The White Tower

A tall tower at the centre of the academy. White, but not like marble, more like some material that catches the light; the height cannot be judged—it could be ten storeys, it could be twenty, it could be more, and the top is swallowed by a low layer of cloud. New students who see it for the first time usually need no introduction from anyone to know that the only name this tower can have is the White Tower. Climb to the pavilion high in your own College and look again, and the top is still above you; the cloud is then close enough to touch, and is in fact still very far off.

The White Tower has a bell. The sound is very low and very long, as though it came up from the "bottom" of the academy. The ears take it first, then the chest, then the boards underfoot—layer after layer shakes with it. Anyone who hears it finds that his own ribs want, for no reason he can name, to "line up" with some direction, and that vibration goes deeper than the sound itself and disperses more slowly.

On the night of enrolment the bell rang 5 times—one for each of the 5 Colleges completing the reporting in of its new students. That intake happened to come to 5 as well.

After the bell stopped, on the small wooden rack at the corner of the east wall of the Eastern College courtyard, the bronze bell the size of half a fist began to shake by itself. The windows were shut and there was no wind in the courtyard, and still the body of the bell trembled, at an extremely low frequency: dong—dong—dong—dong—dong, a short pause, then another round, exactly the beat of the tower bell. The older students said it would stop, that it would stop once the fifth new student sat down in the Main Court.

The tower can be felt from high in the Colleges too. Go up the narrow wooden stairs to about the height of 5 storeys and you begin to be short of breath, and it has nothing to do with fitness. The Eastern College's way of putting it is that the higher you go the closer you are to the "core" of the White Tower, and the air thins; it does not affect breathing, and the body remembers. At night the outline of the tower carries an extremely faint white, and the cloud at its top hangs lower than by day, like rain that will not fall. After the brazier in the Main Court goes out, the whole spread of flagstones is left with only the faint light it gives off by itself, just enough to see the path by, not enough to see detail, and the White Tower still stands at the centre.