The Slow Stair Gradus Descensorius Semper Relatus, Ad Basim Nondum Perductus
The great stepped apron below the Rail: taken up at the head, carried down and laid at the foot, for as long as anyone has counted — and it has never once reached the bottom.
It is not a ruin
Every visitor reads the broken lower edge as collapse, and every one of them is corrected within the hour. Nothing has fallen. The flights end in a raw face because that is where the work has got to: dressed stone stacked in banks, a lifting frame, a tally, and beyond it the drop.
The city walks. The Rail chases the cut. So the stair between them is lifted at the head, carried down, and re-laid at the foot — a few courses at a time, without ceasing, because a stair that stopped being re-laid would within a generation begin nowhere and end nowhere.
The stair is not going down the mountain. The mountain is going down, and the stair is keeping up.
Nothing is discarded
The stone in the lowest flight was cut for the highest, three or four settings ago, and has been down and up and down again. Nothing here is thrown away, so the stair does not consume material, only order: the same courses, endlessly re-sorted downhill. What is worn is worn in a different place each time, which is why a Scales stair wears evenly and a stair anywhere else does not.
Not yet brought to the base
By the rule that things accrete and people do not, the plate grows a clause at every re-laying, and this one has been re-laying without interruption for longer than any building in the city has stood. Its inscription is the longest in the Scales, which is to say the longest in the world.
The final clause — ad basim nondum perductus, not yet brought to the base — was bookkeeping when a clerk cut it. It is now the only phrase in any name in the city that people actively hope is never struck off, and the masons re-cut it verbatim at every setting without being asked.
The two completions
Twice the foot has reached the base and the last course has been laid. Both dates are known and neither is celebrated. On both occasions the stair was complete because the ground had stopped moving — and a mountain that has stopped yielding is the one condition the Scales has no answer for.
So a finished stair reads as a stalled city, and the second completion is the closer of the two to living memory. What actually followed each is not settled in this record.
Why guides bring visitors here first
The walk of the city is otherwise invisible — a few feet a year, spread over a mountain, argued about in numbers. The Slow Stair is the whole process at a size a person can take in standing still: a structure visibly being carried downhill by the men carrying it, with a lit end and an unlit end and the boundary between them moving while you watch.
It is also, for that reason, the most photographed misunderstanding in the Scales.