Havah Read Online Free PDF Page B

be without, to see a counterpart for every animal and none for oneself.
    Sometime before sleep it occurred to me that the true nature of being without might mean never knowing what one lacked.
     
     
    I DREAMED OF DARK heavens, of land pulled from the water, and the great energy everywhere, jittering with life.
    But there—a great light careened toward a zenith! It was a fiery globe, molten, throwing warmth onto my skin. There were others, too, peering into the darkness like the opening of a thousand eyes, each of them glistening through the heavens, seeming to stare at me. Behind me, a cooler light, so small in comparison, rose in silence. Then I realized it was no light at all but a small mass of land illuminated by that new, great star.
    Now with the rise of the sun and of the smaller mass, a long pull bent the walls of my veins in one great, throbbing tug. Release, and then the tug again: the ebb and flow of the tide. The pulse of every heart and vein. The beckon of every womb.
    It came as a chorus. It came as a roar. Now when I looked upon the land, the raw earth and craggy mountains in all their chilly finery had sprung a lush wealth of trees, shrub, and grass—green of every kind, twining toward heaven in whatever direction the sun might wheel. The pulse in my ear came not from me but from that land and the stems throbbing with water and sun and sap.
    Wake!
     
     
    THAT MORNING, AS WE made our water in the stream, I announced: “Beyond this land there is a great body of water, filled with strange life miniscule and giant, and beyond it there is another continent. And another.”
    I told him about the mountains with their treasures like charms hidden in a fist, and the marshy deltas that drained into great lakes where hatching flies spewed up from the surface like plumes of smoke escaping the abyss below. Of island mountains heaving up fire to sizzle in the sea. Of the frozen waters, creeping so slowly as to seem never to move.
    When I had finished, he gave a slow exhale. “You are truly the daughter of God.”
    “You told me once you roamed the place beyond this valley.”
    “Yes, beyond the mountain gate, before the great mountain to the east, the origin of our river. There is a wide basin before it, covered with waves of rustling grass.”
    My dreaming vision had not played me false—the world was vast. One day we would come out from this gated cradle and discover the secrets beyond that plain.
    I did not realize then how very soon that was to be.

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    Gazing at the glimmering sky by night, I saw the drama of the creation of my dreams inscribed in living code. If only I studied it long enough, I thought I might read within its record the account of all that had gone before. There was meaning, I knew, in the strew of the stars, cryptic symbols drawn by the finger of the One in an age before this.
    On a night like this I closed my eyes and found myself gazing down again at the thriving vegetation of the land. The tug and pull of the stars drew me out in all directions—toward the sun, toward the cosmos as they churned with such force that I thought I might split apart.
    I was aware of those celestial bodies as I had never been before, each of them measuring the passing of seconds and moments and hours, the fulmination of time where before there had been none.
    Now when I looked out over the land, I saw movement within the seas. I rushed as the wind upon the surface of the water and saw beneath it the swarm of fish and, beyond them, a great shadow, gliding through the deep. Was there anything so vast as this ocean, so great as this colossus within it, or so powerful as the One who commanded them all, Wake and Swim?
    My heart lifted, and I mounted up toward the sky. I cried aloud the name of the One, spoken in secret to me, but it was with the voice of the eagle. The heavens answered in kind with the throats of a thousand birds.
    Wake! I heard, and with every fiber of my being I replied:
    I