When Leona awoke from her hypnotic sleep, in what seemed like no time at all, the little girl looked around, expecting to be on the back porch of her home. Instead she was on what appeared to be a large, smooth, shiny-black rock. The rock was surrounded by the colorful, nearly transparent mist, and it was flying through the sky at lightning speed, making a soft whooshing sound as it overtook and passed other heavenly objects, many nearly as colorful as the one Leona rode. Off in the distance Leona could see the Moon getting smaller and smaller in front of her; at least, that’s what she thought. But finally it occurred to her that it wasn’t the Moon she was seeing after all, but the Earth. The Earth as no one had ever seen it, and would not see it until years later when space-travel endowed others with the amazing gift only Leona now possessed: the gift of viewing the magnificent round ball she called home, so splendidly painted a soft blue and white, floating peacefully in the dark heaven. And despite its seemingly growing smaller and smaller with the passing of time, it was huge, this magnificent Earth. Maybe five times larger than her body.
Suddenly, Leona realized that the heavenly rock that she was hurtling through the heavens on could not possibly be a star, because a star’s surface was gaseous and would be much too hot to stand on; indeed she would have been burned to a crisp by now. As Leona pondered the curious object she was riding, something inside of her said, in an almost silent whisper:
“This is your comet, Leona.”
“But how can this be a comet?” she wondered. “Miss Hutchinson said a comet is made mostly of ice, dust and gas; not rock. This should be an asteroid; not a comet.”
Then, upon seeing the colorful, alluring glow emanating from it, she thought: “But this isn’t a rock either. Rocks don’t change color and glow like this. And Miss Hutchinson did say that the Sun can make comets glow. So I guess this could be a comet after all. But it must be a very special comet.”
Then she heard her inner voice once again say, more loudly this time and with much more authority:
“This is your comet, Leona.”
After accepting the wisdom of her inner voice, the little girl’s eyes lit up and a huge smile appeared on her face.
“If this is really my comet, then I’m gonna name it Haley’s Comet,” she said.
After Leona’s excitement waned, her attention returned again to the Earth. In doing so, it wasn’t long before she discovered that this mysterious comet she found herself riding seemed to give her untold magical powers. When she unconsciously wished for a closer look at the beautiful planet she had somehow just departed, it happened. Magically her eyes were able to zoom in on any portion of the Earth she wanted to. And it occurred to her that if she wanted to she could zoom in even further to see, with more detail and clarity than she thought possible, the Earth’s glorious and sometimes mystical features.
—1—
The first time she zoomed in, the Earth grew from 5-times to 100-times her size and she was able to make out some of the larger mountains and rivers that peppered its landscape. Unconsciously again Leona thought about how wonderful it would be if the Earth would stop rotating for a while, so she could linger on some of its more majestic sights, and amazingly it happened. And, by chance, when the Earth did stop, she was staring at the Ivory Coast of Africa, where, according to her teacher, the slave trade first began, back in the early 1500s, long before her nation even existed. She immediately thought of President Abraham Lincoln—the founder of the Republican Party—and how he freed the slaves in 1864. Then the Civil War came to mind. Thinking of the photos she had seen in her U.S. history textbook—depicting large southern battlefields littered with dead Yankee and Rebel soldiers—brought to mind images of the vast Sahara Desert in North Africa, where extreme droughts often laid waste to hundreds and even thousands of its defenseless inhabitants, both animal and human. But instead of seeing a barren desert, Leona found herself over the beautiful Serengeti Plains of Tanzania, just south of Kenya, following two very graceful cheetah chasing after a heard of antelope. Leona seemed to be flying no more than fifteen feet above their heads as they zigzagged this way and that way while chasing their elusive prey.
“But am I really flying?” she wondered; or was it just the magical powers that the comet blessed her with, allowing her mind and eyes to be the co-pilots of her magical aircraft, controlling her destination and the speed at which she arrived there. “So that’s why they call it the mind’s eye. I’m seeing all these amazing things, even though I know they can’t be coming by way of my eyes. Can they?”
No matter. The fact that she was able to take this fantastic journey was the only thing of importance to her at this moment. It wasn’t long before Leona was marveling at even more exotic wildlife and vegetation. Soon she saw huge gray elephants: likely distant cousins of the Wooly Mammoth that roamed the earth during the ice age, some 10,000 years ago. The gigantic modern pachyderms were pulling leaves from the branches of tall trees; their little ones staying close by, playfully mimicking their mother by tugging on small bushes that hugged the ground. Not far away was a herd of female lions, some on the prowl, others lurking in sparse patches of deep grass; both groups apparently looking for food while the lazy male lions, made majestic by their golden crown of hair, lay blissfully in the shade of an acacia tree. Off in the distance Leona saw a herd of stampeding wildebeests sending dust high into the air, apparently spooked by the hungry lions. Also on the run were a few long-necked giraffes and a hundred or so graceful gazelle, beautiful spotted antelope, and distinctive black-and-white-striped zebra. Coming to a river she saw a giant hippopotamus wallowing in the mud. It was by far the fattest animal she had ever seen. Close by was a crocodile entering the water, and not far away were two ferocious male rhinoceros posturing for a fight, their heads lowered and their horned noses digging into the ground, throwing dirt as a warning to the other.
Just to the north, Leona noticed the impressive Nile—the Earth’s longest river—on Africa’s east coast, running northward nearly 4,200 miles through Sudan and Egypt to the ancient cities of Damietta and Alexandria near Port Said, where it emptied into the Mediterranean Sea: facts that Leona memorized from a lesson on ‘major rivers of the world’ that Miss Hutchinson had recently taught. Her thoughts turned to Egypt and soon she was seeing the ancient Pyramids. Not long thereafter she was at the tomb where a teenage pharaoh named King Tutankhamen was interred. How she knew that this particular tomb was now his home, she did not know; but somehow she knew that it was.
—2—
Northward, the staggering vastness and deep blue splendor of the Mediterranean Sea caught her eye; and then further north Leona was drawn to the majesty of Europe’s Swiss Alps. She followed that mountain range through France, into Switzerland; and—after recalling that fictional Heidi lived in Zurich—Leona remembered that Hans’ daughter Helga lived in Oslo, Norway. When Hans returned Leona’s book Anne of Green Gables to her in late September and told her that Helga “just loved” Anne’s story, she gave him her second most favorite book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to take to his daughter. “Helga must have it by now,” Leona thought, and she decided to find out. So she headed to Oslo and somehow went directly to Hans’ home. She peered into a window, only to see a young girl lying on her bed reading a book; it was Leona’s book. A smile came to her face and she said: “I hope you like this book too, Helga; at least, as much as I did.”
After Leona returned to the Alps to complete that journey, the 8-year-old allowed the Earth to turn slowly on its axis and was soon flying over the biblical city of Jerusalem; and soon thereafter she was over the Caspian Sea—the Earth’s largest inland body of water—on her way to look for Bengal tigers in India. In the meantime Leona realized that in this land was the Taj Mahal, a palace built in 1648 near the Yamuna River as a monument of eternal love for Princess Mumtaz Mahal. She then directed her attention to that distant destination. The wonders that she had so far beheld were now almost being taken for granted by Leona, as she became desensitized by the ease with which she was able to control her journey. Upon continuing her travel, that all changed when she spied a breathtaking sight: a lovely yellow, black-striped Bengal tiger dragging a huge water buffalo with its powerful jaws. That sight shocked Leona back to the reality of her blessed comet and journey.
“I wish Mama and Papa could be here to see all this,” she thought. But they weren’t, so she continued her journey.
The 8-year-old remembered one of Hans’ stories about India and decided to head to Calcutta on its east coast. After marveling at the daring snake charmers there, she decided it was time to leave India in favor of nearby China and its many wonders. On her way she flew over the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal and noticed snow-capped Mt. Everest off to her right, its 29,000-foot peak protruding through the clouds. As she came to Tibet, Leona recalled hearing rumors of a tall, elusive, ape-like creature the natives called Yeti, or abominable snowman. She also recalled that the native Indians of North America called it Sasquatch, or Big Foot.
It wasn’t long after flying over Tibet that part of the 3,900-mile Yangtze River came into view. Leona crossed it wanting to see the Great Wall of China and the vast Gobi Desert where the wall abruptly ends, and she did just that. She then recalled overhearing Miss Hutchinson tell the 6th-grade world history class that the 13th century Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai built the largest empire known to man by conquering all the land between the Sea of Japan and the Caspian Sea. Leona also overheard the teacher talking about Confucius, Shangri-La, the Forbidden City, and China’s many dynasties; however, she could only remember the Ming Dynasty, the Han Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty by name.
“But I’ll remember them all, and why they were important, when Miss Hutchinson teaches world history to me,” she thought. “The only thing I remember is that porcelain—or fine china—was perfected during the Ming Dynasty. I know that gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass were also invented by the Chinese, but I don’t remember when.”
Suddenly Leona laughed out loud when she recalled the reason she was eavesdropping on that class in the first place. She was working on an arithmetic assignment at the time and she thought she heard Miss Hutchinson say Han’s dynasty, so that caught her attention because she didn’t know that her friend Hans had a dynasty. After listening for a while longer she heard the teacher mention the Han Dynasty in China, and the little girl finally realized that Miss Hutchinson wasn’t talking about the Norwegian sailor after all. When she stopped laughing, Leona decided to follow the meandering Yangtze by zooming in on its origin, the Kunlun Mountain in the west, and tracking its flow through the remainder of China until it emptied into the East China Sea near the famous port city of Shanghai. She also recalled Miss Hutchinson teaching the 6th-graders about that city and its commercial trade with the United States. In addition, she spoke of traders who docked their cargo ships in major west-coast cities like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, shamefully kidnapping drunkards who staggered out of local bars; and then, after sobering them up, forcing them to work as indentured ship-hands on the vessels bound for Shanghai.
“It’s where the word shanghaied—or kidnapped—comes from,” Leona recalled hearing her teacher say.
After studying the Yangtze and the primitive villages it passed through, for what seemed like hours, Leona’s thoughts immediately drifted to the Amazon River in South America, the Earth’s second longest river, causing the Earth to begin rotating once again. As it did she noticed the tiny peninsula of Korea on the east coast of China, and the island of Taiwan sitting in the Pacific Ocean, a few miles off the coast of China. To the north of it she saw the much larger island of Japan, and below it were the Philippine Islands. About halfway between Asia and the Americas she spotted the small island chain of Hawaii. Leona thought about exploring all of those exotic lands, but decided against it, saving that adventure for another time.