Al Ain Branch Times: Babel Edition

Had our traveling S Conference at the Shangri La hotel in Dubai. This was for all members in the UAE: 2 wards, 2 branches. We were shy at least 80 people, but even so, there were reportedly 430 of us. Maybe that helps answer Adam's question about connectivity. By the way, folks, you should take our cue and go easy on the church talk: keep it codified. We try to lay pretty low. Gov't doesn't mind, but the locals sometimes do. Wasta matters.

Anyway, second counselor presided alone. There was a concurrent session in Riyadh, and one last week in Doha. It was the most international of its kind we've ever attended. Tons of Filipinos, of course, and the boring pasties, but also members from India, eastern Europe, western Europe, and Pacific Islands, and many other places. Kinda cool.

Anyway, a few of us are off to Bahrain next week for training, but we'll be in the new digs for sure on Nov. 23rd. Moved the stuff over last week. Here goes somethin'.

Anyway, some pictures, in no particular order, most taken by Riley from a variety of vantage points. The Tower of Babel is called "Burj Dubai." We are assured the intention is not to reach Heaven. Besides, the languages are already confounded here.



























Aw, to heck with it. Here's a theme-appropriate story-draft I cooked up some time ago. No changes since we last talked about it, earth mother. Sorry. Busy days.


Babel

At the moment the languages were confounded, I was bent over a parchment, trying to ignore the sounds of construction that by now hunted every one of us across the city. I had no interest in the project myself, indeed I was apprehensive, both about the sheer hubris of the thing and mind-boggling issue of workplace safety. My brother was contracted to oversee construction of the balustrades that wound their way up the tower in slightly but ever narrowing circles—the feat of an engineering science I had never understood, but that had gripped him with a fever from childhood: numbers were his, letters mine. Daring was also his, and since his first apprenticeship he had volunteered for the most dangerous projects, and even as foreman preferred to put himself in the most precarious positions.

But I was in the minority in my apprehension, and in its specific personality. The prophets who had spoken out their warnings of judgment and destruction had all been taken forcibly to work in the quarries, so I kept quiet, and hoped that the Elders would grow bored of the project and leave it to crumble and molder as they had so many other such ventures in the past.

That was not to be, and soon my brother was strapped in ever-more complicated harnesses, launching himself out into dusty, sweltering spaces. He worked with such energy and skill that he had very nearly caught up with the construction of the tower itself. When it became inefficient to descend the tower each day, he slept at ever-greater heights, and passed into an impenetrable glare of blue.

I put him out of my mind, and bent over my work.

The moment played out so subtly, at first, that I myself hardly knew what had happened. I was writing in the free-flowing script of our old, common language—what we called it, I do not remember, for the words of that language are gone from me—when I heard a deep rumbling above the shouts and shrieks of men and instruments at work. It had a tone that marked its difference from the usual grating of stone being hoisted precariously up the center shaft of the tower. It was followed by alarums and then by screams, so I left my work and went to the window, which afforded me only a glimpse of the base of the tower, even at this great distance.

I went out onto the balcony to look up, and saw, to my horror, great blocks of stone crumbling down and outward, having fallen from an unfathomable height. Though I knew there was nothing I could do, my instinct was to rush to the scene and find my brother. This was a gratuitous instinct, of course: he would have been at the very top, and my only hope was that he was on the opposite side of the crumbling rock, but even if this were so, it would take him days to come down and prove he lived. I went back to my table nonetheless, and took up my tunic from the chair. I had just reached the door when a great wail went up from the direction of the tower, and the rumbling deepened and grew to a sustained crash, drowning out the screams and cries of men and fear. I turned back to the window and knew it was too late, for in the place of the tower grew a mountain of rubble—deadly, cruel stone rained down and mocked our ambitions—until it, too, was veiled in a storm of dust and agony that pushed out further and further from the tower and touched even my home with a fine, impetuous film.

I stood looking out into the grey for quite some time, grieving without feeling, not for the tower, but what I had lost to its construction. And then there was a profound silence, into which I fixed my gaze.

I was broken from this state by the sounds of voices much nearer, speaking in words I did not know. This startled me. I had only ever known the one language, and knew it, many thought, better than any that had ever spoken it. But this I could not understand, and suddenly, apart from my grief, loomed a memory [?] and a profound fear.

I turned back to the table and glanced at my parchment, which had blown a little back on the table when the concussion of the collapse had reached my quarter. I scanned the first several lines, and did not recognize the hand or the language, so I turned to my library and pulled scroll after scroll, book after book from the shelves looking for anything familiar, anything lucid or sane in the madness of confusion and incomprehension that threatened. Nothing. I recognized, could understand, nothing. I doubted all my memories, wondered if I had ever written or read a legible word, or if my life’s work was a fantasy come crashing down in a cruel and ugly revelation, or if all that made sense in the world, all given to us from the gods, had just suddenly been re-veiled, taken from us, and we thrown back into a preternatural state.

I was too panicked to recognize that I was thinking.

I leaned, panting and wild, against a wall for several moments, sweat and clarity pouring out of me in the heat and dust and fear. And then I saw my parchment on the table, and went back to look at it once more, as if it would somehow make sense.

I could read the last five characters. Line after line of that flowing hand I now recognize as our old language were incomprehensible and alien to me: but there, at the precise moment I heard the first shouts and cries, just before the rumbling broke through my concentration, were five distinct hieroglyphs of the kind now familiar to you, and according to which system you are now reading this memoir.

Of those of us who congregated in the days and weeks after the collapse, I am the only one who remembers that old language—or rather, that there was an old language. For the rest, it is as if we always spoke what we now speak, and came to this valley only to escape the wrath of God which had confounded all those other tongues. They have forgotten brothers, sisters, lovers, and parents with whom they could no longer communicate, and forged new identities, as if we were born of the tower’s collapse, and never lived before it.

But I have spent many hours in memory [reference to brother? Trait of courage . . . to be cautious], and I now understand. I have never written of this before, my son, and never will again. And I have let all my old learning be lost, for fear it would inspire men to build another such obscenity. Perhaps they’ll be content with monuments to God, and never again presume to seek him in his heaven.