Athanasius scanned the swirling darkness in the Chamber of Philosophy; looking past the edges of his own contained light for the glow of others.
There were none.
He hurried over to the bookshelf halfway down the room and reached over the collected works of Kierkegaard where his fingers closed round the slim volume of Nietzsche. He withdrew it and slipped it under his sleeve, not daring to look at it as he hurried away from the central corridor towards the reading tables stationed at the quiet and private edges of the chamber. He found one against a wall, buried amongst the most obscure and unsought titles, checked the darkness once more, then laid the book gently down on the desk top.
He stared at it for a moment, as if it was a mousetrap about to spring. It looked suspiciously isolated on the bare desk so he reached across to the nearest shelf, took down a few more volumes and laid them beside it, opening some at random. Satisfied with the makeshift camouflage of study he had created, he sat down, checked the darkness one last time, then opened the volume to where the folded sheets of paper lay. He removed the first one, carefully unfolded it and pressed it flat against the desk.
The page was blank.
He reached into the pocket of his cassock and removed a small stick of charcoal he had rescued earlier from the Abbot’s fire. He ground it against the desktop until he had a small pile of fine, black powder then, very gently, he dipped the tip of his finger into it and began to rub it back and forth across the greasy surface of the paper. As the dust found the gaps in the wax, small black symbols began to rise from the creamy blankness, until two dense columns of text filled the page.
Athanasius looked down at what the dust had revealed. He had never seen so much of the forbidden language of Malan collected into one document before. He held his breath as he leaned forward, as if the merest gasp might blow the words from the page, and started to read, translating in his head as he went.
In the beginning was the World
And the World was God, and the World was good.
And the World was the wife of the Sun
And the creator of everything.
In the beginning the World was wild,
A garden teeming with life.
And a being appeared, an embodiment of Earth,
One to bring order to the garden.
And where the One walked, the land blossomed,
And plants grew where there had been none,
And creatures nested and prospered,
And each was given a name by the One
And took what it needed from the Earth and no more.
And each gave itself back to the Earth
When its life was done.
And so it was through the time of the great ferns,
And the time of the great lizards,
Even to the dawn of the first age of ice.
Then one day man appeared – the greatest of all animals.
Close to being a god – but not close enough for him.
And he began to see not the great gifts he possessed
But only those he lacked.
He began to covet that which was not his.
And this made an emptiness inside him.
And the more he yearned for that which he had not,
The greater this emptiness became.
He tried to fill it with things he could possess:
Land, chattels, power over animals, power over others.
He saw his fellow man and desired more than his share,
He wanted more food, more water, more shelter.
But none of these things could fill the vast emptiness.
And above all else he wanted more life.
He did not want his time on Earth
To be measured by the rise and fall of the sun,
But by the rise and fall of mountains.
He wanted his time to be immeasurable.
He wanted to be immortal.
And he saw the One. Walking the Earth.
Never ageing. Never withering.
And he became jealous.