The Architect by Brendan Connell Page B

their own meeting place. Why rely on outsiders, who we must pay, to do what so many would be grateful to do voluntarily.”
    Nesler’s little eyes gleamed. “You are right. We would save a great deal that way.”
    “But many of our members—the great majority—live abroad. Some in India. Others in China and Africa.”
    “Then let them come—from everywhere let them come!”

XV.
     
    And so it was that disciples poured in from the four corners and eight directions of the Earth to lend their labour to the vast project. They arrived in great numbers, rolled up their sleeves, and set to work.
    There were blonde-headed Swedes and dark-skinned Africans. Japanese stood beside Greeks and clean-shaven Russians laboured next to South Americans with silky black beards. A Ukrainian woman with a handkerchief tied around her head shovelled sand. An inadequately dressed young lady from California carried water. The people came, from north and south, from the mountains and the coast, uttering words in half the languages of the earth. The whole recalled some scene from the Old Testament—a vast undertaking such as might have been done by pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty.
    And it must be here said that the congregation were from all walks of life, from all strata of society. The rich, the educated, shoved themselves forward with as much vehemence as the illiterate, showing indeed that wisdom cannot be taught in schools and that the laws of social facilitation apply to all.
    Businessmen unknotted their ties, slipped into overalls and let their soft hands, used to nothing heavier than banknotes, nothing harsher than the keys of a computer keyboard, make contact with abrasive work, while the lower classes lurched forward, calves taut, pulling at thick ropes, like donkeys or oxen. Lines of men, like tribes of ants, made their way about the structure, their backs bent under huge loads, the palms of their hands raw wounds from pushing against blocks of stone.
    By the beginning of March they had ten thousand men assembled. By the middle of the same month, the number had more than doubled and by April there were no less than eighty thousand—enough to fill a small city.
    The work force was divided into four gangs, named, respectively: the Friends of Körn, the Sons of Zeus, the Brothers of Julian the Apostate, and the Sisters of Future Well-being, the latter of which was put under the supervision of Maria. Each gang was then divided into five phyla of around five thousand workers respectively. With this huge, though admittedly rather unskilled work force, the building grew visibly day by day and seemed to be slowly revealing itself as if by magic—trembling in the light and sighing in the darkness; eating the rays of the sun and drinking in the moonshine. The walls wrapped themselves around the foundation and great pillars began to make their appearance, columns which stretched themselves out like fingers, seeming thereby to replicate the digits of the very hands that made them—those appendages of the ever-zealous Sons of Zeus, who indeed proved themselves to be the strongest, the most energetic of the phyla.
    One of their number, an old Swedish man with a long white beard, went about his tasks with especial vigour. He had his feet eternally resting in a pair of hiking boots and liked to dress in polypropolene and polyurethane materials. He strained his thin arms, stuck forward his bird-like chest and worked in silence, rising well before dawn and not discontinuing his efforts until long after dark.
    “Who is that fellow?” Nachtman enquired of Nesler.
    “His name is Olaf Lidskog. He is an eccentric millionaire well dedicated to the cause.”
    “So he has donated?”
    “Heavily.”
    There are few things in this world more frightening than voluntary slavery. The slave in shackles is without freedom, but has a will and hope, things which the voluntary slave has not. He has renounced the power to think for himself and without analytical