Tower of Babylon

Tower of Babylon is a 1990 story, his first published work, by Ted Chiang. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. You can read it online here. It begins,

A tower reaches for the vault of heaven, and its builders discover that the wrath of God is the least of their worries.

It takes a full month and a half to climb to the towers

summit

Were the power to be laid down across the plain of Shinar, it would be two days journey to walk from one end to the other. While the tower stands, it takes a month and a half to climb from its base to its summit, is a man walks underburdened. But few men climb the tower with empty hands; the pace of most men is much slowed by the cart of bricks that they pull behind them. Four months passed before the day a brick is loaded onto a cart of and the day it is taken off to form a part of the tower.

Hillalum had spent all his life in Elam and knew babylon only as a buyer of Elam's copper. The copper ingots were carried on boats that traveled down the Karun to the Lower Sea, headed for the Eupherates. Hillalum and the other miners traveled overland, alongside of merchant's caravan of loaded onagers. They walked along a dusty path leading down the plataeu, across the plains, to the green fields sectioned by canals and dikes.

None of them had seen the tower before. It became visible when they were still leagues away: a line as thin as a strand of flax, wavering in the shimmering air, rising up from the crust of mud that was Babylon itself

It is included in the anthology Stories of Your Life and Others.

I always have a glass of water and usually also a cup of coffee or tea beside me while I read. Join me?

I'm sharing at the weekly T Stands for Tuesday blogger gathering hosted by Bleubeard and Elizabeth at the Altered Book Lovers blog.