People of the Ark (Ark Chronicles 1) (27 page)

25.

The weather-beaten Ark with its bottom hull overgrown with marine grass and barnacles lay athwart the mountain of Ararat. The door stood ajar, the vessel empty, used up, fulfilled of its awesome task.

In the almost bare valley below
there stood eight weary people. They had searched for rocks, one by one piling them together until Noah had his altar. Cold winds howled. Storm clouds billowed. It looked like rain.

Rahab snuggled closer beside Ham
. He drew his cloak about the two of them.

Noah lifted his arms in prayer, the smoke of burnt offerings strong and dark, snaking to the heavens with their angry clouds
. Noah prayed as thunder boomed, making each of them flinch. The thunder boomed louder. Lightning flashed.

Noah cried out and fell on his face before the altar.

Ham’s stomach clenched. He dropped to his knees and bowed low before the altar. All of them did. Then a great and powerful wind tore at the mountain of Ararat, shattering rocks.

Ham trembled uncontrollably
. He cried out, so did Rahab and the others.

“
Don’t look up!” Noah shouted. “For Jehovah is not in the wind.”

After the wind
, there was an earthquake, but Jehovah was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but Jehovah was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

Noah pulled his cloak over his face and rose from his knees
. Ham and the others kept their faces pressed to the ground.

“
This is what Jehovah says,” Noah told them, “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

Then Noah ceased speaking, and in a whisper
, Jehovah spoke to them all.

“
Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the Earth. The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the Earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

“
But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. And for your lifeblood, I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man.

“
Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of Jehovah has Jehovah made man.

“
As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the Earth and increase upon it.”

Then
Jehovah said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish My covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the Ark with you—every living creature on Earth. I establish My covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the Earth.”

And
Jehovah said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set My rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between Me and the Earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the Earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again, will the waters became a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between Jehovah and all living creatures of every kind on the Earth.”

So
Jehovah said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between Me and all life on the Earth.”

Ham feared
Jehovah, but to hear Him repeat these promises over and over again calmed him and reassured him that a new flood, a new disaster wasn’t about to slay them. Ham swallowed, wishing to call out and tell Jehovah that he was sorry for all the wrong he’d done. But he didn’t dare.

Then he heard:
“It’s beautiful.”

Ham frowned
. That sounded like his father.

Then he heard Shem suck in his breath.

Beside him, Rahab stirred.

Ham, no longer feeling the close presence of
Jehovah, dared peek up. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The dark clouds had rolled away and the sun shone. And over the Ark, bright, colorful and wonderful shone the world’s first rainbow.

Ham
’s chest felt hollow; and a great welling of love toward Jehovah, of His awesome power and grandeur overwhelmed him. After a time, he glanced at Rahab. Tears streamed from her eyes. They smiled. And they held hands. Together, they gazed in rapture at the rainbow, recalling the blessed promises of Jehovah Almighty and that they had survived the Deluge.

The End

The epic adventure continues with

People of the Flood

Read on for an exciting excerpt from the next book in the Ark Chronicles.

1.

“It’s freezing,” Rahab said.

Ham pulled her up to him on the mountainside and wrapped his arms around her. Clouds fled across the sky. The wind howled, tugging their garments like an angry beggar.

“Look at the Ark,” he said.

It rested in a cleft of granite, a monstrous, wooden ship stuck on a mountain. Bare rock and water-scoured boulders barely softened by patches of greenery—the Old World had never seen such bleakness. Life struggled to reassert itself from waterlogged seeds and saplings.

Ham guided Rahab over a bare mountain ridge and into a bleak valley, with loose shale sliding under their feet.

“It’s so silent,” Rahab said.

“And eerie,” Ham added. “Do you suppose this is what the Earth was like in the beginning, before Adam and Eve?”

“No. Not so forbidding,” Rahab said, “so savage.” She groped for his hand. “Can we survive here?”

“We must.”

Lighting flashed and thunder shook them.

Ham grimaced later. “At least I don’t have to worry about a charioteer of Havilah or a Slayer abducting you.”

“Or a Red Blades for you,” she said.

Despite the cool weather, sweat prickled his skin as they tramped up the next ridge. There, a strange and dreadful scene shocked them.

“Oh, Ham, how awful,” Rahab said. “It’s like the Old World’s bones.”

Logs, millions of uprooted trees, many of them monsters from the time of Eden, were jammed and thrust into the valley. Mold and fungus made thousands of them look leprous. How many other valleys were like this, filled with the debris and flotsam of the Flood?

The next valley led to a higher mountain. Halfway up it, they sheltered behind a boulder. There they devoured a package of bread and dried figs. At the top of the mountain, the wind blew hard but the view was fantastic.

“Oh, Ham, look.”

In the distance, far past the mountains—“Blue,” he said. “Like the horizon.”

“It’s the sea, the Floodwaters.”

“I think they’re still receding.”

“Can we go back to the Ark now? Have you seen enough?”

Returning in time for supper, the Ark’s narrow halls seemed cramped like a tomb.

Japheth and Europa had been exploring too. They told of a valley like a graveyard, filled with jelly-like corpses: animals, men and great fishes. According to Japheth, the waxy substance must have coated the corpses at some great depth. Those corpses must have only surfaced at the end of the Flood.

“If they had floated near the surface the entire time,” Japheth explained, “they would have decomposed by now.”

“They have become food for the Ark’s predators,” Ham said. “It’s a vast supply of carrion for them to feast on.”

“As the various fungi and molds on the logs you found will supply herbivores with sustenance,” Gaea said.

Noah ended the discussion, saying that tomorrow was going to be a hard day. They all needed their sleep.

The great release began the next morning at dawn. Rats, mice, sparrows, pigeons and pterodactyls fled the Ark together with deer, elk, glyptodons and elephants. Some of the animals wobbled, weak after a year of confinement. Others had mangy fur or sore hooves.

“We’ll never see this kind of day again,” Ham told Rahab.

A few hours before dusk, they were done. All the plant-eaters had left the ship, and the majority of those the immediate vicinity of the Ark. A moose bawled at them, then trotted away for one of the many mountain ridges. The reunited ravens wheeled overhead.

“We made it,” Gaea said, wearily. “We really did it.”

Noah put his arm around her waist and kissed her.

Ham took Rahab by the hand and whispered that maybe it was time to repopulate the Earth. She giggled, and they headed into the Ark.