You clamber out of the world, you soak up the view, you plunge back in, you move onto the next tower - a digestible, compulsive little design loop that has come to serve on the one hand as a tacit colonial fantasy, the mapping of "exotic" yet highly regularised terrain, and on the other as a kind of stress release valve. But the real reward for your labours is eagle-diving from the summit, back into that haystack of threats and distractions.
Reach the top and you can synchronise with the Animus device, the game-within-a-game that serves as Assassin's Creed's frame narrative, exposing nearby landmarks and activities on your minimap. There is nothing but the scuffle of toes on masonry and the rattle of Altair's sword in its sheath. The occasional frustrations of shouldering through mobs or scrambling across uneven rooftops are forgotten. The city is a fading murmur beneath you, the cries of beggars and traders and the jingle of guard awareness icons whisked away by the wind. If there are moments of serenity in the original Assassin's Creed, which turns 10 years old next month, they are surely to be found in the act of scaling towers - a way of pacing consumption of the landscape that has shaped almost every subsequent open world escapade, from Rocksteady's Batman Arkham games to the mighty Breath of the Wild.