“Can you?”
Anna smiled.
“It’s all part and parcel,” she said.
Then there was silence.
Shortly afterward the first ripple came lapping in toward them. It didn’t recede but just rolled on, and seemed to well slowly up as it mingled with a ripple that came stealing in from the other direction.
They crept closer together. Rachel lifted the baby and held him to her. Jerak put his arms around her.
“Is he sleeping?” whispered Anna.
Another ripple washed in between them.
Rachel shook her head.
“He’s awake. He’s looking at Jerak.”
Javan stood up. Anna turned her head and glanced the same way.
Perhaps fifteen yards away lay the ship, black in the grayish dusk. It was drifting toward them.
Anna looked down. Water covered the entire mountain now.
All was sea.
But the ship was approaching.
Could Noah have changed his mind? Was he going to pick them up after all?
Of course he was going to pick them up. The boy was here. The boy was here.
“Noah!” she shouted. “Dear Noah, we’re in danger!”
Noah had been sure it was all over when he heard her sudden cry.
If he waited a bit longer, he would never again be able to hear her voice. That was the easiest, the most sensible thing. At the same time he wanted her to know that he knew what he was doing.
When he rose to go up, his wife held him back.
“Don’t go up there,” she said. “Please. Wait an hour. Then you can go up. But not now, my dear.”
He shook himself free of her and went up the steps to the top deck, bent his head beneath the low roof and went aft.
The ship was ten yards off when Noah came out. They saw him quite clearly. He was dressed in white, and his skin was white, and he stood in the stern looking down at them.
“Noah!” Anna shouted. “You must save us! Save us, Noah!”
Noah remained motionless where he stood. He just stared at them.
Anna took the baby from Rachel and raised him above her head so that he could see.
He saw.
When, immediately afterward, Anna laid the child to her breast and turned away, she was no longer despairing or angry or scared; all of these feelings had vanished into a great calm. They were going to die. And Noah would live on with the memory of what he had done.
Soon after, Noah also turned on his heel, moved down the deck, and was gone.
He did not return, and slowly the ship drifted past them, into the night. Nobody spoke. Anna looked down at the baby. He gazed at her with his placid, dark eyes. She handed him to Rachel and sat down.
Suddenly Javan burst out laughing.
“Well, I never thought I’d live to see that!” he exclaimed.
Everyone laughed.
When the laughter had died out, nothing more was said for a long time. They sat silently staring out into the darkness as the water rose around them. Rachel held the baby tightly to her breast. When the water was up to their waists, she glanced at her mother. Her mother smiled back.
“Is he asleep?” she whispered.
Rachel shook her head.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said.
Gently, she pushed the baby down and held him under the water. She looked at her mother the whole time.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said again.
THE GREAT flood rose for one hundred and fifty days before it began to recede. Because the water sank as slowly as it had risen, the surface of the earth was covered with water for about three hundred days. It then took another fifty-four days for the ground to dry out and for the former balance between land and water to be reestablished.
So about a year passed between the time Noah boarded the ark and his disembarkation. In the course of it, all living things had been wiped out. All human beings were dead, all animals were dead, all birds were dead. All insects were dead. All trees were dead, and all grass, and all plants and flowers. The only life that had survived was that in the seas. But not all life even there: static life died out, and the bottom-dwelling creatures died out, because of the weight of water. But fishes, seals, whales and sharks survived. Plankton survived, jellyfish survived.
Ah, what a sight it was. The entire earth covered in water. Even the highest mountains were beneath the surface of the waters. They swelled and increased over the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the waters, it says in the Bible. More and more the waters increased over the earth until they covered all the high mountains everywhere under heaven. The waters increased and the mountains were covered to a depth of fifteen cubits.
Fifteen cubits is just under fifty feet. As the highest mountains on earth are about 29,000 feet and the deepest marine trench about 37,000 feet, it’s possible to work out that, at its deepest, the water that covered the earth in the great flood was 66,000 feet and, at its shallowest, fifty feet.
The pressure on the earth’s surface must have been enormous. Knowing as we do that the weight of glaciers can flatten entire mountain chains, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that this huge volume of water must have radically altered the world’s topography. In addition, there was the force of the water itself — whether rising, standing, or receding. In ocean thousands of feet deep, what could those currents not stir up? Or carry with them? Or crush, break, bend, or twist? The sands of entire deserts must have been lifted up and washed away, just as the sea now lifts and washes away sand from coastal shorelines, which can be heaped with stones some years, covered with the finest sand in others. Mountains must have collapsed, cliffs toppled and the great stones from them spread over vast areas; wooded hills must have been torn up, valleys filled in, whole mountain ranges pressed into the earth’s crust.
The world into which Noah stepped anew, when the waters had subsided and his ship, after almost a year’s voyage, had once again found firm ground beneath her keel, was therefore new in more than one sense. Not only had the whole of mankind been eradicated, and the whole of his culture with him, not only had all living things died, but even the landscape had changed beyond all recognition. Not only were all the trees gone, and all the grass and all the moss, and all the plants and flowers, but also the valleys and ridges, meadows and plains where they’d grown. Gone were the fjords and the high mountains, gone were the skerries off the coast, gone were the forests and lakes to the east and north of Nod. The landscape Noah saw opening out before him as he walked down from the mountains where the ark had stranded was flat, barren, and mostly covered with sand.
Considering that Noah and his family were the only links between human beings of the first kingdom and the second, scripture pays them surprisingly little attention. Apart from the description of the flood itself, only one episode is mentioned. As this episode involves neither God nor the angels, we must assume that it is there because it is important in itself. This is what it says:
Noah, a man of the soil, began the planting of vineyards. He drank some of the wine, became drunk and lay naked inside his tent. When Ham, father of Canaan, saw his father naked, he told his two brothers outside. So Shem and Japheth took a cloak, put it on their shoulders and walked backwards, and so covered their father’s naked body; their faces were turned the other way, so that they did not see their father naked. When Noah awoke from his drunken sleep, he learnt what his youngest son had done to him, and said:
Cursed be Canaan,
slave of slaves
shall he be to his brothers.
The growing of vines is one indicator that the climate must have been hot. Living in a tent another. For Noah, conditions in this new world must have been the very worst imaginable. He must have viewed the burning sun and the scorched, sandy landscape as a punishment. Presumably he found it ironic. He had left all he held dear, not just a life but an entire world, and he’d done so on a huge wave of water. Where did all this take him? Into a desert. There, beneath the sun, water-starved and shadeless, the new life was to be lived.