Two Shaky Towers : A Fable

by Joe Blow

they had made and learning the art of swimming. Of course it was only the theory, and not the practice, because they still did not dare to climb down from their tower and face the giant spider.

  Meanwhile in the other tower, the fruit-eaters who had become experts on trees, and insects and birds, were having a debate about whether or not the lake existed.

  "Nothing exists but what we can see," declared one of the fruit-eaters authoritatively. "I see no lake. Therefore there is no lake."

  "But I remember the lake. It still exists in my memory," said another.

  "What is memory?" said the first man. "I cannot see memory."

  "Let's ask those in the other tower," said the second man.

  "Why would you want to do that?" asked the first man. "They haven't even got a telescope. They see nothing."

  "But I remember them saying that they were going to build their tower overlooking the lake," he replied.

  "Stuff and nonsense!" the first man expostulated. "I can see their tower, but I can see no lake."

  "IS THERE A LAKE?" cried the second man, making a loud-hailer of his hands, as he looked out towards the other tower.

  "OF COURSE THERE IS A LAKE?" replied a man in the other tower. "ARE YOU BLIND!"

  "WE CAN'T SEE IT!" he responded. "AND WE HAVE A TELESCOPE."

  And so an argument grew up between the fruit-eaters in their tower and the fish-eaters in their tower over whether or not there was a lake.

  "We know everything there is to know about the world," said the foremost expert among the fruit-eaters. "If there were a lake, we would have seen some sign of it in our studies of the trees and the insects and the flowers."

  But what the expert couldn't see, and therefore didn't know, was that the only reason there were trees was because their roots - which the expert knew nothing of as they were beneath the ground and could not be seen with a telescope - drank water from the lake.

  Eventually the fruit-eaters ran out of their stores of water.

  When this happened they began to deny that there had ever been such a thing as water.

  "Why do our tongues stick to the roofs of our mouths?" someone asked the expert.

  "Because the cells on the roof of our mouths exert a force of attraction upon the cells of our tongues," the expert explained patiently.

  "Isn't it because we are thirsty?" asked a small boy. "Because we have no more water."

  "Don't talk to me of water!" cried the expert. "I'm a scientist, not a mystic!"

  He would have said more, but his tongue was sticking the roof of his mouth.

  Slowly water deprivation began to drive the fruit-eaters and the fish-eaters crazy. Their minds were filled with dreams of giant spiders, now ten feet across, swarming over the land and climbing up the towers to eat them.

  "We must build our tower higher!" cried the fish-eaters.

  "We must build our tower higher!" cried the fruit-eaters.

  But all they had with which to build their towers higher were the stones which made up those towers. So they began pulling stones off of the edges and piling them up in the middle. The towers got taller, but they also got more and more precarious and unstable. Slowly they began dismantling the outer edges of layer upon layer of their towers and piling those stones up into teetering spires from which they clung for their lives, looking down ever-fearfully for the spiders they expected to appear at any moment.

  The chant of the fruit-eaters, which once had been "There is no lake!", became one of "There are no spiders! There are no spiders! There are no spiders!" But they still kept building their shaky tower higher.

  "The Son of the Lake foretold a time when we would swim in the lake," the fish-eaters told each other. "He must have meant that the lake will rise up to the top of our tower and he will swim back to us and lead us away to safety."

  And so they prayed that the Son of the Lake would come and rescue them soon, before the giant spiders ate them.

  "YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SWIM!" they yelled out to the fruit-eaters who were teetering on their own precarious tower. "FOR THE LAKE IS GOING TO RISE AND THE SON OF THE LAKE IS GOING TO RETURN. AND THOSE WHO CANNOT SWIM WILL SURELY DROWN, OR BE EATEN BY THE GIANT SPIDERS."

  "THERE IS NO LAKE! THERE ARE NO GIANT SPIDERS! AND THE TERM "SWIMMING" IS MEANINGLESS, BECAUSE, AS WE HAVE ALREADY TOLD YOU A MILLION TIMES - THERE IS NO LAKE!" the fruit-eaters yelled back.

  "ARE YOU NOT SCARED THAT YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE GIANT SPIDERS?" cried the fish-eaters

  "WE KEEP TELLING YOU - THERE ARE NO GIANT SPIDERS!" cried the fruit-eaters, looking around nervously for giant spiders.

  At this point a young boy came walking through the forest. He had been looking around at all the trees and insects and birds. And he'd been playing under the trees, digging around and checking out their roots. He noticed that it was damp beneath the ground, so he knew there must be a lake nearby.

  When he wandered out from among the trees he saw the most amazing sight.

  There were two tall towers, rocking and teetering precariously, and clinging to them were many men and women screaming out something about giant spiders.

  Now the boy had never seen a giant spider, so he was very curious.

  "What is all this about giant spiders?" he asked.

  "Spiders, spiders...who mentioned spiders?" said the men and women hanging from the two precariously rocking towers. They could see that the small boy was not afraid, and they didn't want to let on that they were. It would make them look bad. They just tried to pretend that everything was normal.

  "Why are you hanging there from those towers?" asked the boy. "It looks rather dangerous."

  "Oh, it is dangerous," one replied. "We do it because we are brave men." The others nodded.

  But the boy could see that the men were afraid of something.

  "I am only a boy," he told them. "I know little of the world. Tell me what the world is like, that it makes people want to show their bravery by hanging from tall towers."

  The fruit-eaters told the boy all that they had learned from using their telescope. Some of it made sense and some of it did not. The boy laughed out loud when they explained the reason why one's tongue sticks to the roof of one's mouth.

  "Do not laugh at us you impudent boy!" they scolded him indignantly. "For we are wise men."

  "You have told me many useful things," said the boy. "But that last bit is a load of sparrow droppings."

  "Why do you say that?" they asked.

  "Because my tongue doesn't stick the roof of my mouth unless I haven't drunken enough water," replied the boy.

  "Oh, a mystic are you!" cried the expert from among the fruit-eaters. "Go and peddle your nonsense somewhere else." And yet he couldn't help but wonder at the ease with which the boy spoke. He himself had to exert a great effort to make his tongue work because of the strength of the attractive force that held it to the roof of his mouth.

  So the boy decided to go and talk to the men hanging from the other tower.

  "How long will you hang there?" he asked.

  "Until the Son of the Lake returns and rescues us," they replied.

  "Rescues you from what?" asked the boy. "The giant spiders you were talking about? I don't see any giant spiders."

  "You must learn to swim!" they cried. "Or when the lake rises you will drown."

  "How is the lake going to rise?" asked the boy. "Where is the extra water going to come from?"

  "We do not know. No-one can answer these questions. All a person can do is to have faith and learn to swim," they told him.

  "Oh, I already know how to swim," the boy assured them.

  "How can you know how to swim?" they asked. "We are the keepers of the notes of the Son of the Lake. If you have not read the notes, then you cannot know how to swim."

  "Swimming is easy," replied the boy.

  "Blasphemy!" cried the fish-eaters. "The boy claims that he is the equal of the Son of the Lake!"

  "I don't know this Son of the Lake person you are talking about," sai
d the boy. "Please tell me more about him."

  So the fish-eaters told the boy all about the Son of the Lake.

  "He sounds like a very nice man," replied the boy.

  "A MAN! He was not a man!" they cried. "He was the Son of the Lake! He was a superman who flew through the air to visit us on our tall tower. He brought some of us back from the dead How can you refer to him as just a man! Could a man climb all the way up this tower to talk to us?"

  "No," replied the boy. "I suppose he couldn't. It is a very tall tower and not very steady. It will fall down fairly soon."

  "That shows how little you know," they replied. "For this tower will stand until it is washed away by the lake rising to bring the Son of the Lake back to us."

  This was all a mystery to the boy, so he went and sat under at tree and thought about all that he had seen and all that they had told him.

  "They are obviously afraid of something down here," the boy surmised. "Otherwise why would they have built those towers and climbed up them. It must be something very scary, but I can't see anything like that. I must admit, though, they are acting kind of crazy. If they have been up there without water or food that could explain it. But what scared them up there in the first place?"

  The fruit-eaters had examined the forest very closely and so he doubted that what they were afraid of was in the forest. And the fish-eaters obviously loved the lake, so it can't have been from there. So the boy decided to dig around in the sand and see if he could find something there.

  He hadn't dug for long when out sprang a spider two feet across.

  The boy grabbed it from behind and pulled out it's fangs with his fingers.

  "You no longer have to fear!" cried