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some great mushroom, seemingly swelling up out of nothingness amidst a network of scaffolding. Each day more work was done and that giant stone foetus stretched itself forth, like the golem created by Elijaj Ba’al Shem, which grew ever bigger. Nachtman, by sheer will power, seemed to be dragging it out of the mountain, to be giving life to inanimate materials—like a magician casting his spell over clay. The men obeyed his sometimes frantic gestures and occasional screams, though the effect of his madness was somewhat mitigated by the foreman who acted as a breakwater between this fanatic of architecture and his workers.
    And though, as a rule, construction is the most dangerous of occupations, this project proved to be considerably more dangerous than most.
    The position of the structure was such that, more often than not, a slight mistake would mean sure death—for to one side there was a sheer drop of a good three or four hundred meters, and strong winds often came about, making balance difficult. Occasionally a worker, losing his footing, would fall from the heights of that vast structure and be broken to bits on the rocks below or find himself unpleasantly skewered by a tree.
    Then there were the stones themselves, which Nachtman, obsessed with the gigantic, insisted on having cut into as large of units as possible, so that, if these were mismanaged, they proved exceedingly dangerous, and on more than one occasion some poor fellow had his leg crushed or was bodily buried beneath one.
    But such was the grandeur of the project that these contra-temps went by all but unnoticed. A helicopter would come to remove the corpse and a quarter of an hour later the work force would be at it again at full throttle, throwing up stone and scaling ladders and, indeed, their sheer numbers made the losses seem but a trifle, like a great army having a man occasionally break away from its ranks.
    The sound of drills filled the air† like the sound of war; the mountain itself had been decapitated like some traitor—to be mounted with a new head of stone. And Peter, gazing through the little windows of glass mounted before his eyes, resting on his long nose, looked on at the assault wave of shirtless men going about their work, bouquets of stout individuals pounding away at concept to make it reality. Obedient to their foreman, they attacked in squads, striking with their hammers and kicking with their boots. Some held grinders or impact wrenches in their hands and all went about with helmets, lending the scene a decidedly military aspect.
     
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    The young man’s lips curled into something loosely resembling a smile as he took note of the great progress that had been done in such a short period of time and then, seeing Fabrizio approaching his person, his mouth returned to its usual austere pastures, where it grazed momentarily on his tongue as his hand pushed the wings of his hair back away from his eyes.
    “The work is getting on well,” he commented.
    “Yes.”
    “You don’t seem very satisfied.”
    “I am satisfied with my crew, but…”
    “Well?”
    “They do what they’re told. The building is going up.”
    “Yes, the building is going up, and much faster than most of us expected. So what’s the problem?”
    “Nachtman.”
    “Is a great architect.”
    “That may be. But he’s not a structural engineer and hasn’t brought in one to help him. It seems to me that he has also been careless about the geotechnical aspects of the project, without paying proper attention to the soil mechanics of this mountain—the seepage, the best possible ground, rock anchors and so forth.”
    “I have faith in him,” Peter said defensively.
    “That’s fine,” the other replied with a rather cold grin, showing a mouthful of healthy white teeth. “But making a building shouldn’t require faith, but simply science. Many of the ideas he is basing