoot Church, and the Boot and Thorn, and the Old Walls were grounded firm and held firm.

I shook off the vision. The Square returned to its old form; risen, changed and yet the same, though I still had the image of the wide spinning left in my mind. I kept it in my mind. A whirlpool was a Logarithmic spiral.

I put my foot on the paving stones and they held firm. I walked across the Square to the Old Wall and the Coal Gate and called up into the scaffolding. “Oh, Lithicus!” To dust I was returning: the whole paving under the gate was covered in fine, gray stone dust.

“You?” was answered. His face appeared white from the shadow like a cherub or monster of carved stone.

“I’ll ask you about spirals,” I said.

“Ask nothing about them,” he said.

So I asked nothing. I dragged my boot through the dust on the ground, circling. “That’s the spiral you made for Master Jacob,” I said.

“That is the spiral.”

I wiped the dust smooth and drew again, as I’d seen in the whirlpool. From the center and out, but growing and widening. “That’s what they said they wanted.”

“It’s no difference from the other!” he said, “but that it’s poor and wanton for a spiral.”

“There’s no complaint against you, Master Stonemason,” I said, “and no fault in your craft. But this is a spiral, too, and the truth is, it’s the better one.”

“Then they’d have shown it to me before instead of after.”

“They should have. Who was it that gave you your instructions?”

“Now, look, you! You’ve asked enough. You’ve asked enough! I’ve done nothing but what I was told, I was told nothing but what I had to do it! I’m no one to do anything else.”