You stand at the bottom of the rope and look up into the dark above it, and there is a thing up there that has been deciding about people since before your grandparents were born.

PorterIt is a bell. It is four hundred pounds of bronze on a wooden frame and I am standing underneath it feeling like a boy in a church.

CorvinaThat is the correct feeling. Every mistake anybody has made in this tower was made by somebody who had stopped feeling it.

The rope is cold and then it is not, and somewhere above the lantern light the clapper moves a quarter of an inch and settles again.