Ark Read Online Free PDF Page A

hurt a bit from a hard crease in the middle of the sofa bed. He folded the sheets and put the sofa back together, then walked stiffly to the smoke-filled kitchen where he found Jim whistling in his bathrobe and poking at a frying pan with a spatula.
    “Glad I woke up before you torched the place, bro,” said Dan. “Need a fire extinguisher?”
    “How do you like your eggs?” asked Jim.
    “As an ingredient in cakes,” said Dan. “I’ll just have some bacon and toast and coffee, if you’ll point the way.”
    Jim explained that Kas and Stephie had gone to church.
    “Jeez, I didn’t hear them leave,” said Dan. “You don’t go?”
    “Not much,” said Jim. “Sometimes I go to hear Steph sing in the choir.”
    “How does she sound? Good?”
    Jim laughed. “Never actually heard her. Kas says she did once, but it was because she came in too soon with a Hallelujah.”
    “Well, you’re not supposed to hear ’em, right? Say,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table, “speaking of church, I noticed the word cubit on those drawings on the coffee table.”
    “Oh,” laughed Jim, “those are old. I made them for a friend at least twenty years ago at the old Raftworks.”
    “I was looking them last night,” said Dan. “They look like mechanical drawings, but the measurements were in cubits.”
    “That’s true,” replied Jim, pouring two cups of coffee. “Those are sketches I made. Do you recognize the object?”
    “Not really.”
    Jim gave Dan his bacon and toast, then retrieved the ark drawings from the coffee table. “It’s just a box of wood overlaid with gold inside and out,” said Jim as he handed Dan the folder.
    “And what are these?” said Dan, pointing to the wings that adorned the top of the box.
    “Flat pieces of gold, joined to the lid of the box. They’re fashioned to resemble angels.”
    “Is the lid made of wood too?”
    “No, it’s solid gold.”
    Wait a minute,” said Dan. “Is this the Ark of the Covenant?”
    “Yup,” said Jim. “I think it is.”
    “But I saw it in that movie, Raiders , you know- and it didn’t look like this. The angels on top were like sculpture.”
    “Yeah, I saw the movie,” said Jim, sitting down across from his friend, “but I did my drawings from the Bible. I didn’t have any idea what the thing might look like. I just drew it up from reading the description in the Bible.”
    “That right?” said Dan, pondering the image.
    Jim leafed through the folder and found a Xerox of the passage from the Bible that described the ark. “Read it,” he said. “See what you think. Does it sound like the angels, cherubim, are sculpture?”
    Dan read the passage and examined the drawing more closely. “How big is a cubit, anyway?”
    “In inches, between eighteen and twenty-two. The length of a person’s forearm.”
    “Seems rather imprecise,” said Dan.
    Jim stirred his coffee absent-mindedly as he looked at his drawing. “I did some research back when I made them, and I’ve read some more stuff since then. I’ve decided that the ark probably measured thirty-one and a half inches by fifty-two and a half inches. Maybe fifty inches tall, including those wings. That’s based on the Egyptian royal cubit, which was twenty-one inches. People say the standard at the time was the Babylonian cubit of eighteen inches, but the Hebrews were from Egypt, right? They worked for the Egyptians as slaves, so I think it’s fair to say that they took Egyptian tools with them when they made their Exodus. What difference would it make what size it was?”
    “Maybe a lot.”
    “How so?”
    “That’s a loaded one,” said Dan, scratching his ear. “If you’re talking radio waves. Whether you know it or not this is a simple resonator: twin surfaces of gold, boxing a finite space. The space could correspond to a wavelength. Change the size of the box and you change the wavelength.”
    “What are you talking about?” asked Jim. “You’re saying this thing