BEYOND GENESIS

A suggestion of how legends are born...

Hobley closed his eyes as evening began to fall in the endless desert. Stretchig it seemed for ever, It was his home, had been his father’s home before him, and probably that father’s father’s too, but he wasn’t so sure when it came to going back into an unrecorded past.

Hobley was a dreamer, but at the same time he was nobody’s fool and his tribesmen friends, those he shared his days and nights with, looked on him with respect as well as for guidance. To him had fallen the talent of understanding the desert and its ways, the coming and going of storms of raging dust, of water holes where the people and their animals might drink safely, the many hazards that needed to be avoided if lives were to live long enough to enjoy their hard ,lives.

So Hobley settled down to rest, the last rays of a setting sun playing on him and seeming to stir his mind into dreams. He loved his dreams. He knew that everyone dreamed: of course they did, but as far as he knew he was the only one in the tribe who could recall his dreams next day. It gave him a sort of currency because he could recount the adventures he witnessed in his sleep and entertain even the young, especially if he added bits of spice that hadn’t actually been part of a particular dream, but might well have been.

And this particular night he was to have a corker of a dream. It was one that was stirred in his mind into being because for quite a long time he had looked around him at the desert, the blue skies, the shimmering of a mirage and its liquid secrets, and wondered what it all meant. Even the desert itself, such a wasteland, was hard for him to accept as all there was. And now a dream was beginning to answer things for him.

Because he saw something brand new, and it excited him. And the dream was so vivid it seemed almost as if he was awake and looking upon the unknown with open eyes. Because when his dream surveyed the heavens he beheld a wonderful sight. A great force, like a man and yet not a man because no man could have so many magical qualities as the powerful force in his dreams had. And that wizardly being waved one mighty arm and from somewhere came the order “let there be light.”

Was it the sun rising at night? Or some great catastrophe in the skies created by he who wasn’t a man but a figure in a dream? It even seemed that he had a magical control over nature itself. But the voice… let there be light and the mystical obedience, captivated Hobley, and next day he decided to share his dream with anyone who cared to listen, for it seemed to him that it was more than a dream but a mysterious explanation that answered many of his inner questions. Because he decided that there hadn’t always been light until the power had created it in a magical moment.

But when he started to speak it was clear nobody was taking much notice of him. His tales were usually throbbing with excitement and this rambling fantasy had no adventure, no hero fighting hoards of vicious enemies, nothing to thrill the heart in it.

“Give us adventure like you usually do,” suggested Homin, an elderly man with no teeth to help him shape his words.

“Yes, thrill us,” added Budnip, a middle aged man just out of his teens if life was measured like that, which it wasn’t.

Hobley paused and looked around him. Some of his audience was occupied with quiet private debates in twos or threes when usually they were gazing with fascination at him as he spoke. He needed to not just recount his dream but make out that it was something more than just a series of night images.

“Then the giant came,” he said, warming to his invention, “a giant that strode across the skies, all powerful and all-knowing. And in the black darkness of a night lost to time he strode like a magnificent gigantic power and ordered, yes, in a voice loud as thunder, ordered that light be created, and it was, magnificent, bright, even dazzling, like a day might be today, with the burning sun high above us...”

“Now that’s almost something like,” growled Homin, “but tell us more… the giant, what did he look like?”

Hobley frowned, and searched his mind for an answer. And gradually one came to him.

“Well,” he said slowly, and smiled, “but first I would advise you to take your children to your tents lest they be scared to death…”

There was a rustling, but nobody left his circle, so he continued.

“Well, here goes,” he said, “and I did warn you. It was like a man, a giant of a gigantic man, and it had eyes so bright you could imagine them shining over all the desert and illuminating every corner. And when it spoke the words came out of its mouth like clouds of steam, but not ordinary steam like that rising from the sand when you piss on it, but booming, powerful steam. Even the heavens had to behave when it spoke, and even the Heavens did as they were told and created light. But there was more…”

“Go on! Tell more!” urged Budnip, and he coughed as he spoke.

“The giant looked over the great empty space that was the heavens, and suddenly, as if he knew it must be said loud as thunder, he ordered that there was land!” invented Hobley, pausing to give himself time to work out what he might say next.

“And land appeared in the void,” almost whispered the dreamer, “green lands with verdant plants and trees growing all over it, not like the occasional stringy growth we see in this desert but green and luscious. and there was water running in streams across that land, and the air was sweet with the fragrance of all the green, and the music of the trickling water was so sweet it would lull you to sleep…”

“Ah, sweet perfection,” sighed Budnip, spitting out a gob of asthmatic phlegm.

“It was indeed,” smiled Hobley, “but there was more…”

“Get on with it!” urged Homin, and a few others cheered him on, hoarse voices raised in fascinated excitement.

“The giant created a man,” whispered Hobley, and he added slightly mischievously, “and it was a naked man…” and he smiled as his woman Suzy gasped. And it was that shock that gave him a clue about what to tell the growing crowd around him next.

“The giant bade the man to cover his nakedness, and when he did that a mighty hand reached down and smashed into the man’s chest, and pulled out a rib, and with unbelievable skill moulded it into a woman. So there, in the green and verdant land, was one man and one woman, and both of them were naked! It was then, as my dream was fading and I was waking up, that the giant created a snake... That was the total of my vision and if more comes to me on another night I won’t forget to tell you all about it.”

“But, master, how big was the giant?” asked a small boy called Inkle asked him, eyes wide.

“As big as the whole sky,” replied Hobley with a smile, “now move away. I need to go to my toilet, then I will sleep. It’s when I sleep that I have my visions of what maybe has been…”

And smiling to himself he wandered off.

And out in the crowd of desert dwellers his story got passed to those that hadn’t heard it, and even down the future years so that those as yet unborn got to marvel at his story of a giant in the skies.

© Peter Rogerson 17.11.24

xxx