It is as if everything in The Tower has been collected and brought together to display in sequence the entire human record, indeed going back past Homo sapiens to the earliest ancestors possessing any human traits. After re-ascending The Tower and preparing a meal, I thought about what I had seen. The walls at the lowermost levels were painted with drawings that recalled the cave paintings at Lascaux or Chauvet in France, or Altamira in Spain, others unknown to me. Higher up had begun the familar wedge-shaped groupings of cuneiform writing, and directly above those Egyptian hieroglyphics- the pattern was already becoming familiar. Within 10 feet of the top of the stairs were represented languages of the day; I could recognize English, Spanish, French, and Cyrillic characters I assumed represented Russian. There were a variety of ideographic characters, although I could not tell whether they were Mandarin, Japanese, or some other. There were also stones inscribed with a complex series of hooked and dotted characters completely unfamilar to me. Strangest of all were the last three courses of stones....which were blank.
In the upper story, all of the other rooms contained shelves densely packed with books. I had no energy to open a single volume, however. I returned to my sleeping roll and was asleep within minutes.