Hell & Beyond by Michael Phillips

Author:Michael Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2012-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

The Sea of Burnished Souls

The high hills through which I had passed after the desert disappeared behind me, as did the huge rock face, the Place of the Skull.

As I descended from them, I found myself walking through air that felt surprisingly moist. It reminded me faintly of a time long ago in childhood. After my trek across the hot dry desert, the sudden humid climate refreshed me with pleasurable nostalgia. I knew how elephants and other animals could smell water from enormous distances. That same sensation came over me now. I not only felt the moisture in the air, its far-off fragrance penetrated my nostrils and lungs with the sense of something remembered and also with the distant hope of life to come.

I continued as the terrain slowly changed. I felt the beginnings of a crisp wind meeting me as I went, and I could detect the aroma of salt on the breeze. I realized that the shrubbery growing about my feet had taken on the wiry characteristic of sea grass. An occasional tree grew out from increasingly sandy soil, gnarled and windswept—cypress and juniper mostly, bent in the direction of the prevailing wind. I was not therefore surprised when, an hour or two later—to speak as if time were relevant in this place of timelessness—I arrived at the crest of a moderately high dune and beheld a vast expanse of blue water in front of me.

The temperature had by now dropped at least twenty degrees. After the desert I must say it felt wonderful. A persistent breeze from across the surface met my face with the unmistakable aroma of salt spray. Gentle incoming waves splashed on a wide sandy beach that extended along the shoreline to my right and left. I had come to an ocean that stretched into the unseeable beyond all the way to the horizon.

I ran down the slope of the dune with a feeling of exhilaration. What a positive delight was the tingle of warm dry sand on my bare feet! I could scarcely contain my joy. Reaching the wet sand at the water’s edge, I turned and continued running parallel to the shoreline, in and out of the foamy inflowing remnant of waves. I was a child again, playing at the sea!

The beach of white sand seemed to extend forever. Never could I have imagined such an exquisite beach! The sand was not mere sand, it was pure sand. This was the ultimate, the perfect shoreline and beach, of which all other beaches were only dim and hazy reflections.

Perhaps I had arrived at the outskirts of heaven! The way I felt as I scampered about… it was heaven!

The air and sand and breeze and sound of gently breaking waves, the gorgeous color of sea and sky and beach, continued to fill me with a happiness I could scarcely contain. What more than a perfect beach on a perfect summer’s day could draw up into it the very essence of the joy and optimism and hope and energy of childhood?

I ran and ran, laughing and exuberant, never tiring.

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