Ziggurat
I was downtown near my office on a Saturday. There was a large park across the street, and I saw a few of our plainclothes security guys moving into it quickly. On a whim I decided to follow them, and saw them rapidly scaling a grass-covered stone ziggurat.
I began to climb it, assuming that since they ran up it without effort, I could do the same. I was wrong; I had to use my hands to pull myself up the nearly vertical surface, grasping as best I could the spongy grass covering the granite blocks. There were no steps; it was a monolith, not a pyramid at all. How had the others scaled it so easily?
I reached the top, where a few people were lounging about in the cool air. The top of the structure was enormous, perhaps a city block in size, dotted with trees and even stone paths. Looking out I saw I was at least a hundred feet above the ground, yet no-one seemed to take any notice. Some of the paths even led directly off the edge, continuing down the sides, sides which I could now see were nearly perpendicular to the ground.
After resting for a bit, and talking with some strangers, I knew I needed to head back down to the world below. The thought of climbing back down was daunting, but I had to convince myself that if I made it up here, I could go back down, and that I could return whenever I wanted.
[August, 2002]
