Granite Slate

The Granite Slate is a slab of close-grained granite, measuring 1.14 metres by 0.78 metres and 9 centimetres thick, held upright on a bronze cradle in the Hall of Foundational Texts on Floor 17. It bears the canonical text of Clause I, cut in uncials to a depth of 4 millimetres, and is the artifact against which all other copies of Clause I in the Tower are collated. By the terms of the Concordance of Immovable Texts it may not be moved, lent, photographed, or read aloud in a language other than that in which it was cut.

Physical description

The stone is a pale grey granite with a marked foliation that runs, unusually, against the grain of the inscription; the letters of Clause I therefore appear to lean very slightly leftward in oblique light. The cradle was replaced in the winter of the eleventh year of the Reckoning of the Quiet Stair after the original bronze developed a hairline fracture on its south face. The replacement was cut from the same pattern and is regarded by the Office of Cradles as the last wholly uncontroversial act in the Slate's modern history.

Clause I is 41 words long. Its final word, abides, is cut 2 millimetres shallower than the preceding text and is the subject of the Dispute of the Shallow Terminal, still unresolved after nine recensions of the collation register.

Inscription of Clause I

The Slate was cut in the Year of the First Concordance by an unknown hand, and no working draft, sketch, or quarry order survives. The earliest mention of it in the archive is a requisition for lamp oil addressed to the Undersecretary of the Seventeenth Ascent, which notes in its margin that "the stone in the hall is not to be dusted with the flock cloths" (Requisition 44-B, margin).

The text was fixed as canonical only in the third century, when the Granite Library was charged by the founding ordinance, clause 3, with "distinguishing between the granite of the coils and Granite Intrusion" — a charge that obliged it, almost incidentally, to establish which granite in the Tower was authoritative and which was merely present. The Granite Library presently distinguishes the Granite Slate from the granite of the coils at its reading room on the West Spiral Stairwell, Floor 302.

Reading procedure and the Hall

Readers approach the Slate along a marked aisle and stand at a brass rail 1.2 metres from the cradle, a distance fixed by the Concordance of Immovable Texts, Annex 2, after a reader in the reign of the fourth Librarian leaned close enough to breathe on the surface. Condensation, the annex records, "is a form of inscription."

The Hall is lit by four lamps on the north wall and is otherwise unlit. Visitors are asked to remove their shoes; the floor of the aisle is laid with a coarse mat of woven reed, replaced annually, and the Office of Cradles records the replacement in the same ledger as the cradle inspections, for reasons that have never been minuted.

Collation and the Receiving Slate

Every copy of Clause I made in the Tower is collated against the Slate before it is released, and the collation is performed by laying a sheet of Receiving Slate over the inscription and taking a rubbing. The rubbing is then compared line by line with the master rubbing of the Year of the Slate Ledger, held under seal by the Keeper of the Master Rubbing. Two discrepancies are permitted; three require the copy to be destroyed and the copyist to submit a written account of the discrepancy.

In the ninth year of the present reckoning the clerk Mirabel Ost submitted eleven such accounts in a single quarter, each attributing the third discrepancy to the shallowness of the terminal word. Her twelfth account was returned unopened with a note from the Keeper reading, in full, "The word is not shallow; the stone is not level." Ost petitioned for the cradle to be relevelled and was refused on the ground that the Slate is immovable. She is recorded as having requested, and been granted, permission to measure the floor instead.

"Where a text cannot be corrected, the ground beneath it may still be surveyed."

— Keeper of the Master Rubbing, marginal note on Ost's twelfth account

Scholarly disagreement

It is disputed whether the Slate is the original from which Clause I was first cut, or a recension made from a lost original and subsequently promoted. The Concordance of Immovable Texts states plainly in its preamble that the Slate "is the first stone and no other precedes it." The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 7, contradicts this without naming it, referring to "stones antecedent to the present text, now accounted rubble."

The Granite Library has declined to adjudicate, noting in its standing position of the Year of the Slate Ledger that the question is one of provenance rather than of granite, and therefore falls outside its ordinance. The Clerks of the Granite Step have offered the observation — not a ruling — that rubble is a category the Tower has never satisfactorily defined, since a stone that ceases to be a text does not cease to be granite.

A minority position, advanced by the archivist Dennel Sarrow and never formally answered, holds that the shallowness of the terminal word is itself the surviving trace of the earlier stone, and that the Slate is therefore two texts cut in the same place. Sarrow's memorandum was read into the register and has not been read out of it since.

Restrictions

The Slate may not be viewed during the periods of manifest intrusion in the Neutral Zones, out of a precaution the Hall of Foundational Texts has never explained and continues to observe. Rubbing is suspended on the first and last days of the month. Food is not permitted in the Hall, and the reed mat may not be walked upon in wet boots.