The Mountain

by David L. Golemon

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  For Valisa, Eunice, Steve, and Buck—The members of my first EVENT … I miss them beyond measure.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To the extensive libraries of H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, so helpful to an author with some very strange questions.

  Also, for Albert Einstein, someday they will prove that you were one of them all along!

  PROLOGUE

  History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

  —David McCullough

  MESOPOTAMIA, THE TIGRESS AND EUPHRATES RIVERS (FIRST AGE OF MAN)

  13,056 BCE

  The family gathered as the sun broke free of the black, roiling clouds for the last time. All forty-two men, women, and children sat silently on bedding of wool and goatskin. The evening meal was a heavy one. A virtual feast compared to normal building days, for the great father had warned all who would listen that there would be many days of hunger ahead. Three goats and twenty fat, roasted goslings sat before the group untouched as the darkness and an uncommon cold reclaimed the world after their brief taste of sunshine. For many in the group that darkness brought on horrid visions of what was to come. The family of men grew silent as each one heard the same sounds emanating from the closed-off world outside.

  It was a three-year-old great-granddaughter who broke the spell of silence when she began to cry. Her mother, only fourteen years of summers herself, was feeling the fear just like her daughter and all of those gathered around the meal that night. The young woman began to remove the child from the supper circle as others of the family averted their eyes.

  “No, bring me the child,” the great-grandfather ordered moments before the young girl could slink out with her crying daughter clutched tightly to her chest. “She is only feeling and saying what the rest of my children are thinking and hiding. Everyone at our circle of family wants to do nothing less than the child is doing, even unto myself, so how can I fault the child?” His granddaughter reluctantly handed over her baby.

  The large family watched as the old man held the girl to his face so he could see her better in the tallow-fueled illumination of the lamp bowl.

  “I shame myself, granddaughter, but I cannot remember the child’s name,” he said, not so much in embarrassment but as a way of reminding his extensive family that he had been rather busy the past fifty-six years. Or was it simply because the elder was ashamed that over those same years he had completely ignored the trappings of a normal father—he failed to know and therefore love his own kin.

  The girl-child stopped crying and started hitching her breath when the old man’s long and graying beard caught her attention. She slowly reached out and took a small fistful of whiskers and tugged. The move elicited the first smiles around the meal fire in what seemed like many years—ever since their father had ordered the family away from their ancestral home to this makeshift tent village deep inside the last forest near the confluence of the two great rivers.

  “Her name is Leah,” his granddaughter said as she looked apprehensively to her husband when the baby took hold of the great-grandfather’s beard. He was smiling at the baby and so she relaxed. Finally there was a great belly laugh from the man most of the older children had not seen jest in their entire lifetimes.

  “You have named her after my sister?” the old man asked as he finally managed to control his laughter.

  His wife of sixty-five years laughed also, happy to see her husband finally view them as his family and not the slaves they had been for the past half-century. All thoughts of the darkness and shadows were absent from the old man’s mind for the first time in years. The angels of the Lord may have been God-sent, but the old man knew exactly what they were—the deliverers of death. He despised the orders of the Lord to allow the destruction of so many innocents, and he was not allowed to help them. God was allowing children, such as the girl-child he was now holding, to be destroyed by his edict. His enemy was now those very same blackened angels of death that haunted his world. The old man and his God had come to a crossroads and the split was evident.

  He again saw the eyes of the child as she laughed and continued to tug at his beard. His eyes softened and he allowed the thoughts of darkness and angels to slip out of his mind as his great-granddaughter convinced him he had done right by his family.

  The design and building of his life’s ambition had been given to him in thought and dream by the Lord God. It had also come to him in dream that his was the only family of man that would survive God’s wrath. The shadows punished him every time he attempted to convince his onetime friends and neighbors of their true plight. The old man went against the decision of God himself.

  His wife reached for a wooden bowl and started filling it with meat and herbs for her husband. She ladled thick brown gravy over the meat. The old man handed the child back to her mother and then nodded his head in thanks when his wife held before him the steaming bowl.

  The mood was soon broken and the smiles died away as surely as the sun setting behind the darkening storm clouds to the south and west. The elder was the first to see the shadows near the animal pens move. He knew they were there with his family. He had been warned in dream and nightmare many years before that the shadows would be with them in the days leading up to this night of nights. He averted his eyes so that the children would not notice what had joined the family this evening in the midst of the last days.

  “Father, I saw a long line of soldiers today. They marched to the south. The gossip near the two rivers reports that the war you predicted began two years ago in the great southern sea and the ringed island at its center.”

  The old man, grateful to turn away from the hovering shadows of them, placed a piece of bread into his mouth and looked at his second-eldest son.

  “And how does my son Shem know this when he was to be harvesting the bounty of hay and barley our livestock will need upon our great journey?”

  “Because it is now impossible to travel anywhere without crossing the paths of many soldiers gathering to fight the evil in the south. Your son Shem has learned that there are even strangers from a distant land calling themselves Greeks among the rebels that are joining forces.”

  The old man continued to chew his bread and look at his son. His eyes moved to the darkest corner of the enclosure and saw a large shadow break free of the wooden side of the Ark and then disappear through the unpitched crack in the large loading ramp. That shadow was soon followed by four others.

  “Father, if what you have said is true, we are out of time. The war has been raging for two years now and from rumor we hear that the final blow to the evil ones on their island fortress has commenced. They say the combined barbarian army will win.”

  “My son Shem has always been the thinker, and now we learn that he is a war general also.” The old man smiled for the briefest of moments. “You are so sure of this great military campaign that you are predict
ing outcomes, both victor and vanquished?” He tossed the remains of his bread into the fire. “Tell me, Shem the thinker, the family’s master general; do the barbarians have the essence or the sheer power to end our world with their bone-edged swords and wooden ships?”

  “How would I know this? We here in this valley know nothing of war, nor even the people fighting it. The barbarians like ourselves wear nothing but skins, hides, and roughly woven homespun, when the false gods on their island kingdom wear finery the likes of which we have never before seen. They have science, we have goats. They have riches and slaves while we have nothing but mouths to feed. No, father, the barbarians cannot end this world. As you have said to us as many times as there are stars in the heavens—only God can end the time of men.”

  The old man knew the shadows, although departed from the interior, could still hear and feel what was being said in their absence; they always had. He again tried to ignore the thoughts of shadows. “You think, but you do not take the path that will allow you to think it through without cloudiness, Shem. The barbarians are no better than those they see as evil. They want the power and knowledge of the island people, and if they had this power of knowing God’s sciences they would be no gentler a taskmaster than the Titans on the ringed island. This is why the world ends. All of this”—he gestured at his family who watched him now with their frightened eyes—“will be gone and that is the way it was meant to be. The great ringed island has brought the very power of God’s elements to bear upon the world—a power only the Lord our God was ever meant to wield, and thus our world will come to an end, and only the righteous”—he smirked at his gathered clan—“or the stubborn will live to start anew.”

  “Grandfather, will our family be the only ones left upon the face of the world?”

  The old man smiled in all sincerity and then reached over and placed his hand on his great-grandson’s cheek.

  “No, there will be thousands, hundreds of thousands who will join us for the second coming of man. It will be a time and a place where we can live and grow together and not seek the ways and riches of those civilizations before us. No, we will see and come to know many different peoples on our path back to our home.”

  The great-grandson was about to speak again when the first rumblings from the earth were felt through the furs and homespun cloth upon which they sat.

  The father slowly stood with the help of Shem and looked at his large family as the shaking earth gradually settled.

  “The time of the end is upon us.” He looked at his three sons, their wives, and many, many grandchildren, and using the strength of his convictions the old one remained calm. “We must set our minds to what is to be done in this, the beginning of end times. You must harden your hearts, for the next two days will be the most horrible of your lives. You will all, every one of you, see friends and yes, even family, perish as the world shakes off the evil that has dominated it for over five thousand years.”

  At the end of his words his family started to rise as one. He looked at each and prayed that his path had been the right branch in the road to take. A barren road he had been placed upon at birth was now coming to an end as once more the world started to shake. This time the earth moved in a deeper and more pronounced motion.

  The war between the barbarians of the combined world and the false gods of the south—the Atlanteans—had begun in earnest and the false gods were losing.

  The known world of the first age of man would end in less than two days.

  * * *

  As Hamm traded the last of their hoarded gold for the remaining three shoats left in their neighbor’s pen, he grimaced as he heard the laughter behind him from his shameless old friends. He ignored them as best he could as his five sons maneuvered the three small pigs from their pen and started them along the path to the once-thick forest that grew between the two rivers.

  As the laughter at his family’s lifelong endeavor continued, Hamm looked up and saw the giant trees ahead of him, and it was then that he realized how much the forest had vanished in the thirty-two years they had been building their father’s hopeless folly. The deforesting had caused many a hardship for his kin and even more so for their neighbors, who had come to hate the family of Noah.

  As they cleared the screening line of giant trees, leaving the mocking laughter behind them, Hamm had to stop and look upon the false deity they had built. The Ark had taken thirty-seven years to design and construct and had cost the family everything they had in life, and even that of their children’s and grandchildren’s lives. From the gold riches of his father’s family to the many hundreds of pounds of precious coin made by his sons, all had gone into the construction of the monstrosity towering to the top of the few trees remaining, which were tasked with holding the great vessel anchored into place. The once-great and very powerful family was now close to destitute and with everything they owned aboard the Ark, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs and the laughter of old friends in their ears.

  As he was about to turn away he saw a shadow peel away from the highest point of the Ark and then vanish beyond the curvature of the bow. This was not the first strange darkness he had seen. For the past forty years the shadows that acted as if by magic came and went and their father, who Hamm knew had seen the strange shadows, never spoke of them. Even when one of his many offspring asked him about the darkness that seemed to have an intelligence, he would just shrug his aging shoulders, smile, and then say he had not seen a thing. The subject of the shadows was rarely brought up any longer.

  The trees held the enormous Ark taut to the earth in the ever-increasing winds. The giant, ages-old trees and their vines were intentionally entangled among the wood of the great vessel anchored to the earth. The Ark stretched four hundred and fifty-five feet from arched end to arched end. The spire-like bow of the ship rose to a hundred feet above the ground and it was there that Hamm saw his father perched, looking to the far-off southern borders of the two rivers. The skies there were glowing red and black. White and gray ash had started to fall only an hour before, falling ever thicker, like sickly snow from a dying sky.

  Hamm could see and hear the near panic in familial faces and voices as they herded the last of their farm animals over the thick, strong ramp and then aboard the Ark. They had bought as many animals and beasts of burden as they could before the end days, making them the butt of even more laughter and mockery by their neighbors, extended family, and former friends who counted the money offered for their animals and grain even as they laughed at the foolish family of Noah.

  “Hamm, you and Shem commence to raising and moving the ramp into place. The Atlanteans have unleashed Hell to the south. It is now time!”

  Hamm heard the words of his father and wondered as always how he knew these things, but did not ask. All the same he felt his blood go cold as the skies started to darken even more than the previous two days. The earth once again lurched under his feet and he stumbled as the ground seemingly came out from beneath his sandals.

  The world started to break apart from the power being unleashed by the warlords to the south.

  * * *

  The known world of the first age of man had actually ended two hours earlier in the Poseidon Sea. The large body of water, which would eventually become known as the Mediterranean, exploded with the power of ten thousand nuclear weapons as the seabed cracked and split from the power of the Atlantean sciences of earth and sea, along with the necromancy of tectonic earth movement. The combined strength of the allied barbarian states that had suffered through the reign of terror for five thousand years at the hands of the inhabitants of the circular-ringed island was now devastatingly close to their homeland.

  The attack started in earnest on the morning of the end of days. The strength of the Greek fleet under the command of Jason of Thessaly, coupled with a ground attack under the command of another Greek, Heracles the Barbarian, had pushed the Atlanteans to use the one thing they thought could save their island empire—th
e total destruction of the combined Greek and Egyptian fleets. This would be accomplished through the use of sound-inducing bells arrayed on the sea floor. The audio assault would fracture a localized section of tectonic plate, and that localized fracture would in turn create massive tsunamis that would swallow the entire thousand-ship fleet of their barbaric enemies.

  As the great machines were put into motion the world erupted. The Atlanteans’ map of the tectonic plates had not taken into account the spiderweb makeup of the earth’s crust. The grinding of one plate would cause a domino effect of the audible attack on the planet and spread far beyond the defensive area desired in the middle of the Mediterranean. Each was linked one with the other, which meant that the advanced race of Atlantis had set off a worldwide chain reaction that would change the face of the earth for all time.

  * * *

  The earth continued to rumble and roll beneath their feet. As Hamm looked to the sky, lightning wrenched the darkness and brought fire to the night, affording him a look at what it had taken him a lifetime to build. The Ark stood strong against the increasing winds and the constant shaking of the world. The ground beneath his sandaled feet lurched and the Ark rolled. The father heard the screams of the children inside as the wooden vessel rolled to the right and the old man feared it would continue to tumble until it tipped on its keel and was crushed beneath its own weight. Just as it hit the optimum point where it had to roll over, the restraining ropes still attached to the strongest of the remaining trees snagged and held firm as the Ark stopped its roll. The towering trees continued supporting the Ark but swayed as the smaller trees were uprooted and thrown into the hurricane-force winds shaking the world. Then the rains started in earnest. Viscous mud and stone struck the wooden ship at the same time as the first dirt-infused drops of rain started to fall. Enormous fireballs arched across the night sky as mountain-sized boulders and spits of land were hurled into the air from the horrendous explosions of the earth to the south.