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So much for the dream. Another form of popular 'topography', (a topographical act, one could say), is simply that of climbing a tower. Like the topographical Panorama, the tower gives us the whole city. Too much, in fact; too much information! Too much for me because I find the contemplation of so much city overwhelming to the point that it is hard to look at all. Prosaically you can say "ah, there's the x…there's the y… there's my hotel." That is fine, especially if it is your own city. But presented with a mass of information I see from the summit of Tange's City Hall in Shinjuku, Tokyo is truly perturbing; what is one to make of this astonishing expanse of data, this micro-mosaic of detail spreading to each horizon? It is for me not just a matter of how to cope with all this optically but also emotionally. A huge city spread out below me is almost painful. Each glance makes me sick with longing, for what I don't know. What I see is too big, the implications too huge, too moving. It is enough to me that I have been there. There is no need to look more than once; but having ascended 60 storeys then I feel I should wait longer; I find myself dutifully returning to each point of the compass wondering if it would be negligent if I took the next lift down.

From the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago I watch a helicopter rattle past below. For an hour (such is the frequency of its lifts) from the top of the Cairo tower I ponder the great brown city at dusk, like a huge quarry in its delapidation, the tiny pyramids as neat as the little wedges on a pack of Camels, the suburbs creeping towards them. (And this for me carries no threat; thrilling it would be for the city to lap around the Great Pyramid, tenement blocks backed up against its vast brown flanks!) But not all cities are epic from a tower. Sydney is prosaic. Impressive, yes, but not sublime; the concentration of downtown, grandly tacky as it is, gives way rather too suddenly to the suburban: a whole swathe of Ramsay Streets compromising the properly metropolitan texture at my feet.

It need not always be a vertiginous vantage point; there is the modest Monument (two hundred feet) in London; not modest in the eighteenth century, however; Boswell writes "It was horrid to find myself so monstrous a way up in the air." This seems to be the right type of height to be above London, to be close to its dank buildings, its turbid river, its sinister locked-in feel; close enough to hear the churning and seething of London below you, primitive enough very easily to imagine maid servants hauling their petticoats over the (then) low railings, falling into Fish Street Hill to their death (for the
Monument was a popular suicide venue.)

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