The glass floor

Text 1: Ninety Floors Up, by Callum Reyes

An original contemporary travel writing.

The lift takes fifty-eight seconds to climb ninety floors, and the only sign that you are moving at all is a faint pressure in your ears and a screen above the door on which the numbers blur upward like the reels of a fruit machine. Then the doors slide open, and the city falls away on every side.

The observation deck runs right round the top of the tower, walled entirely in glass, and at first it is simply, overwhelmingly beautiful. The river shines like a strip of foil. The old town, with its crooked lanes and copper domes, looks like something a child has built and abandoned on the carpet. Further out, the new districts march towards the horizon in ranks of glass and steel, every window burning orange in the late sun.

And then there is the floor. In one corner of the deck, a section of it is glass too: a square of nothing, perhaps four metres across, through which you can look straight down the side of the building to the street, four hundred metres below. A small queue of people waits at its edge. Children run straight onto it, stamp, jump, lie on their bellies and wave at the traffic. Adults are different. Adults stand at the rim and test the glass with one toe, like bathers at a cold sea.

I know perfectly well that it is safe. I have read that the panels could hold the weight of a lorry. None of this matters to the part of my brain that is older than reading. When I step out, my knees lock, my palms prickle, and my stomach performs a small, sickening somersault. Below my shoes, a bus the size of a grain of rice crawls along the boulevard.

I stay for perhaps ten seconds. It feels considerably longer. When I step back onto solid floor, a girl of about six walks past me, glances at my face, and pats my arm kindly, the way you would comfort an elderly dog.

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