Bell-Keepers of the Salt-Stair Descent — an age when a cliff-cut pilgrim city empties its evening prayer down one immense stone stair carved straight into the sea-face, ten thousand descending pilgrims pouring toward the tidal shrine below while the returning column climbs against them on the same worn treads, so the stair becomes a two-way avalanche of shoulders and lamplight with no still step in it; and the Bell-Keeper is the one appointed to hold the great mid-flight landing where the descending flood and the climbing flood shear past each other, planted at the bronze wayfinding-bell that the callers ring off the set of her braced body — not to speed the descent, not to slow the climb, only to REMAIN on the mid-stair mark through the whole crossing so the stair below can be read true, while every pilgrim that brushes her wants to fold her into the going-down or the coming-up