Tomba shrugged. "They got here first. You can’t pretend astonishment, when you see ’em." He was working on a splice. This platform on which they all stood was impaled, as it were, on the shaft of the Monument: an immense fluted column that stood alone on Fish Street Hill. Supposedly its foundation covered the place where the Fire had started in 1666. Or so ’twas asserted by the Latin inscription on its base, which blamed the conflagration on Popish incendiaries, despatched from the Vatican. At any rate the middle of the high viewing-platform was occupied by a stone cylinder, which was the upper terminus of the stairway, as well as the support for diverse Barock decorations, knobs, lanthorns, &c. piled on top to make the Monument that much taller. Several turns of rope had been laid round this by the two Filipinos, who’d set out their street-shoes in a tidy row so that they could work barefoot, sailor-style. The same ropes passed through the eye of the huge block on Tomba’s lap. To look at it, a landlubber would phant’sy that the pulley had already been made fast to the top of the Monument; but the Filipinos were riggers, and would not let it rest until a good deal more splicing, seizing, stropping, and serving had been effected. They’d been busy enough, until now; but the arrival of the man in the golden waistcoat threw them into a lather, and even the Jews backed away from them, lest they get jabbed by a marlinspike or bludgeoned by a heaver, and find their forelocks unfathomably convolved with a turk’s-head.