I climbed up on one corner of wall and looked around me from that vantage point. I could almost make sense of at the tumbled walls and collapsed roofs. I jumped down and once more began to thread my way though…what? A temple town? A village? A graveyard of ancient tombs?

Whatever it was, it had fallen, leaving the spindle and its tower to lord it over the time-gnawed remains. How could a folk with tools of stone, bone, and bronze have shaped such a vast creation? I even considered giving the guide a hector on my return, to see if he had a believable answer to the question.

When I reached the base of the tower, I discovered two things. The first was that it was in much poorer condition than it had seemed from the distance. The second was that it was not a proper building at all. It consisted only of a spiraling stair that wound up and around a solid inner core. I could not enter the tower at all; I could only ascend to its peak by the outer stair. A crude barrier of ropes and poles had been thrown up in front of the tower’s first step, as it to warn people off. I paid no heed to it.

The lips of the stairs were rounded. The center of each step dipped, tribute to the passage of both feet and years. The walls of the stair’s core had once been tiled with mosaics. Glimpses of them remained: an eye and a pair of leering lips, a paw with claws outstretched, the fat-cheeked face of a little child with eyes closed in bliss. Round and round I climbed, ever ascending. I felt a giddy familiarity yet could recall no similar experience in my life. Here, in the mosaic, the head of a red and black croaker bird gaped its beak open wide. There a tree, arms reaching up to the sun with its face turned to its rays. I had passed it by a dozen steps before it came to me that a tree should have neither arms nor a face. There was graffiti, too, the ever-present proclamation that someone had been here, or that someone loved someone forever. Some of it was old but most of it was fresh. I expected to grow weary with the climb. The day was warm, the sun determined, and I was carrying more flesh than I’d ever had in my life.

Yet there was something exhilarating about being up so high with nothing between me and a sheer drop to the rocky ground below the spire. With every step I took, the music of the spinning Spindle grew louder; I could feel the vibration in my bones. I felt the wind of its passage on my face.

There was even a peculiar scent that I knew was generated by the stone’s movement, a warm smell, delicious, like singed spices. I stopped watching the stairs and looked up to the Spindle. I could see the striated stone core.