The Architect’s Quarry

For some days after the Exchange the three of them walked through quiet stone country, high and bare and beautiful, all grey and white rock cut through by deep ravines. And in the ravines and on the hillsides and up on the high plateaus there were buildings.

They were old, and they were like nothing Inquirer had ever seen. Some were no bigger than a shepherd’s hut, and some were as big as cathedrals. There were long low halls and towers, and odd shapes he had no names for, stepped pyramids and rings of standing stones and bridges that seemed to go nowhere. They were built out of the rock of the hills and seemed to grow out of it. No two were alike, and every one was complete, standing whole and balanced without a stone out of place.

“What are they?”

Analogy, who read as he walked more often than not, looked up from his Book. “Passages. This is the Quarry country. Every passage in the Book stands here as a building, put up by its author. You’ve learned to read a passage in its context and in its kind. Now you’ll learn to see its shape: how it’s put together, where it starts and stops, what holds it up.”

“I always thought a passage was just… words in a row.”

“So did I,” said Plain-Sense, “till I came through here the first time.” He pointed at a small, beautifully proportioned building on a rise ahead, a little house of white stone with a door at each end. “Look at that one. That’s the First Psalm. Go and walk through it.”

Inquirer went up to the little white house. Over the front door was carved: Blessed Is The Man That Walketh Not In The Counsel Of The Ungodly. He went in.

There were two rooms inside with a wall down the middle. In the right-hand room everything was green and growing, a tree planted by a stream with glossy leaves and branches bowed down with fruit. In the left-hand room everything was dry and grey, a heap of chaff on a threshing floor, and as he looked a wind came through and scattered it.

He went through both rooms and out at the back door. Over that one was carved: For The Lord Knoweth The Way Of The Righteous: But The Way Of The Ungodly Shall Perish.

He stood outside and looked the little house over, and saw it was built in perfect symmetry. Two doors, two rooms, two ways. The front door began with a man who doesn’t walk in the way of sinners, and the back door ended with the way of the righteous and the way of the ungodly. The word way was cut over both doors, front and back, like a pair of bookends.

“It’s two roads,” he said slowly, when the others caught up. “The whole Psalm’s two roads. It starts with a man choosing which road not to walk on, and it ends with both roads and where they go, and the middle is a picture of each. The tree and the chaff.”

“That’s its shape,” said Analogy. “And since it’s the first Psalm, it’s the front door to the whole Psalter. It tells you the Psalms are about two ways of living before God. Would you have seen that reading it verse by verse?”

“No. I’d have seen a nice verse about trees.”

“The scholars call those bookends an inclusio,” said Plain-Sense. “A writer repeats a word or a phrase at the beginning and the end of a passage, so you know where it starts and where it stops and what’s holding it together. Look out for them. Once you know, they’re everywhere.”

They heard the builders before they saw them: a crash of falling stone, then hammers, and a loud cheerful voice shouting orders.

Round a bend in the ravine they came on a great deal of activity. A large, handsome building stood there, or had done, a long hall with many arches, beautifully made. Now it was surrounded by scaffolding, and men in leather aprons were swarming all over it knocking stones out. There was already a big heap of rubble at its foot, and beside the heap, on a trestle table, a set of drawings was spread out with stones holding down the corners.

The man in charge was big and red-faced and jolly, in a top hat, with a roll of blueprints under his arm and a speaking-trumpet in his hand.

“Steady with that arch, lads!” he bellowed. “It doesn’t fit the plan! Out with it! We’ll put a nice square doorway in instead. Now, where are my three pillars? I need three pillars, all starting with the same letter!”

“Who’s that?”

Analogy sighed. “Mr. By-Points. The most successful builder in the Quarry. Come and see what he does. It’s instructive, in its way.”

Mr. By-Points saw them coming and swept off his hat. “Pilgrims! Welcome, welcome! You’ve come to see the finest sermon-builder on the road. Look at these!” He waved at the drawings on the trestle. “My blueprints. Every one a winner. Three Points and a Poem, that’s my bestseller. The Five P’s of Prayer. Seven Steps to Victory. The ABC of Salvation. Every passage in the Book, I can fit into one of these. People love ‘em. They remember ‘em. Three points, all starting with P! Who could forget?”

Inquirer looked at the building the men were knocking about. Over its main door, half chipped away, he could still make out: The Lord Is My Shepherd; I Shall Not Want.

“That’s the Twenty-third Psalm.”

“It was,” said Mr. By-Points proudly. “It’s going to be The Three P’s of the Shepherd! Point one: His Provision, I shall not want. Point two: His Protection, I will fear no evil. Point three: His Presence, thou art with me. Lovely, eh? Only trouble is, the old building doesn’t fit. There’s all this business about a table and enemies and oil and a cup running over, and a house at the end of it, and it won’t go into my three P’s. So we’re knocking it out.”

Plain-Sense had gone round the side of the building where the scaffolding was thinnest, and Inquirer followed him. Through a gap in the stones they could see into the old hall where the builders hadn’t got to yet.

It was in two halves. The front half was a field, green pasture and still water and a path down through a dark valley, all lit by the figure of a shepherd with his rod and staff. But the back half wasn’t a field at all. It was a house, a great hall with a long table laid for a feast, and at the head of the table a host anointing his guest’s head with oil and filling his cup until it spilled. Outside the windows enemies stood looking in, quite helpless. And right at the back there was a door, and over it: I Will Dwell In The House Of The Lord For Ever.

“It’s two pictures,” said Plain-Sense quietly. “A shepherd and his sheep, and then a host and his guest. The Lord’s both. He leads you through the valley, and at the end of it He brings you into His own house and sets a feast in front of you while your enemies can only stand and watch. That’s the shape. The second picture is where the first one was heading all along: out in the field, then in at the door. And he’s knocking the whole back half out because it doesn’t start with P.”

They went back to Mr. By-Points, who was busy at his trestle.

“Sir,” said Inquirer, “your three P’s are all true. The Lord does provide and protect, and He is present. But they’re not the shape of this Psalm. The Psalm goes from a field to a house, from the shepherd to the host, from the valley to the table. Knock that out and you’ve kept some of the words and lost what the Psalmist built.”

Mr. By-Points laughed heartily. “Built, built! What’s it matter how he built it? People don’t want architecture, my boy. They want something to take home. Three P’s on a card! And the Psalm’s still there, isn’t it? I’m only rearranging.”

“You’re putting your plan on top of his,” said Analogy mildly. “And because you’ve done it so many times with so many passages, your people have heard a hundred sermons and every one of them’s the same shape. Yours. They’ve never once seen the shape of a Psalm.”

Mr. By-Points stopped laughing and looked at them a moment. Then he turned his back and lifted his trumpet.

“Right, lads! Out with that table!”

They left him to it, sick at heart, and went on up the ravine. At the top, on a wide open plateau, stood a workshop, a long low stone building with a great many windows, and through them they could see tables covered in drawings and models of buildings and bits of carved stone.

The door was open. Inside, an old woman with her white hair pulled back in a knot was bent over a model with a pair of calipers. She was small and spare, with spectacles on a chain and chalk on her fingers.

“Ah,” she said, without looking up. “Analogy. It’s been forty years. And you’ve brought two young men. Come in. You’ll have seen By-Points, I suppose. I heard the stone coming down from here.”

“We have, Mistress Shape.”

“Then you’ll want to learn the opposite of what he does.” She put the calipers down and turned round. “Sit, sit. I’ll be brief. There’s more to learn by looking than by listening. Every passage in the Book has a shape, and its author gave it that shape, and the shape is part of the meaning. Some shapes are simple: a story with a beginning, middle and end, an argument with a claim and its reasons. Some are very subtle. Your job is to find the shape the author built, not to make up a new one. By-Points brings his blueprints to the passage. I go to the passage and draw what’s there.”

“How do you find it?”

Mistress Shape held up a chalky hand and counted off.

“One, repetition. Words and phrases that keep coming back. The writer’s telling you what matters. Two, the joints, the little words that tie one clause to the next. For, but, therefore, so that, because, when, then. Master Context will have shown you those. Three, bookends, the inclusio, like your First Psalm. Four, turns, where the passage changes direction. But God. Nevertheless. And it came to pass. Five, the main line. What’s the main verb, the main statement, and which clauses hang off it explaining it or qualifying it? Find the spine first, then the ribs.”

She took a sheet of paper down off a shelf and unrolled it on the table. It was covered in an odd sort of diagram: lines of text laid out down the page, some at the left margin and some stepped in further and further, with arrows and brackets joining them up.

“Ephesians one, verses three to fourteen. Did you know that in the Greek it’s one sentence? A single sentence, two hundred words long. Paul’s so overcome with praise he can’t stop for breath. Most readers get lost in it, and By-Points chops it into twelve little sermonettes. But look here.”

She traced the lines with her finger. “This is the spine: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings. That’s the main clause. Everything else hangs off it, explaining what the blessings are. And look at the refrain. Three times it comes round, to the praise of his glory: here, after the Father’s choosing; here, after the Son’s redeeming; and here, after the Spirit’s sealing. It’s a hymn in three verses, Father, Son, and Spirit. Could you see that if you cut it into twelve?”

Inquirer stared at the diagram. He’d read that passage a hundred times and never seen the three refrains, or the three Persons.

“No.”

Mistress Shape kept them three days and set them to work the way she set her own apprentices, drawing the shapes of passages, small ones first and then bigger.

They drew the Sermon on the Mount and found its bookends: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven at the first Beatitude and again at the last, and the law and the prophets at the start of the great middle section and again at its close. They drew the whole Gospel of Matthew and found it was built round five great speeches of the Lord, every one ending with the same words, And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings. They drew Genesis and found it built in sections that each began These are the generations of…, opening one into the next like the rooms of a long house.

They drew the Letter to the Hebrews and found the word better cut into its walls over and over: a better hope, a better covenant, better promises, a better sacrifice, a better country. The whole letter was built to show that Christ is better than everything that came before Him, and built that way for readers who were tempted to go back to the old.

And every time, Inquirer found that once he saw the shape, the passage said more than it had and said it more plainly. The shape didn’t add anything. It had been there all along, and he’d been walking round the building in the dark feeling one stone at a time.

It was on the third day that Plain-Sense met the other builder.

He had gone out alone in the evening to the edge of the plateau, where it looked down into another ravine, and when Inquirer went to fetch him for supper he found him standing on the brink of the cliff talking to a thin, intense man with very bright eyes, who was showing him a drawing.

“You see?” the man was saying eagerly. “See how it balances? A, B, C, D, and then the center, X! Then D, C, B, A, mirrored on the other side. Perfect symmetry! The whole passage is a mirror! And the center’s the key! Whatever’s standing in the middle of the mirror is what the passage is really about!”

Plain-Sense was nodding slowly, and he had a look on his face Inquirer had never seen there, the look of a man who has just picked up a tool that fits his hand exactly.

“And you find these everywhere?”

“Everywhere!” cried the thin man. “Every passage! Every book! The whole Bible’s one great mirror inside another inside another! I’ve got charts for the lot. Look. Here’s Genesis. Here’s Mark. Here’s Leviticus. Here’s the genealogy in First Chronicles!”

“Who’s this?” said Inquirer, coming up.

“This is Mr. Chiasm-Everywhere,” said Plain-Sense, with a gleam of excitement in his eye. “He’s found the most remarkable thing. Look, Inquirer. The writers of the Book often built their passages as mirrors, a first thing, a second, a center, then the second again and the first. Mistress Shape mentioned them. It’s a real pattern, a real Hebrew way of building. And he says the center of the mirror is always the main point. It’s so… so orderly.”

Inquirer looked at the drawings. The first was the story of the Flood, and it did seem to be built as one great mirror, from the building of the ark to the waters rising, to the center, And God remembered Noah, then back down through the waters going down to the leaving of the ark. It was beautiful, and it rang true.

The second was the genealogy in First Chronicles. It was a chart so complicated it looked like a spider’s web, letters and brackets running everywhere, and in the middle, very small, a single name Inquirer didn’t recognize, circled three times in red.

“And that’s the main point? Of the whole genealogy? Him?”

“Must be,” said Mr. Chiasm-Everywhere. “He’s in the center.”

Inquirer looked at Plain-Sense, who was studying the spider’s-web chart. Slowly the gleam went out of his eye.

“No,” he said at last. “That one’s not there. You’ve had to bend half the names to make it balance. You’ve skipped some and counted others twice.” He handed the drawings back. “The Flood’s real, I think. But you’ve taken a real tool and decided it’s the only tool and it has to work every time, and now you’re finding mirrors that aren’t there because you can’t stand a passage that isn’t one.”

The thin man’s face fell. “But it’s so orderly.”

“I know,” said Plain-Sense, with a rueful sort of sympathy. “I know. That’s what nearly got me.”

They walked back to the workshop together, and Plain-Sense didn’t say anything for a long while.

“I nearly went with him,” he said eventually. “Did you see? I’m so fond of things being plain and in order. And he offered me a whole Book in perfect order, every passage a perfect mirror. I wanted it to be true.”

“I know,” said Inquirer. “I know what that’s like.” He was thinking of the Exchange, and the dinner, and the clapping. “Everybody’s got something he wants the Book to be.”

When they told Mistress Shape, she only nodded. “There are two ways to go wrong in my trade. By-Points brings in a shape that isn’t there and forces it on. The mirror-man finds a real shape and then sees it everywhere. One’s careless and the other’s too clever, and the cure’s the same for both. Look at the passage. Draw what’s there. If it doesn’t balance, it doesn’t balance. Some of the finest buildings in the Book are just a man telling you what happened, one thing after another. That’s a shape too.”

On the fourth morning they said goodbye to Mistress Shape and went down the far side of the plateau, and the road took them back through the ravine where Mr. By-Points was working. He had finished with the Twenty-third Psalm by then and moved on to something much bigger.

It was a magnificent building, a soaring vaulted hall of white stone with one enormous arch at the heart of it, and over the door was carved: Blessed Be The God And Father Of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Ephesians one,” said Inquirer. “The long sentence.”

Mr. By-Points stood in the middle of the hall with his trumpet and a new blueprint spread out in front of him: Twelve Blessings for Twelve Weeks. His men were up the scaffolding all round the great arch, chipping at the stones.

“That’s it, lads!” he was shouting. “Twelve separate pieces! A little blessing for every week of the quarter! Knock out the joins, we don’t need ‘em! In whom… according to… to the praise of… All that connecting stuff, out it goes! Every blessing on its own pedestal!”

“Stop!” Inquirer shouted. “Mr. By-Points, stop! That’s the keystone! That’s the main clause! Everything hangs off it!”

Mr. By-Points turned and waved his trumpet cheerfully. “Don’t fret, my boy! I’ve done this a hundred times!”

At that very moment, high over his head, one of his men struck the last blow at the top of the great arch and knocked loose a single stone, bigger than all the rest, carved with the words who hath blessed us.

A long, deep groan came out of the whole building.

“Run!” Plain-Sense yelled.

The workmen ran, sliding down the scaffolding and bolting out of the doors. But Mr. By-Points stood rooted in the middle of the hall with his trumpet in his hand, staring up. The great arch was starting to sag. Its stones weren’t joined to the keystone any more, weren’t resting on each other. Each one was suddenly a piece on its own with nothing to hold it up.

Inquirer didn’t stop to think, any more than he had at the vow-keeper’s door. He ran into the hall with Analogy and Plain-Sense at his heels, and the three of them grabbed Mr. By-Points by the arms and coat-tails and hauled him, stumbling and protesting, out through the door. They only just made it. Behind them, with a roar like the end of the world, the arch came down.

When the dust cleared the hall was a heap of white rubble, and Mr. By-Points was sitting on the ground in front of it in his dusty top hat, staring.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Mr. By-Points said, in a small voice nothing like his usual bellow, “It was a very good blueprint. Twelve blessings. Twelve weeks.”

“They were all true blessings,” said Analogy gently, sitting down in the dust beside him. “Every one. Election, adoption, redemption, forgiveness, wisdom, the mystery of His will, the inheritance, the sealing of the Spirit. Paul names them all. But he doesn’t name them as twelve separate things. He names them as one great act of God, Father and Son and Spirit, all hanging off one keystone: blessed be God, who hath blessed us. Take the blessings away from the God who gives them and they won’t stand up. They’re just stones.”

Mr. By-Points was quiet for a while. Then he pulled out his roll of blueprints and looked at them. Three Points and a Poem. The Five P’s of Prayer. Seven Steps to Victory.

“Thirty years I’ve been doing this,” he said. “Thirty years. Every Sunday. Three points. I don’t believe I’ve ever once looked at how a passage was built. I just always… knew what shape I wanted.”

“There’s a workshop at the top of the ravine,” said Inquirer. “An old woman. She’d teach you, if you asked.”

Mr. By-Points looked up the ravine toward the plateau, and down at his blueprints, and at the rubble.

Then, very slowly, he got up and brushed the dust off his coat, put the blueprints under his arm, and started walking up the ravine. He didn’t look back.

“Think he’ll go?” said Plain-Sense, watching.

“I think he’s going,” said Analogy. “Whether he’ll stay is another matter. Thirty years is a long time to build one way.”

They went on east, and the stone country began to give way to forest. Before they were out of the Quarry altogether they passed one more building, very small and very plain, a single standing stone by the side of the road with simple letters cut into it: The Lord Is Nigh Unto All Them That Call Upon Him.

Inquirer stopped and looked at it.

“What’s its shape? There’s nothing to it. It’s just one stone.”

Analogy smiled. “Look again. It’s part of something.”

Inquirer looked and saw that the stone was one of many. A long line of standing stones ran off along the edge of the forest, one after another, each with a few words cut in it. He walked along the line reading them. The first started with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph. The second started with the second, Beth. The third with the third.

“It’s an acrostic,” he said, wondering. “The whole Psalm. Every verse starts with the next letter. It’s praise from A to Z. Everything.”

“Everything, first letter to last,” said Analogy. “The shape is the meaning. God’s to be praised with everything, the whole alphabet of it. You’d never know that from one stone.”

Inquirer stood looking down the line of stones where it ran away into the trees. He thought about Mr. By-Points and his three P’s, and Mr. Chiasm-Everywhere and his spider’s web, and the little white house with two doors he’d walked straight through without seeing.

“I’ve been reading in the dark my whole life. One stone at a time.”

“So has everybody,” said Plain-Sense. “That’s what the road’s for.”

And the three of them went on into the forest. The trees closed in over them, very tall and very close together, and the light came down green and dim between the trunks. A strange sound grew up around them, faint at first and then stronger, a rustling and chattering in the branches like ten thousand small voices arguing about grammar.