Layla and the Tower That Stopped Being Scary

Layla built tall things, and she had a trick for never once feeling scared of them.

The other builders would look at a plan for a great tower — spires and arches and a knobbly roof — and their hands would go cold. “It’s too much,” they’d whisper. “Where do you even start?” They’d try to place a block up high and another down low and a third off to the side, and soon the whole thing was a wobbly muddle and they’d give up.

Layla never started high, and she never darted around. She started at the very bottom, with the floor.

“One storey at a time,” she’d say, laying out a whole flat layer of blocks — the ground floor, complete, every square filled that needed filling and every gap left that needed leaving. Only when that floor was perfect and solid would she climb up one step and lay the next flat layer on top of it, resting neatly on the one below.

“You’re building a cake,” a small builder said, watching her.

“Exactly a cake,” Layla laughed. “Sponge, then cream, then sponge, then cream. Nobody frosts the top of a cake before they’ve baked the bottom. Why would you build a tower that way?”

The scary part, she explained, was only ever scary because people tried to see the whole tower at once, all its height crowding into their head. But a single flat layer isn’t scary at all. It’s just a little map, drawn on the floor. Anybody can read a map and lay some blocks on it. And a tall tower is nothing but a short stack of those little maps, one resting on the next.

She showed the small builder how to read a finished tower backwards, too — how to slice it in your mind into its floors and understand it storey by storey, ground floor up. “If you can read one floor,” she said, “you can read any tower ever built, because a tower is only its floors, stacked.”

By evening the small builder had raised a spire of her own, and she’d never once felt her hands go cold, because she’d never once looked at the whole thing. She’d only ever looked at the layer in front of her.

Layla patted the finished spire, floor by floor, all the way up. “Floor first, then the next storey,” she said. “A shape is always easiest to build one flat layer at a time.”