Level: Observer

About 3850 BC
The raging, rolling, ochre cloud engulfed the desert from horizon to horizon, but at last the sandstorm began to expend itself. After a few more hours dust devils pirouetted like brown-skinned harem girls on the tips of sand dunes under a cooling sky.
The figure staggered out of the horizon like a black and blue mirage. At first no bigger than a fly, he would have grown to the size of a man, had anybody been there to see him.
He reached one of the very highest dunes and began to climb. But his exhaustion overcame him and he fell to the sand, pounding it with his fists. Slowly, hand over hand, he clawed his way to the tip of the dune and lay still.
Only after a long while did he raise his eyes, the only part of his head showing through the slit in blue cloth that wound around his head. He stared wearily toward the next dune, but there was no dune, only a gentle slope down to what looked like a wide river, its water sparkling in the sun.
He didn’t believe it, but his legs suddenly had all the energy they needed. He got to his feet and slid down the dune to the dirt and ragged vegetation that stretched the river’s fertility into the desert.
The man touched the leaf of a plant and felt its rubbery reality. Putting back his head, he yelled:
“You have delivered me! Oh thank you, gods of the great desert!”
A tear cut a pale path through the grit on his cheek. He ripped away the blue rag, revealing a white rind of handsome face, centred round a sensual mouth. His blue eyes burned for the cool water, so he began to run.
It proved much further to the river than he had thought, perhaps five miles, but still his legs carried him on. At last he threw himself into the river and drank, and drank, and drank.
The man from the desert slept that night with an empty stomach, but a happy heart.
“I’m safe! And tomorrow I will find plenty of food. These banks are thick with palms heavy with dates!”
During the night a jackal came sniffing round the sleeping man and wondered from where he had come.
In the early hours, as the sun crept over a distant mountain’s lip, he began to wonder about his survival. It seemed like a miracle, a miracle like no god’s he had known before. It wasn’t like the work of the Anubians’ god, who seemed vengeful.
The wanderer stared defiantly at the red disk of the sun, as had been his wont since being bullied as a boy. At times he even stared at the midday sun’s burning disk of fire, against the advice of others. He enjoyed the feeling as it seared the back of his eye. Afterwards he could see a black disk wherever he looked, for hours, reminding him of the duality of the world.
“No, I won’t worship the nameless God of gods, whom the Anubians had us worship! And I certainly won’t worship the Bekans themselves, as some did. I will have a new god! The sun disk shall be my god! And I shall call you … .”
But he couldn’t think of a name. Everything that came into his head seemed to reduce the beauty and mystery of his new god. So he decided to name the effect of the disk, the beams of light that radiated from it. This would be one of the manifestations of his god.
“Hm. Rah sounds good! I shall call you Rah, for now.”
He grabbed a twig and drew a small circle, with lines radiating from it, in the sand, laughing at what he had drawn, and told himself:
“I saw an Anubian draw shapes in the sand once, when they were planning a building. And when a second man came, he looked at the shapes and nodded, as if they had talked to him. This sign will be for Rah.”
The man struggled to his feet and left the cool shade of the palm he had been sitting under, to study its crown, nearly seventy short arms above. He shook his head slowly.
“I’m so hungry! In the village, a boy would have shinned up the tree with a belt. Now I have to do it! And its further up for a short man like me! But I’m weary.” He shook his head again. Wandering about for a while, he found a shorter date palm, whose curved trunk bowed close enough to a mud bank for him to start half way up. He pulled the one thing he had carried across the desert, his bronze axe, from its waist holster and flung it on the sand.
The sores on his arms stung wickedly as he twisted his blue scarf into a chord to wrap around the trunk the tree, but the physical pains in his body seemed remote after so much suffering. Passing the twisted scarf round the tree’s rough trunk, he wrapped its ends round his wrists and wearily braced his weight against the tree with his bare feet. Taking a deep breath, he began to climb. The tree’s large bark scales helped him gain purchase, but even so, several times he had to pause to catch his breath.
“I wish I had brought my axe now!” he moaned, as he reached the first clump of dates and tried to strip them off, so that they would fall to the ground. “With one cut, I could have lopped off the whole branch!”
He carried on, sometimes moving a little higher, sometimes circling the trunk slowly, until he had dropped all the fruit within easy reach. At last he wearily edged back down to the soft sand, falling the last few feet and collapsing in a heap. He didn’t move for a while, but when he did, he reached for the nearest date and bit into the juicy fruit with his cracked lips. The juice penetrated into the sores and ulcers in his mouth, but he laughed like a child who has learned to run.
“I will live, oh Rah!” It was almost a defiant statement of fact.

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