A door that turns like a millwheel, and grinds no grain.
I stood before it a long while, watching. The lords and their ladies step into it one at a time, and it swallows them, and it turns, and it sets them down inside the great house of glass without ever once stopping. No man holds it. No boy waits in the cold to pull it for his betters. It simply turns, and turns, and asks nothing.
I could not make sense of it. A door is a hard thing. In winter it swells and sticks, and you put your shoulder to it and curse, and the wind comes in through the gap regardless. That is a door. This thing keeps the cold out and lets the warmth stay, all while spinning like a top, and I do not know what feeds it. No ox. No wheel of water that I could see. Only the walking of idle men, and their walking is enough.
I pushed it once, gently, to feel the weight. It moved sweet as anything. A whole winter of my labor could not build a thing so smooth.
That is what troubled me most. Not that it turns. That it turns for men who have never split a log nor buried a child, and it spares them even the small honest ache of opening a door. They pass through and feel nothing.
A man who is spared every hardship has nothing left to offer up. God save them, for they have forgotten how to be tired, and a soul that has never been tired will not know rest when it comes.