Stories of Your Life and Others

This story employs third person limited narration, with consciousness centered on the character of Hillalum, a miner from the ancient civilization of Elam. Hillalum lives in the shadow of the Tower of Babylon, which the townsfolk build in an effort to reach the Vault of Heaven. It takes a month and a half to climb the Tower unburdened. For the bricklayers, the journey takes four months.

Hillalum arrives with his fellow miners to Babylon, where the tower appears to be a never-ending column reaching the vault of the sky. He and his fellow miners are here to dig into the hard heaven, so they can reach the seat of God. The city is already celebrating the completion of the tower, and the Elamites join the festivities before their journey upwards. Lugatum, the puller who will lead the miners for the first four days, envies them, as they will ascend to the top of the tower. Pullers like Lugatum only climb four days’ worth of height, before the next group of pullers take over the climb.

The next day, Hillalum visits the Tower. Its base resembles a huge ziggurat temple, and the Tower itself starts after the second platform. Along the column of the Tower, two ramps allow climbing and descending. Awed by the tower’s height, Hillalum remembers a story from his childhood: After a devastating flood known as the Deluge, men travelled to the ends of the earth. They wished to learn of the earth’s skyward borders, beyond which Yahweh’s dwelling lies “above the reservoirs that contained the waters of heaven” (4-5). This is why they built the tower. Now, facing the seemingly endless column, Hillalum feels that nothing should be this tall, as doubts about their endeavor overwhelm him.

As the procession assembles the next morning, a pair of men pull each cart, and the going is hard. Some of the miners discover they fear heights. During the next two days, all the miners develop sore muscles and can barely walk or pull their carts. Once the group of pullers changes, a man named Kudda invites Hillalum and his friend Nanni to observe the sunset from this height: “‘Night falls on the earth before it does here’” (10). Observing the shadows consume the barely visible city and climb along the tower, Hillalum “knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky” (11).

The climbers soon reach wooden balconies that serve as gardens for the workers’ food, and rooms in the interior of the tower where their families live: Hillalum begins to feel displaced, as if he no longer belongs to earth or heaven. He wishes Yahweh would give them a sign of approval.

Next, they reach the level of the moon, and then they approach the sun, where “the heat was enough to roast barley” (13). As they climb past it, its light shines upwards, which unsettles them. Nanni learns that once a passing star hit the tower, “‘a transgression, something not spoken of’” (15).

One morning the climbers reach the solid ceiling of the heaven’s’ vault. Hillalum feels “as if the world had flipped around somehow, and if he lost his footing he would fall upward to meet it” (16). At the top of the tower, workers are building a stairway to the vault, and miners prepare for their part of the job. They have no idea where the reservoirs with heaven’s waters are, as the solid face of the vault is featureless; they fear they might break one open and cause another Deluge. They debate whether God wants them to enter the vault or not.

For years, the miners dig an upwards staircase into the heavens, opening rooms in which Egyptian miners build granite doors they can slide into position to close off the water should they hit a reservoir.

One day, Hillalum hears a “distant sound of shattering” (22), and water starts gushing from above. He runs to the closest granite door to close it off, but finds the door already firmly closed, trapping Hillalum and two others inside the uppermost room. As water rises around them, Hillalum realizes, “Yahweh had not asked men to build the tower or to pierce the vault; the decision to build it belonged to men alone, and they would die in this endeavor just as they did in any of their earthbound tasks” (23). The water carries them to the top of the dugout, where Hillalum traces the fissure. He dives upward into it, surrounded by blackness, and finds himself in a tunnel, at the end of which he reaches open air. Naked and battered, he crawls through the darkness, feeling an upward slope until he sees light ahead. He runs out of the tunnel and comes across a caravan of men in a sandy landscape. Hillalum realizes he has climbed his way up to the surface of the earth: “Men imagined heaven and earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched” (27).