The Myriad Gate · The Folded Campus

The Myriad Academy has no single gate. Students come in through different entrances all over the world: the clock tower in London, the old temple in Yunjin, the underpass in Cairo, the arch in Istanbul, the stone steps in Lhasa, the temple in the Maya jungle—every one of those doors opens onto the same academy.

The academy is pieced together out of the nodes of several civilisations, and internally the structure is called the Folded Campus. The seams can be felt in the corridors. In the corridor behind the Yunjin door, the walls are natural bluestone with the marks of the hand-chisel still on them; the floor is white marble, irregular at the edges, worn smooth, cold underfoot; overhead is a dragon-pattern low relief in deep blue-green. The dragon pattern changes posture every 20 paces, down to the number of claws: some are cut in thick lines, cloud-scrolls curling around the body as though hacked straight out with a blade; on some every scale is distinct, the knife-work as steady as breathing that never stopped; some are carved so deep the head is about to come out of the stone; some are nearly flat intaglio, nothing left but the outline. The wear on the stone does not line up either—some corners are still sharp, whole faces of others have been rounded off by time.

The length does not match either. From the temple door to the statue is only 15 paces, but the corridor takes 420 paces to walk. Inside it a phone has no signal—not even the "searching" that comes up when no base station can be found. There are no windows, the light source cannot be located, and the whole corridor gives off an extremely faint light of its own that is warm against the skin.

At the end of the corridor is the Main Court. About the size of two football pitches, the flagstones irregular, as though pieced together out of different eras, with a white tower standing at the centre. There is an entrance and a stairway in each of the four directions, and in the distance you can see the spire of a Gothic clock tower, stone steps climbing to a summit, the glare of desert and an arch. Every direction is visible, through a thin layer of haze, and the distance cannot be measured.

Beside the exit of the eastern corridor stands a stone with characters cut into it that read the Eastern College · this way, and next to the words a bronze guide-plaque points into a narrower passage. To new students who have just come out of the corridor and are still dazed, the older students usually hand over only one line: here, do not judge far and near by distance, judge by direction. On the first day hardly anyone takes it in; by the second, nobody is working out routes by how long it takes to walk them.