Elijah (30 page)

The prophet did not climb the highest peak until spring, after the snow and ice had melted. The cold was bitter on the other peaks, too, with hard winds. He would not have exposed himself to the region at all except for his impatience to survey the places of Israel’s beginnings as a nation.

Yahweh’s voice was silent during the days of exploration, and silent still after Elijah had examined every point except the highest of the mass of Mount Horeb. The prophet was silent, too. He could not pray, though he often tried. He simply could not express the rumblings of his soul. His life was too impractical, too misused, too wasted on a people who would not respond. He had not dreamed of being the last prophet in a line of faith, but of rousing success in his efforts to bring the people back to Yahweh. The hiding, the loneliness, the austerity, the taunts, the fear, the anger of rulers all were worth bearing if the end brought success, but not if the battle were lost.

The immobile mountains spoke to Elijah, but their message was not clear. One day the barren crags spoke of hard, barren hearts; and another day the green ribbons of valley spoke of hearts that yielded fruit. One day Elijah saw visions in the wadis of Israelites who made a golden calf; on another day the visions were of a people who did, ultimately, follow Yahweh.

As days passed into weeks Elijah spent long hours staring from high ridges at the great mass of gray granite peaks, and their hardness came into his spirit. He could feel the steeling of the nerves. The food of the basins and valleys gradually filled out the muscles of his body, too, so that he took on once again the hard, healthy stockiness he had before his fast. His eyes lost their bewildered look, and took on again the prophet’s piercing depths.

Yet Yahweh did not speak.

Elijah became restless. He thought of Israel more. As March broke up the winter, he recalled images of Baal altars once again, and felt the anger rise again in his chest. But the renewed sensations only frustrated him more, for Jezebel had won. Yahweh no longer had a foothold in Israel.

It was in early April that Yahweh spoke. Elijah sat on a ridge below his adopted cave, watching the granite peaks that shone in the spring sun like burnished copper. The voice startled him, so abruptly did it break into his thoughts. He jumped to his feet and looked around. The hard mountains looked the same, with the shadows of their crevices etched deep into their sides. The voice had not been loud, and he wasn’t sure whether it came from Mount Horeb or from within his own breast. The voice asked simply, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

The prophet answered out loud, with an edge of anger such as when one lover feels wronged by the other. “I have been zealous for you, Yahweh, knowing that you are Lord of all the hosts of heaven.” The prophet’s voice was strong, louder than the voice that spoke to him. “I have fought hard for you, because the children of Israel have turned away from the covenant you made with them to be their God and they to be your people. They have thrown down your altars and slaughtered your prophets.” Elijah gazed upward toward the summit he could not see. Surely that was where the voice had come from. “I am the only one left, God, I alone, and I am marked for death, too. They are looking for me to kill me.”

The answer from God came quickly. It rose from within Elijah’s soul and from outside, too. It sounded from inside his head and from the rocks and trees of the mountain. He felt it in his limbs and heard it from the valleys below. The voice was soft, but commanding. “Go and stand on the mountain in my presence.”

Elijah started immediately up the mountain, climbing up a fairly easy trail that ran along towering precipices. Once on the ridge he made his way quickly to his cave. Inside, he turned to face the opening, his heart beating more rapidly from his awe of Yahweh than from the climb.

He had stood only a moment when a loud, whirring sound began. It quickly grew louder. The day darkened with surprising suddenness. Soon a wind of gale proportions sucked at the mouth of his cave and whistled in the crevices of the rocky ridge. Elijah fell prone to the cave floor and buried his head under his arms. The sound grew louder still, the terrifying storm of rainless wind whipping and snapping with wild fury at the mountain, trying to rip the rock skin from the Mount of God itself. Loud screeches echoed in the cave as the wind twisted trees around on their trunks, then horrendous cracks like thunder tore into his cave as trees were roughly severed from their bases. Torn trees plummeted down the mountainside, joined boulders knocked loose by the weight, to fill the air with horrifying crashes, scraping against the rock sides of the slope on their way to the valley below. In the midst of the screaming sounds of the stricken earth an even louder crack sent chills along his spine as a large boulder crashed into an outcropping to force it loose from the parent mountain.

The storm lasted almost an hour, then a deep quiet settled over the peaks. Elijah rose cautiously and moved slowly toward the mouth of the cave. He looked out. The sky was clear. He inched out to find a better vantage point. A large boulder lay a few yards from the cave. Below, down the valley where he had heard God’s voice, other boulders had cut tracks of destruction. Outcroppings that had become familiar to him were sheared off, their jagged edges left strangely lighter in color than the weathered pieces that lay broken below. Shallow trenches were cut promiscuously down the steep slope by the plummeting and tumbling rocks and trees. Below, the tree trunks and boulders and stones were heaped together in a wild tangled mass. Branches of bruised bark and torn leaves littered the slope and valley floor. Bare trunks jutted out from the downward slope, their torn splinters shining yellow-white in the sun. The stumps were bare and pitted, their bark stripped away and lying in tiny bits below them. To the right, not far away, a part of the mountain itself was torn apart from the range, standing alone as a sharp uplifted hand separated from its body by a deep chasm. The howling and crashing and wrenching screeches still echoed in Elijah’s head. A throbbing fear forced heavy thumps in his chest.

The mountain was silent now. Not even the faintest breeze broke the quiet, now almost as ominous as the sudden storm itself.

Elijah surveyed the destruction for many minutes. Surely God had called him to the mountaintop for this experience. Surely in it Yahweh had a word. Perhaps this is the message the prophet should deliver to Israel. Yahweh will tear them with the vengeance of a mighty storm.

But Yahweh did not say that. Was that not the message the prophet had preached all of his ministry? He could not deliver again such a message of wrath without divine certainty that it was from God. But Yahweh was as quiet now as the air itself.

Elijah walked slowly through the destruction back to his cave. He sat in the cave’s mouth and looked out onto the torn scene. Chills broke out on his arms several times as the terrifying sounds forced their way back into his mind. He listened to the day, expecting at any moment that Yahweh would speak again. But as the sunset touched the mountains again with color, ignoring the destruction below, Elijah still waited for that new word. Gradually, the colors on the granite lost their tone and the night fastened its grip on Sinai. A soft breeze began to blow then, its whisper a contrast to the wildness of the storm. The prophet nodded his thanks to Yahweh for the breeze and went into the cave for the night.

He awoke the next morning and went again to the mouth of the cave. Nothing had changed. The desolate scene was untempered from the day before. He sighed and shook his head. He started out of the cave, but in midstep the earth beneath him began to shake. He leaned his back against the cave wall and pressed his hands against its roof. The tremor increased. The hard, dirt-covered rock floor under him vibrated in quick, short movements, then with increasing tempo. There was a rhythm to it for the first moments, then the shaking became more erratic and violent. Elijah fell to the floor again and crawled in panic farther into the cave. Dust fell from the roof to fill the air with its choking fineness. The earth roared now, a long, rending scraping, sliding sound of rock on rock, and the noises of yesterday tore the air, louder than before, built on and carried by the shaking of the mountain. The thought flashed through his mind that Yahweh was going to take his life now as he had requested weeks before. It was fitting that he should die on Mount Horeb. But the cave roof held, and the quake was over in a few moments.

The dust in the cave filled Elijah’s nostrils and throat. He coughed, trying to expel the choking particles, then sucked in more of it as he gasped for air. He ran for the cave opening, coughing with such force that he had trouble with his footing. Outside, the floating dust formed a sheet above the earth as it was caught by the wind and pushed away.

The boulder that yesterday was deposited near the cave was gone. The broken hand of mountain that had been separated by a crevice from its parent was split away. It lay in a thousand pieces up and down the mountain, leaving its destruction behind it. The mass of tangled tree trunks and branches in the valley reached out their shredded limbs in grotesque gestures for help, broken by the weight of monstrous boulders released onto them by the quake. To the right the ancient crevice that had mystified him for days with its clinging bits of hardy growth between its jaws had opened wider, a chasm now whose bottom was lost in darkness.

Elijah could breathe now, but a taste of dust still lingered in the air, and the sun filtered through its haze to cast a dismal glow onto the mountain.

The prophet looked around carefully, half expecting a message from Yahweh to be etched in the newly-created crevice, or in the tangled mass of tree and rock below, or written in the dust that hung high in the air. But again he was met by the silence of God. Even the light wind that followed the earthquake had died away. Now, as yesterday, the day was bathed in quiet, as though nature had to catch its breath after the destruction before she could speak again. The newly rent rocks rested unmoving in their new places. The severed stumps suffered their stigma of death silently. The light litter of leaves from torn trees lay serenely where they fell.

The day wore on and Elijah did not leave his place. He paced up and down the ridge beyond his cave. If God did not want him to die, what then was his cause to live? What message did Yahweh have for his prophet?

Yahweh did not answer.

Evening came as before, ushered in by the same faint whisper of breeze that yesterday had cleansed the air and swept away the heat. As yesterday, Elijah thanked God for the gift, then continued his vigilance for the word from Yahweh.

Night came and Elijah ate of his stored provisions before stretching out to sleep. His mind raced unremittingly as he lay on his bed of leaves and twigs, his mantle spread under and over him. He could recall only two phrases from Yahweh, one question and one command. The prophet had answered the question and obeyed the command. What indeed was he doing here? Waiting for a word from his God. And Yahweh’s command to go to the top of the mountain surely was a preface to some word to come. Was there a message in Yahweh’s question? Were the cataclysmic events a warning that he should not be here? But, surely, there was more.

The next morning Elijah trembled as he left the mouth of the cave. His fright was mixed with a sense of anticipation to see what God would do next. A slight breeze blew, warm, not cool as the morning breeze usually was. He looked to the east, expecting to see the approach of dark storm clouds. Sure enough, they formed beyond the peaks, out toward the Gulf of Aqabah. Elijah watched them, entranced, as they thickened. They built up quickly, their thunderheads raised higher into the sky, gathering together in a great mass as they moved over the Sinai range. The mountain peaks looked blue and purple under them, dark colors, as dark as the clouds themselves, majestic and awesome in their shrouded fury. Lightning flashed from them, and in moments grand thunderclaps reached Elijah’s ear. The storm moved west, toward Mount Horeb, and soon the wind blew in hard fits around the prophet. His hair blew into his eyes and he felt the whipping of his beard against his neck. He watched and felt it, feeling as if he stood inside the voice of God, until the rain started. A few large drops fell first, irregularly, blown ahead of the clouds by the wind. By the time he ducked into his cave the storm had come in fury, blowing its rain so hard that he had to move farther back into the cave’s interior.

The sound of the thunderclap invaded the hollow sanctity of the cave simultaneously with its flash. He did not see where the lightning struck, but it was nearby and, he knew from its force, destructive. The rain fell only for a few moments, but its force was furious. Then it passed over the mountain to the west. Before Elijah could make his way out of the cave the sun was out again.

He was surprised that the fury was so short and ineffective. He made his way out to the cliff edge to survey the storm’s effect on the torn valley. Then he saw it. The mass of tangled trunks and branches in the deep wadi below was burning. He watched the flames, curiously for awhile, then with alarm as they spread rapidly along the huge pile of nature’s trash. Soon he could hear its roar, even at his distance, burning with the white heat of a smelter’s fire. Bits of bark and twigs, still burning, rose on the hot waves of the flames to be carried by the wind all along the valley. Within an hour the unchecked flames spread throughout the wadi, the floating bits of fire igniting clumps of trees and bushes up and down its length. The smaller clumps of growth burned rapidly, the larger ones more slowly but more fiercely, their own fires throwing of faggots to ignite other trees and bushes. The fire roared with the sound of a thousand chariots into the afternoon before it began to die.