Tree of Life Book III

Part II - Chapter 13

TREE OF LIFE BOOK III – PART II

CHAPTER 13

In the end, it was a long time. Much longer than we had expected.

I learned to tell the days from the nights by the tiny variations in the light coming down through the oculus. By them, I counted about two weeks until the rain stopped falling down on our skylight. After that, I didn't know, because by that time, the dome had come to be completely covered over with water and this I knew for the fish and other water life that had begun to swim by and over us, casting strange shadows on the ground and on our faces.

So, we were underwater, completely. The entire mountain. I wondered how long it would be before we got out again. Or if we were going to get out again. And when we did, if we did, will there be anyone left?

The days drifted by and every day, I would check on the dome to see if there was anything to be seen.

Nothing. Always nothing.

Days and days. Weeks and weeks. I counted about thirty of them, thirty weeks in total.

And then one morning, the dome was gone.

This was how I found out.

~~~

That morning, I got up. I left my rooms to go outside for a walk and also to check on the crops, in the fashion that had become my routine now over these last few months.

The minute I stepped out past the door, it caught my eye.

A solid pillar of white had stabbed through the ceiling to our cavern and now was a sword in the stone through the mid-point of our settlement, like a beacon, a flare, like a stairway leading upward and into Heaven.

It was slanted. It was bright. It was the first beam of pure sunlight I had seen in over two hundred days and my heart was caught up in my throat at the sight of it. I stopped breathing. I could not blink.

I raced over to it and noticed that others had already come to join me. We stopped at its edge. No one stepped inside it. They ran their eyes down the length of it and also tailed it back up all the way to its source, to the oculus high above us at the zenith to our world.

It was oval on the ground and measured about fifty yards across, about the size of the opening above through which it had entered.

Some fell to their knees. Some laughed and embraced each other. Some cried. We didn't know what to do at first. We didn't know what to say.

A hush fell around us.

The people parted behind me.

Annie.

She shuffled past the crowd and approached the light. She too stopped at its edge.

She glanced around, focusing on one and then another of the faces gathered there, like she was asking their permission. Squinting against it, she turned back to the light.

She reached out her hand. She let the light take it and it glowed.

She turned it over and this way and that. She closed her eyes and smiled.

We too smiled, all of us and began chattering among ourselves, brimming with delight, bubbling with joy. We held hands, we clutched shoulders, some even danced and we…

Annie cried out.

She jerked her hand back.

We stopped. We stared.