The eight-sided marble tower is the Tower of the Winds, and it's one of the cleverest buildings in Athens. Look up near the top. Each of the eight sides has a carved winged figure flying sideways across it, and each one is a wind. The north face has Boreas, an old man wrapped in a heavy cloak, blowing on a conch shell, because the north wind is cold. The west face has Zephyrus, a young man with his lap full of flowers, because the west wind brings the spring. The building tells you what the weather will do from each direction.
A man named Andronikos, from the town of Kyrrhos in northern Greece, built it about a century before Christ, and he packed it with machinery. Below the winds, cut into the marble, are the lines of sundials, on every face the sun can reach. Whichever side of the tower you were standing on, you could read the time off the wall. On the roof stood a bronze Triton, a sea god with a fish's tail, who turned in the wind and pointed a rod down at whichever wind was blowi
ng. The building gave you the time and the forecast at once.
Then Andronikos did the thing I love most about this building. He built a second clock inside it.
Sundials are useless on a cloudy day, and useless at night. So inside the tower, Andronikos put a water clock, fed by a channel running down from a spring on the Acropolis. Water filled a tank at a steady rate, and a float rose with it to
