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himself blue and applied the colors to the walls of the cave. But one near them, somewhere near at
hand. The man was not Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Rembrandt, Richelieu, Rasputin, Robert Fulton or
the Mahdi. Just a man. With the spark.
10
Once, Dira came to the man. Very early on. The spark was there, but the light needed to be
converted to energy. So Dira came to the man, and did what had to be done before the mad one
knew of it, and when he discovered that Dira, the Snake, had made contact, he quickly made
explanations.
This legend has come down to us as the fable of Faust.
TRUE or FALSE?
11
Light converted to energy, thus:
In the fortieth year of his five hundredth incarnation, all-unknowing of the eons of which he
had been part, the man found himself wandering in a terrible dry place under a thin, flat bumming
disc of sun. He was a Berber tribesman who had never considered shadows save to relish them when
they provided shade. The shadow came to him, sweeping down across the sands like the khamsin of
Egypt, the simoom of Asia Minor, the harmattan, all of which he had known in his various lives,
none of which he remembered. The shadow came over him like the sirocco.
The shadow stole the breath from his lungs and the man’s eyes rolled up in his head. He fell
to the ground and the shadow took him down and down, through the sands, into the Earth.
Mother Earth.
She lived, this world of trees and rivers and rocks with deep stone thoughts. She breathed,
had feelings, dreamed dreams, gave birth, laughed, and grew contemplative for millennia. This great
creature swimming in the sea of space.
What a wonder, thought the man, for he had never understood that the Earth was his mother,
before this. He had never understood, before this, that the Earth had a life of its own, at once a part
of mankind and quite separate from mankind. A mother with a life of her own.
Dira, Snake, shadow...took the man down and let the spark of light change itself to energy as
the man became one with the Earth. His flesh melted and became quiet, cool soil. His eyes glowed
with the light that shines in the darkest centers of the planet and he saw the way the mother cared for
her young: the worms, the roots of plants, the rivers that cascaded for miles over great cliffs in
enormous caverns, the bark of trees. He was taken once more to the bosom of that great Earth
mother, and understood the joy of her life.
Remember this, Dira said to the man.
What a wonder, the man thought...
...and was returned to the sands of the desert, with no remembrance of having slept with,
loved, enjoyed the body of his natural mother.
12
They camped at the base of the mountain, in a green-glass cave; not deep but angled sharply
so the blown pumice could not reach them. They put Nathan Stack’s stone in a fault in the cave’s
floor, and the heat spread quickly, warming them. The shadow thing with its triangular head sank
back in shadow and closed its eye and sent its hunting instinct out for food. A shriek came back on
the wind.
