t the third and last was in flames.

All that night Godfrey was toiling to retrieve the disaster.
He took down the whole tower from where it stood and raised
it again on the high ground to the north of the city which is
now marked by the pine tree that grows outside Herod's gate.
And all the time he toiled, it was said, sinister sorcerers sat
upon the battlements, working unknown marvels for the undoing
of the labour of man. If the great knight had a touch of such
symbolism on his own side, he might have seen in his own strife
with the solid timber something of the craft that had surrounded
the birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter.
And indeed the very pattern of all carpentry is cruciform, and there
is something more than an accident in the allegory. The transverse
position of the timber does indeed involve many of those mathematical
that are analogous to moral truths and almost every structural
shape has the shadow of the mystic rood, as the three dimensions
have a shadow of the Trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality;
since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity, and never
be nearer to the symbolic shape without the help of the shorter.
Here is that war and wedding between two contrary forces, resisting and
supporting each other; the meeting-place of contraries which we,
by a sort of pietistic pun, still call the crux of the question.
Here is our angular and defiant answer to the self-devouring circle
of Asia. It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible
(for the age was philosophical enough) that a man like Godfrey
thus extended the mystical to the metaphysical; but the writer
of a real romance about him would be well within his rights in making
him see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower rising above
him through the clouds of night as if taking hold on the heaven
or showing its network of beams black against the daybreak;
scaling the skies and open to all the winds, a ladder and a labyrinth,
repeating till it was lost in the twilight the pattern of the sign
of the cross.

When dawn was come all those starving peasants may well have stood
before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair.
Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers
looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells
paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort
of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for