Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson Page B

Jack tomorrow morning. He excuses himself to the bathroom, which is an old-fashioned two-holer mounted above deep shafts that must descend all the way to hell. He unwads and reads Glory’s note, memorizes the instructions, tears it up and sprinkles it down the hole.
    Mrs. Pascual allows the two young lovers a full half hour of “private” time together, meaning that the Pascuals leavethe room and only come back every five minutes or so to check up on them. There is a painfully elaborate and lengthy good-bye ceremony which ends in Shaftoe returning to the street and Glory waving to him from her balcony.
    Half an hour later, they are doing tongue judo in the back of a horse-drawn taxi galloping over the cobblestones toward the nightclubs of Malate. The extraction of Glory from the Pascual residence was a simple matter for a highly motivated China Marine and a squadron of saucy nursing students.
    But Glory must be kissing him with her eyes open because all of a sudden she wriggles loose and says to the taxi driver, “Stop! Please stop, sir!”
    “What is it?” Shaftoe says blurrily. He looks around and sees nothing but a great big old stone church looming up above them. This brings a preliminary stab of fear. But the church is dark, there’s no Filipinas in long dresses, no Marines in dress uniforms, it can’t be his wedding.
    “I want to show you something,” Glory says, and clambers down out of the taxi. Shaftoe has to pursue her into the place—the Church of San Augustin. He’s gone by this pile many times but he never reckoned he would come inside—on a date .
    She stands at the bottom of a huge staircase and says, “See?”
    Shaftoe looks up into darkness, thinks there might be a stained-glass window or two up there, maybe a Laceration of Christ or an Impalement of the Blessed Thorax, but—
    “Look down, ” Glory says, and taps one miniature foot against the first tread of the staircase. It is a single great big huge slab of granite.
    “Looks like ten or twenty tons of rock there I’d estimate,” he says authoritatively.
    “It came from Mexico.”
    “Ah, go on!”
    Glory smiles at him. “Carry me up the stairs.” And in case Shaftoe’s thinking of refusing, she sort of falls into him, and he has no choice but to catch her up in his arms. She traps his nape in the crook of her arm, the better to pull her face close to his, but what he remembers is how the silk of hersleeve feels against the freshly shaved skin of his neck. He begins the ascent. Glory doesn’t weigh much, but after four steps he has broken a fine sweat. She is watching him, from four inches away, for signs of fatigue, and he feels himself blushing. Good thing that the whole staircase is lit up by about two candles. There’s a lovely bust of a thorn-crowned Jesus with long parallel blood-drops running down his face, and on the right—
    “These giant stones you are walking on were quarried in Mexico, centuries and centuries ago, before America was even a country. They were brought over in the bottoms of the Manila Galleons, as ballast.” She pronounces it bayast .
    “I’ll be damned.”
    “When those galleons arrived, the stones were brought out of their bellies, one by one, and taken here to the Church of San Agustin, and piled up. Each stone on top of the last year’s stone. Until finally after many, many years this staircase was finished.”
    After a while it seems to Shaftoe as though it’s going to take at least that many years to reach the top of the damn thing. The summit is adorned with a life-sized Jesus carrying a cross that appears to be at least as heavy as one of those stair-treads. So who’s he to complain? Then Glory says, “Now carry me down, so you will remember the story.”
    “You think I’m some horny jarhead who won’t remember a story unless it’s got a pretty girl in it?”
    “Yes,” Glory says, and laughs in his face. He carries her down to the bottom again. Then, before she goes off on some