“Have… you been there?”
“I am not yet ready for the final purging. I long for the day when I will be ready.”
“You long for it?”
“Of course.”
“But… the pain… the burning.”
“My Self has become so foul and odious to me, there is no fire I would not endure to be rid of it. I would endure countless aions in my journey to have it gone. To feel it burned away in the cleansing furnace would be worth any torment I might suffer in the process. To cast myself into the healing well of those flames is the greatest longing of my life.”
“Why don’t you go there now?”
“Everything is appointed in his time. I cannot go before I am ready. I must pass through the appointed aions. Too much of my Self yet remains. I am well aware of it, but putting it to death takes time. Such is the purpose of my present aion. My eyes must be fully opened to what I am. Otherwise the fire cannot accomplish its purpose. It grieves me to know I am not yet ready—that my disgust for myself is not complete. I am still being prepared.”
“When that time comes, how long will you remain?”
“For an aion, of course—as he told his disciples long ago. It is the fire of aionian cleansing.”
Six
The Brilliant Young Man and the Courageous Boy
The Mountains and smoke from the pit disappeared from my sight. I was still gazing after them when I realized that the Naturalist had left me. I glanced about, uncertain what I was to do. Should I try to find my way back to the light of the portal through which I had come? Or perhaps was I meant to strike out in the direction where I had last seen the Mountains?
That I even considered the possibility that I might determine my own path in this place showed how little I yet grasped the nature of what lay ahead.
I did not have long to contemplate my options. All at once I was walking beside a young man several inches shorter than myself. He had appeared out of nowhere. We were now striding along as if we had been doing so for some time.
I glanced toward him. He was utterly different than my nineteenth-century guide. He appeared a thorough modernist, not merely from my own century, but from what I would recently have called the present of my own time. That the thought of such a term occurred to me likewise demonstrated that I was not yet altogether here.
Here the idea of time was meaningless. This whole world—another meaningless concept—dwelt inside Einstein’s theoretical time-capsule equation: An infinity of time took no time. A moment required all eternity to accomplish its purpose. There was no time. There was all time. They were one.
“Are you…?” I found myself saying a little timidly.
“Am I dead, you mean?” he said bluntly.
“It’s just that… you appear so young. Have you only just arrived?”
“I cannot say how long it has been in your years,” he replied. “I am in my early aions here. I am still trying to learn to see. I would guess it has been a hundred years. I read your book before I came.”
“Then it can hardly be a hundred years! It was published—let me see… it’s only been three years.”
He merely smiled. I would recognize the expression soon enough—a look that would pass across the faces of many of those I encountered. It was the look that said I had just blurted out something more stupid than could be imagined.
“Time is fluid here,” he said after a moment. “Haven’t you read your Einstein? But I forget, you are here on a trial basis. No wonder you are still confused. You are the first such one I have met,” he went on, at last growing talkative. “Most come to stay.”
“I take it you did?”
“Oh, yes. There was no going back for me. I suffered a massive heart attack. It was instant. I felt nothing. I suddenly found myself flying through the wonderful Portal of Light. It was as if I had been loosed from every weight and encumbrance. Wasn’t it the most delicious sense of energy and power and life?”
“I suppose it was. Yes, I rather enjoyed it, actually. I thought I was dreaming. I still think I’m dreaming!” I added with a light laugh.
“That’s common at first. I thought so too. But no—you’re here alright.”
“It’s a shame you had to die so young,” I said. “You look like an intelligent young man. You must have had a bright future ahead of you.”
A cynical outburst met my words.
“Intelligent?” he repeated. “I thought you might recognize me. I would much prefer not to fill you in about the past.”
“Sorry.”
“I was written up in all the magazines and Sunday supplements… interviews… documentaries—the whole child genius thing. I was the Chinese teen touted as having the highest IQ ever recorded.”
“Of course. I remember now!” I said. “I didn’t recognize you. Actually, I followed the news about you for a time. I suppose I lost track. All the major universities were stumbling over themselves to lure you to their programs. Where did you finally go?”
“MIT. But it wouldn’t have mattered—Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Princeton, Paris… any of them would have been the ruin of me.”
“How do you mean?”
“They all would have done just what MIT did—deepened my love for my intellect. By the time I was twenty-two, I was gone. I read your book. I was convinced we were all gods and that I was the smartest man ever born. Thank God I was taken out of that before it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late to prevent the monstrous evil my intellect would have been capable of,” he replied. I took in his statement, I confess, with confusion. How could such an intelligent young man consider himself evil? He knew my thoughts.
“I had taken an interest in genetics, you see,” he went on. His tone was sad, as if he were recounting a bad dream. “I was intrigued both by the idea of population manipulation and age control. In my early twenties, they were but far off dreams of my imagination. I was just beginning. But it was an age of such rapid technological advances in DNA and all the associated research. It was only a matter of time before my ideas would have reached practical applications. I was like all young idealistic scientists—convinced that my efforts were for the good of mankind. But with energy supplies running low, and populations continuing to explode… surely you see where it would ultimately have led. I would have become the Hitler of late modernity. The mass murders for which I would have been accountable, however, would all have taken place in the test-tube. I would have become as accountable for the murders of millions as the abortionists. I would probably have received a Nobel Prize one day. I would have been hailed rather than despised, as Hitler was. Yet I would have been his twin in evil.”
He paused. I saw his body tremble at the thought.
“I shudder to think what I might have become, and what might have been the result. You cannot imagine how thankful I am to have been rescued from that future by an early death. As it is, much of that potential evil died with me. Once I was shown the sea of faces, I wept for what must have been a year.”
“Who were they in your vision?” I asked. “For me, it was those who had read my book.”
“For me they were the faces of those my research would not have allowed to live. I was seeing into the future. I saw them alive because my career had been cut short. The relief was stupendous to realize they would all live normal lives. It will be generations before another intellect capable of what I was will come along. Hopefully by then mankind will have awakened to the reality that its Creator walks the planet among them. What was given me was a vision. You were shown reality. The faces you saw are real people whom you deceived and who are already here. You taught people they could become their own gods. That is what I took from your writing. By the time I had my Ph.D., I thought I was a god, an intellectual giant among the peons of the world. Now here we are together, recognizing, to our shame, what we were. I was considered brilliant there. Here I am known as The Fool Who Thought He Was Wise.”
He paused again and this time glanced away. I was certain I detected tears. I averted my gaze so as not to embarrass him. How little I still knew! He was light years beyond the sting of embarrassment. I would learn in time that tears were of the most honorable evidences of this place. When you met one whose face was permanently scarred by their tracks down his or her cheeks, you knew you were in the presence of one who was nearly ready.
It would be a long time before I knew what they meant by the term.
“What am I called here?” I asked.
“It will not be determined until you decide whether to stay—or return so that you may die again. There is a rumor that each of our names is written somewhere on some object or another. I have only heard hints, you understand. I don’t know how or where we are meant to learn what they are.”
“I thought you said you knew your name.”
“That is only what I am called now. However, I was not sent to talk to you about that,” he said after a moment. Still he allowed his tears to run and did not wipe them away. “I was sent to show you the purpose of the fire. One who is simply known here as the Scotsman explained it to me. I am given to understand that he is often the one who explains the purpose of the fire. You will no doubt meet him in time. He will tell you more than I am able to. But come.”
He turned and led me up a steep incline, then into a thick wood. We walked through it for some time without speaking until we arrived at a clearing in its midst. In the middle of it glowed a pile of red-hot coals from what must have been a great fire. I had hardly stopped to think about it, but the day was pleasantly warm. Why would anyone need a fire on a day like this?
On the far side of the fire, which emitted a wonderfully sweet fragrance, sat an old woman at a spinning wheel, ancient beyond years yet lovely beyond imagining. Her hair flowed and streamed out all around her, though there was not a breath of wind. The sound of the wheel as she spun made music as from an Æolian harp, again from an invisible wind wafting through it.
And she sang with the music of her spinning harp. Her voice cannot be described, nor the words of her song recalled with certainty. But this is something like them—
The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.
The weepers are learning to smile,
And laughter to glean the sighs;
Burn and bury the care and guile,
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.
The woman and her strange singing held me in rapt attention for some time. Then my sight was drawn to a boy kneeling beside the coals I had not noticed as we had approached. He was probably sixteen or eighteen, at least as I previously would have perceived his age. He wore an old-fashioned leather tunic and shirt of linen. Around his waist his belt held a knife and on his feet were leather sandals. He was clearly from some earthly era other than mine.
Now I saw what must have given the fire its sweet fragrance. Heaped amid the coals were hundreds of rose buds of great variety and many colors, burning but not consumed. The smell of roses filled the air.
My guide and I stood at the edge of the clearing and watched. Presently the singing of the woman ceased, and she spoke to the boy.
“You have been very brave till now,” she said. “Are you ready for your severest trial yet?”
“I will try to be ready,” he answered.
“That is all that is required. Your readiness needs only trust and obedience to turn it into courage.”
“Then if you think me ready, I will do my best to obey.”
“What I have to ask you to do will hurt dreadfully. The pain will be greater than anything you have ever imagined. But it will not hurt you, and great good will come to you from it.”
The boy made no answer but knelt gazing into the woman’s face.
“Now,” she said, “thrust your right hand into the fire.”
The boy hesitated but a moment. Then with a quick motion, he leaned forward and shot his hand deep into the red-hot coals.
An audible gasp escaped my lips. My eyes widened in horror. I expected to hear him shriek and scream in agony and for the smell of the roses to be replaced with the stench of burning flesh.
But beyond a momentary sharp intake of breath, he made no sound. That he was in agony was clear. His eyes, though shut, poured out tears like a river. His body shook and trembled. Sweat covered every inch of him. But he held his hand in the coals and did not draw back.
How long I watched gaping, I do not know. Then the lady spoke again. She told him to remove his hand. I started to turn away, certain that I would see him horribly mutilated or but the stub of an arm where his hand had been burned off altogether.
Instead, a wondrous sight met my eyes. His hand and arm were whole and clean and shining with gold.
The boy looked to the lady. She was weeping.
“Did you feel it too, then?” he asked.
“Of course. I feel every pain. But it is over now. You have passed through the fire. The hand that once sinned has been cleansed and purified.”
With her words, the woman, her spinning wheel, the rose fire, and the boy all disappeared from my sight.
Seven
Purpose of the Fire
“What was all that?” I asked.
“You have been shown the purpose of the fire,” answered my guide.
“But… was it a vision?”
“Of course. But no less real.”
“Who was he?”
“A boy named Curdie.”
“Where is he now?”
“He was being prepared for a mission. His path is different than yours. You saw all you were required to see.”
“Why did he have to put his hand in the fire? It seems a dreadful form of preparation.”
“He is compelled to do terrible things sometimes.”
I had not an inkling who he was talking about.
“The boy had once killed with that hand. The sin had to be burned away so that his hand would be made ready for the Master’s use. All are purified by the fire. Only the fire can produce gold.”
“Will… will the same be required of me?” I asked, a little timidly.
“Oh, no—nothing so easy as that. If that were all it took, Curdie would have been sent to you, not me. Have you not suspected it yet? You and I must walk a similar path. Our sins were committed with no mere hand. Our sins were not mere boyish indiscretions. Our sins were on a far more massive scale. Our sins were willful. We sinned with our brains, not our hands. We were in love with our intellects, in love with ourselves.”
“You don’t mean—” I began, aghast at the thought.
“That we will be required to put our heads in the fire?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Nothing so easy as that,” he repeated. “Don’t you understand—it was all of us. Our whole selves were bound up in the evil we allowed to consume us in arrogance, ego, pride. We were fools, don’t you understand? We were the imbeciles, not the Christians you looked down on. Ours was the sin of Satan himself—we thought we were better than God! You did not merely kill, you deceived. That may be a worse thing, I do not know. I was brought here to prevent my becoming a white-collar murderer. But our sin is the same, yours and mine. It must be purged from us in the same way. We must leap headlong into the fire. We require fire through our entire beings—the all-Consuming Fire. No mere cleansing of a hand or foot or eye will do what is needed in the depths of our souls.”
I could not apprehend the magnitude of his words. Perhaps it was because I was not ready… not yet able to see.
“God’s judgment must fall on our sin,” he went on, “that we, along with all his creation, may be purified and restored. It is the fire of loving judgment. His prophet wrote, I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove your impurities. I will refine you. I will test you in the furnace of affliction. I will brin
g you into the fire. I will refine you like silver and test you like gold.”
The words were high above me. Vaguely, I had the sense that he was quoting from the Bible, a book I had despised. How the young man knew it so well, I did not pause to wonder. He continued to speak… ancient and prophetic words whose meaning I could but faintly apprehend. After some time, he grew silent.
We continued on. The trees slowly thinned and took on a golden hue. It appeared that autumn had suddenly burst upon us. We walked for some time through the yellow wood in silence.
“Your time has now come,” said my guide at length. “We have arrived at the juncture where the paths of your future diverge. Two roads lay before you. You can remain in limbo no longer. You must either turn back to the darkness, or go on…” His voice trailed away.
“To the light?” I said.
He turned his eyes upon me, gazed deep into my soul, and spoke words that caused me to tremble. “Oh, no,” he replied. “Did you not understand what you were just shown? Ahead lies the fire.”
Instantly he disappeared.
I looked about me. Everything had vanished but the way at my feet. It was as though the path upon which I walked was suspended in midair. The wood, the meadows and fields, the distant horizons were gone.
I could move only forward or back. Somehow I knew that with the next step I took I would not henceforth be able to alter my course.
I turned behind me. Again the great orb had risen over the horizon. I descried a tiny door in its midst that appeared exactly like the bedroom door of the mountain lodge. Though I remembered seeing no door at the time, I knew it was the way I had come. But the great sun-like sphere no longer glowed with brilliance and luminescence. It had become a sallow gray. It was the pallor of death. Gradually it darkened as I stared at it.
I turned around where the path led in the opposite direction. On the far distant horizon a much different scene met my gaze. The path disappeared at the horizon into the midst of great turbulent flames of red and orange rising halfway to the sky.
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