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where there was a sparkling, invigorating climate.
    The cities were established where the patterns of stones had been set up according to the necessities of the plan, along the lines of force in the earth of that time. These patterns, lines, circles, arrangements were no different from those familiar to us on other planets, and were the basis and foundation of the transmitting systems of the Lock between Canopus and Rohanda … now poor Shikasta.
    The arranging and alignment of the stones had been done initially entirely by the Giants, whose size and strength made the work easy for them, but by now the understanding between the Giants and the Natives was such that the Natives wished to assist in a task which they knew was – as they put it in their songs and tales and legends – their link with the Gods, with Divinity.
    They did not see the Giants as Gods. They had developed beyond that. Their intelligence was so much greater, because of the Lock, that it was not far from that of the Giants just before the Lock.
    The cities had been built on the lines indicated by the experiments that had been so extensive in the long preparatory phase before the Lock.
    They were of stone, and were linked with the stone patterns as part of the transmitting system.
    Cities, towns, settlements of mud, wood, or any vegetablematerial cannot disturb the transmitting processes, or set up unsuitable oscillations. It was for this reason that during the preparatory phase, the Giants discouraged stone as building material and themselves lived in houses of whichever organic substance was most convenient and to hand. Once the Lock was established, and the stone patterns set and operative, the cities were rebuilt of stone, and the Natives were instructed in this art – so soon to be lost to the memory of Shikasta – for the plan was that when the Natives had evolved to the adequate level, the Giants would leave for another task somewhere else, themselves evolved beyond anything that could have been envisaged by the handful from Colony 10 those many thousands of years ago.
    What the Natives were being taught was the science of maintaining contact at all times with Canopus; of keeping contact with their Mother, their Maintainer, their Friend, and what they called God, the Divine. If they kept the stones aligned and moving as the forces moved and waxed and waned, and if the cities were kept up according to the laws of the Necessity, then they might expect – these little inhabitants of Rohanda who had been no more than scurrying monkeys, half in and half out of the trees, animals with little in them of the Canopean nature – these animals could expect to become men, would take charge of themselves and their world when the Giants left them, the work of the symbiosis complete.
    The cities were all different, because of the different terrains on which they were established, and the currents and forces of those places. They might be on the open plains, or by springs, or by seashores, or on mountains or plateaux. They might be among snow and ice, or very hot, but each was exact and perfect and laid down according to the Necessity. Each was a mathematical symbol and shape, and mathematics were taught to the young ones by travel. A tutor would take a group of pupils to sojourn in, for instance, the Square City, where they would absorb by osmosis everything there is to be known about squareness. Or the Rhomboid, or the Triangle, and so on.
    Of course, the shape of a city was as rigidly controlled upwards as it was in area, for roundness, or the hexagonal, or the spirit of Four, or Five, was expressed as much in the upper parts as it was by what was experienced where the patterns of stone in building enmeshed with the earth.
    The flow of water around and inside a city was patterned according to the Necessity, and so was the placing of fire – as distinct from heat, which was done by steam and heated water – but fire itself, which