TOWERS TO HEAVEN

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And so everyone on earth wanted to be one with Godliness in Heaven.

And therefore, Ladies set out to find their Men, and Princes went forth to find their Princesses. And when they had satisfied themselves that they had found the right one, they set about building for themselves their Towers to Heaven.

The Prince and Princess of Sandstone had very beautiful rocks, in varying hues of pink and orange, and other colours which they could not name. However, their arrangement of rocks was very clumsy. Neither of them seem focussed on the job at hand, instead carelessly placed their rocks one upon the other, without any alignment. Therefore, after a certain level, the tower toppled on one side, and the rocks crumbled to dust.

The Prince and Princess of Marble also had some very very smooth, lustrous and enchanting rocks at their disposal. They did a great job of neatly placing rocks one above the other, and taking great pains to make sure that every rock had been laid perfectly. However, they were obsessed with perfection. Their obsession with perfection and their intolerance for imperfect work was so dramatic, that any any point in time, each of them would thoughtlessly and unhesitatingly pull out a stone that had been imperfectly laid by the other and hold it in front of the other's face, while sharply criticising the 'shoddy effort'. As a result, after a while, the tower never went beyond a point, and in fact even grew shorter, because both got busy criticising each other.

The Prince and Princess of Granite probably had the most beautiful rocks of all. They patiently spent hours carefully piling stone upon stone to built their tower. But as they neared completion, both of them looked down from the heights and saw that there were other rocks that neither of them had ever seen before. They both forgot about their mission, and about what they had achieved together. To everyone's shock, they abandoned the tower that they had so painstakingly built together. The Princess sought to build a separate tower with the Prince of Onyx, while the Prince of Granite was charmed by the Princess of Quartzite. Alas, although they set out to build new Towers, they soon realised that they neither had enough time nor enough rocks to embark on building new towers. They lived the rest of their lives in regret.

The Prince and Princess of Basalt were the most low-profile couple of all. They both had their own set of flaws and imperfections. They could neither find rocks of great colour or shine, nor could they cut them in perfect shape. However, they both had the rare ability to camouflage each other's flaws. Whenever one would pile a poorly cut larger rock over a smaller one, the other would carve a beautiful motif or image on it and make it look beautiful.

In spite of their imperfections, they both were in perfect harmony.

And in the end, to everyone's surprise, their Tower was the only Tower that ever managed to reach Heaven.