Rock Boulder Quotes

Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.

The oceans never stop ... the wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island ... Existence here is on the scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia ...

Curran snarled and hurled the rock against the mountain. The boulder flew, hit like a cannon ball, and rolled back down. Curran chased it, pulled another smaller rock out of the dirt, and smashed it against the first one. Wow. He was really pissed. Astamur's eyes were as big as plates. "I can get him to put those back after he's done," I told him. "No," Astamur said slowly. "It's fine." Curran picked up the smaller rock with both hands and threw it onto the larger boulder. The boulder cracked and fell apart. Oops. "Sorry we broke your rock." Atsany took the pipe out of his mouth and said something. "Mrrrhhhm," Astamur said. "What did he say?" "He said that the man must be your husband, because only someone we love very much can make us this crazy.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

The Cyclops was about to roll the stone back into place, when from somewhere outside Annabeth shouted, "Hello, ugly!" Polyphemus stiffened. "Who said that?" "Nobody!" Annabeth yelled. That got exactl;y the reaction she'd been hoping for. The monster's face turned red with rage. "Nobody!" Polyphemus yelled back. "I remember you!" "You're too stupid to remember anybody," Annabeth taunted. "Much less Nobody." I hoped to the gods she was already moving when she said that, because Polyphemus bellowed furiously, grabbed the nearest boulder (which happened to be his front door) and threw it toward the sound of Annabeth's voice. I heard the rock smash into a thousand fragments. To a terrible moment, there was silence. Then Annabeth shouted, "You haven't learned to throw any better, either!" Polyphemus howled. "Come here! Let me kill you, Nobody!" "You can't kill Nobody, you stupid oaf," she taunted. "Come find me!" Polyphemus barreled down the hill toward her voice. Now, the "Nobody" thing would have confused anybody, but Annabeth had explained to me that it was the name Odysseus had used to trick Polyphemus centuries ago, right before he poked the Cyclops's eye out with a large hot stick. Annabeth had figured Polyphemus would still have a grudge about that name, and she was right. In his frenzy to find his old enemy, he forgot about resealing the cave entrance. Apparently, he did even stop to consider that Annabeth's voice was female, whereas the first Nobody had been male. On the other hand, he'd wanted to marry Grover, so he couldn't have been all that bright about the whole male/female thing. I just hoped Annabeth could stay alive and keep distracting him long enough for me to find Grover and Clarisse.

My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us an end to this as well. You've threaded the rocks resounding with Scylla's howling rabid dogs, and taken the brunt of the Cyclops' boulders, too. Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up. Save your strength for better times to come.

If for a moment you are inclined to regard these taluses as mere draggled, chaotic dumps, climb to the top of one of them, and run down without any haggling, puttering hesitation, boldly jumping from boulder to boulder with even speed. You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of these magnificent rock piles -- a fine lesson; and all Nature's wildness tells the same story -- the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort -- each and all are the orderly beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly

That boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. That’s their nature. It did the only natural thing it could do. It was set up, but it was waiting for you. Without you coming along and pulling it, it would still be stuck where it had been for who knows how long. You did this, Aron. You created it. You chose to come here today; you chose to do this descent into the slot canyon by yourself. You chose not to tell anyone where you were going. You chose to turn away from the women who were there to keep you from getting in this trouble. You created this accident. You wanted it to be like this. You have been heading for this situation for a long time. Look how far you came to find this spot. It’s not that you’re getting what you deserve - you’re getting what you wanted.

A wise man from my home once told me that these mountains have seen far too much suffering and killing, and that each rock and every boulder you see represents a mujahadeen who died fighting either the Russians or the Taliban. Then the man went on to say that now that the fighting is finished, it is time to build a new era of peace-and the first step in that process is to take up the stones and start turning them into schools.

I become like a boulder on the beach in a time-lapse video. The sun and moon and stars cross the sky again and again, shadows lengthen and shrink, the tide rushes in and out. The sea heaves in the background, crabs and seabirds flicker in and out of view. Meanwhile, the boulder sits there, stolid, unmoving, all alone, as life whizzes past.

My disbelief paralyzes me temporarily as I stare at the sight of my arm vanishing into an implausibly small gap between the fallen boulder and the canyon wall. Within moments, my nervous system’s pain response overcomes the initial shock. Good Christ, my hand. The flaring agony throws me into a panic, I grimace and growl a sharp “Fuck!” My mind commands my body, “Get your hand out of there!” I yank my arm three times in a naive attempt to pull it out. But I’m stuck.

I say, did you hear me?" The old man shook a worn walking stick at the oak. "I said move it and I meant it! I was sitting on that rock" -he pointed to a boulder- "enjoying the rising sun on my old bones when you had the nerve to cast a shadow over it and chill me! Move this instant. I say!" The tree did not respond. It also did not move. "I won't take any more of your insolence!" The old man began to beat on the tree with his stick. "Move or I'll - I'll -" "Someone shut that looney in a cage!" Fewmaster Toede shouted, galloping back from the front of the caravan. "Get your hands off me!" the old man shreiked at the draconians who ran up and accosted him. He beat on them feebly with his staff until they took it away from him. "Arrest the tree!" he insisted. "Obstructing sunlight! That's the charge!

He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response. And nothing ever came of what he cried Unless it was the embodiment that crashed In the cliff's talus on the other side, And then in the far-distant water splashed, But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush--and that was all.

Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size, their ability to spout fire, or to crack boulders into splinters with their massive talons. In fact, the only terrifying quality that dragons do not possess is that of existence. Now, the people of this land know about dragons because their leaders have warned them about them. They tell stories about cruel dragons with razor teeth and fiery breath. They recount legends of dragons hunting by night on silent wings. In short, the leaders make sure that the people believe in all the qualities of dragons, including that key quality of existence. And then they control the people — when they need to — with their fear of dragons. The people pay a dragon-slaying tax … everyone stays indoors after dark to avoid being snatched by swooping claws … and nobody ever strays out of bounds for fear of being eaten well and truly up. Perhaps somebody will wonder if dragons aren’t, after all, fictitious because — despite their size — nobody seems to have actually seen one. And so it is necessary from time to time to provide evidence: a burnt tree or two, a splintered rock, the mysterious absence of a villager. The population is controlled by the dragons in its collective mind. It’s contrived superstition, and it is possible because the people do not know enough about the way the world works to know that dragons do not exist.

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can’t speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space — none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that cases I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature — lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.

The waves smash against rocks, boulder thunders upon bolder. Granite men grind one another, leaving their clean sand to floor the ocean. The alternative would be for the republic to breed up a race of men who could work together without growing violent: men more interested in getting somewhere than having their own way." Haniel Long: Homestead 1892: Pittsburgh Memoranda.

When he thought of the old man he could see him suddenly in a field in the spring, trying to move a gray boulder. He always knew instinctively the ones you could move, even though the greater part was buried in the earth, and he expected you to move the rock and not discuss it. A hard and silent man, an honest man, a noble man. Little humor but sometimes the door opened and you saw the warmth within a long way off, a certain sadness, a slow, remote, unfathomable quality as if the man wanted to be closer to the world but did not know how. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: 'What a piece of work is man...in action how like an angel!' And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.' And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel. And when the old man heard about it he was very proud, and Chamberlain felt very good remembering it. The old man was proud of his son, the colonel.

Every morning, he would bring her a boulder and have her try to cut it in half with the Rippling Sword. Every morning, she failed, and he took the stone away, only to bring a new one the next day. She’d thrown her training sword aside in disgust. “I can’t do it,” she had said. “Been waiting for you to say that,” he’d responded. He had taken her to a cave behind a waterfall, where he had kept all of the stones she had tried and failed to cut. There were the marks of her failure: slashes in the rocks where her madra had cut. The scars started faint, but they got wider and deeper. And the stones got bigger. “This is what you did yesterday,” he’d said, pointing to the largest rock, the one with the deepest cut. “I can’t wait to see what you do tomorrow.

My prayer is an attitude of pure gratitude for having the opportunity to experience life on this earth with all its pain, heartache, worry, and turmoil; coupled with this gratitude is the thankfulness for just having the opportunity to have lived. That is fairly easy on good days but difficult when life puts rocks and boulders in the road.

I wake to sunshine flashing on puddled water, to dirty clumps of hail melting in the shadowed lees of boulders, to rock wrens singing like it's the best day of their lives.

The mountain consisted of a giant cone of blue-gray rock and was surrounded by an endless, barren highland studded with a few trees charred by fire and overgrown with gray moss and gray brush, out of which here and there brown boulders jutted up like rotten teeth. Even by light of day, the region was so dismal and dreary that the poorest shepherd in this poverty-stricken province would not have driven his animals here. And by night, by the bleaching light of the moon, it was such a godforsaken wilderness that it seemed not of this world.

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral; it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare to define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don’t know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying’, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, ’ I feel like tears.’ And this phrase -so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! The small child aptly defined his spiral. To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming- like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

You see that stones are worn away by time, Rocks rot, and twoers topple, even the shrines And images of the gods grow very tired, Develop crack or wrinkles, their holy wills Unable to extend their fated term, To litigate against the Laws of Nature. And don't we see the monuments of men Collapse, as if to ask us, "Are not we As frail as those whom we commemorate?"? Boulders come plunging down from the mountain heights, Poor weaklings with no power to resist The thrust that says to them, Your time has come! But they would be rooted in steadfastness Had they endured from time beyond all time, As far back as infinity. Look about you! Whatever it is that holds in its embrace All earth, if it projects, as some men say, All things out of itself, and takes them back When they have perished, must itself consist Of mortal elements. The parts must add Up to the sum. Whatever gives away Must lose in the procedure, and gain again Whenever it takes back.

The path turned a hard right and then dumped into a rocky stream. It looked as if a giant had tossed white boulders and the rocks the way children toss marbles. They lay in scrambled heaps, some as large as carriages, others the size of chamber pots. A weak stream trickled around them.

I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I’d send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.

The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth's crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.

The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one's outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. Tu put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid - none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.

To me, love is either a pebble, a rock, or a boulder. Or a grain of sand, if you’re trying to measure the love my ex wife had for me.

On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous [sic] soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity. From this experience I emerged whole and clean, bitten to the bone by sun, washed pure by the icy sharpness of salt water, dried and bleached to the smooth tranquillity that comes from dwelling among primal things. From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naïve and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

The thing about life,” she says, “is that sometimes the roads that seem impossible just have some rocks in your way. They’re not boulders, they’re just rocks. You can move them. You are strong enough.

Few had much room to cast stones, but hypocrisy has never failed the English middle class in any latitude, and they flung them in plenty with delighted, shocked abandon – rocks, boulders, limited in size only by fear for their husband’s advancement. Conciliating discretion had never been among Mrs Villiers’s qualities, and if subjects for malignant gossip had been wanting she would have provided them by the elephant-load.

You can’t rise to the surface if you’re holding onto rocks. You can’t illuminate a dark room by being a shadow. You have to let go of the boulders sinking you. Only then will you be light, and only light will dispel the darkness.

The last glow of sundown dims away. Stars appear in the east. Night encloses us. The ocean seems to enlarge. When you’re adrift at night, imagination and perception merge. They have to. You can’t see as well, as far, as deep. You tie knots by muscle memory, and you operate your reel mostly by feel. Your boat drifts, your thoughts drift. You sense the sweep of tide and water, and the boat gets rocked in turbulence just past each undersea ridgeline and boulder field. You, too, are looking up, searching constellations, dreaming. You fell again how flexible and expansive your mind can be when it’s working right. And you slip your leash to explore the vast vault of sky and great interior spaces.

We found a smooth inviting boulder under a vast banyan tree, and sat in companionable silence. There unexpectedly, on that rock, I saw the secret of contentment. True happiness is only ever possible if you have been unhappy. And there, at that moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so peaceful. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to take in any more happiness. Moti turned to me and smiled as if she knew. I realised then that this moment and this wonderful feeling would sustain me for a long, long time.

Some species moved north faster than others; when Europeans arrived in New England, earthworms had not yet returned. As the ice sheets withdrew, large chunks of ice broke off and were left behind. When these chunks melted, they left behind water-filled depressions in the ground called kettlehole ponds. Oakland Lake, near the north end of Springfield Boulevard in Queens, is one of these kettlehole ponds. The ice sheets also dropped boulders they’d picked up on their journey; some of these rocks, called glacial erratics, can be found in Central Park today.

Perovich said that he also liked a regional analogy. “The way I’ve been thinking about it, riding my bike around here, is, You ride by all these pastures and they’ve got these big granite boulders in the middle of them. You’ve got a big boulder sitting thereon this rolling hill. You can’t just go by this boulder. You’ve got to try to push it. So you start rocking it, and you get a bunch of friends, and they start rocking it, and finally it starts moving. And then you realize, Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. That’s what we’re doing as a society. This climate, if it starts rolling, we don’t really know where it will stop.

I knew that people sometimes died climbing mountains. But at the age of twenty-three, personal mortality—the idea of my own death—was still largely outside my conceptual grasp. When I decamped from Boulder for Alaska, my head swimming with visions of glory and redemption on the Devils Thumb, it didn’t occur to me that I might be bound by the same cause-and-effect relationships that governed the actions of others. Because I wanted to climb the mountain so badly, because I had thought about the Thumb so intensely for so long, it seemed beyond the realm of possibility that some minor obstacle like the weather or crevasses or rime-covered rock might ultimately thwart my will. At

All Shall Be Restored The grains shall be collected From the thousand shores To which they found their way, And the boulder restored, And the boulder itself replaced In the cliff, and likewise The cliff shall rise Or subside until the plate of earth Is without fissure. Restoration Knows no half-measure. It will Not stop when the treasure and lost Bronze horse remounts the steps. Even this horse will founder backward To coin, cannon, and domestic pots, Which themselves shall bubble and Drain back to green veins in stone. And every word written shall lift off Letter by letter, the backward text Read ever briefer, ever more antic In its effort to insist that nothing Shall be lost.

I didn’t agree to be Rook’s wife. It just happened. Like walking through a mountain pass and a boulder falling on top of your head.” I pushed to my feet. “The person squished underneath the rock doesn’t have to ask it for permission to keep breathing. The person can fight to get free all they want, and the rock can stuff it where the moss don’t grow.

One day she would build her own church, and God would see her, too. They continued traveling along the Arges River, which sometimes was narrow and violently churning, sometimes as wide and smooth as glass. It snaked through the land until reaching the mountains. Everything was a green so deep it was nearly black. Dark gray stones and boulders jutted out of the steeply rising slopes, and beneath them the Arges wandered. It was cooler here than in Tirgoviste, a chill that never quite burned away clinging to the rocks and moss. The looming mountains were so steep that the sun shone directly on the traveling company for only a few hours each day before shadows reclaimed the passes. It smelled of pine and wood and rot—but even the rot smelled rich and healthful, unlike the hidden rot of Tirgoviste. Late

At the same moment the convict screamed out a curse at us and hurled a rock which splintered up against the boulder which had sheltered us. I caught one glimpse of his short, squat, strongly built figure as he sprang to his feet and turned to run. -- A lucky long shot of my revolver might have crippled him, but I had brought it only to defend myself if attacked and not to shoot an unarmed man who was running away.

That’s what he reminded her of. Rock. She could see the Conquisani line in him, though his features were not so well-crafted as Cryndien’s or Arpien’s. He was not so tall, either. Broader. More muscle. A boulder. His eyes were set deep in his face, his stern brow set over them like a guard to discourage anyone from searching within. He reminded Nissa of a half-finished granite statue. Or a slightly depressed brown bear.

I spent my summers at my grandparents’ cabin in Estes Park, literally next door to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a view of Longs Peak across the valley and the giant rock beaver who, my granddad told me, was forever climbing toward the summit of the mountain. We awoke to mule deer peering in the windows and hummingbirds buzzing around the red-trimmed feeders; spent the days chasing chipmunks across the boulders of Deer Mountain and the nights listening to coyotes howling in the dark.

And I saw Sisyphus too, bound to his own torture, grappling his monstrous boulder with both arms working, heaving, hands struggling, legs driving, he kept on thrusting the rock uphill toward the brink, but just as it teetered, set to topple over — time and again the immense weight of the thing would wheel it back and the ruthless boulder would bound and tumble down to the plain again — so once again he would heave, would struggle to thrust it up, sweat drenching his body, dust swirling above his head.

No memorial has been built on Rebero. Nothing to commemorate the fallen but boulders and white and rust-red stones. I look for signs from the hill, I dig at the ground. The sun is straight overhead. This is the hour of mirages. I push away the little rocks, I scratch at the ground. I find a shred of tattered cloth half-buried in the dirt. I try to convince myself that it comes from Antoine’s shirt. I hesitate, then leave that false relic where it lies. I pick up a stone with a sharp edge. In remembrance.

For no reason that she could discern, she put down the novel and picked up her cell phone. She was lonely, yes, but had been so for as long as she cared to remember, and nothing seemed to be pressing that particular bruise, one of many, at the moment. Her loneliness was at a comfortable echelon: not growing like a tree, nor multiplying as a moss, but just simply there. A permanent, weathered embedded rock. A boulder in the wheat field. A bullet inside of a body, too dangerous to remove, around which tissue grows.

Searching for Love in Everything We are so much like these rocks I think to myself One morning While passing a sea of black, gray, and white Pebbles All different shapes, sizes, colors They drift past one another On land or in oceans All while we collide, we crash Gracefully or without the intention of even finding one another Is it messy or beautiful? Our choice or fate? We all have a home We all have a story And perhaps we are found In the waves that rush Where over time we lose our sharp edges And the water All-knowing Smooths us out Reminding us to be gentle with ourselves Perhaps the boulders basking in the light On land carry similar knowledge And, like us Maybe they love watching the clouds in the day And even more the stars at night Maybe all of life ponders the change the earth makes as we constantly gain and lose sight As we try to follow a path to love this life There must be love to go around In all places In all things Isn’t all of it a greater message for the love present in this world? They were here before us And will remain long after Perhaps one day Long after Love will exist For and within Everything

He’s rumored to have more bravery than sense.” “Then he and Gabe make a good pair,” Oliver growled. “Lay off of him, will you?” Jarret told Oliver. Closest to being a blend of their parents, he had black hair but blue-green eyes and no trace of Oliver’s Italian features. “You’ve been ragging him ever since that stupid carriage race. He was drunk. It’s a state you ought to be familiar with.” Oliver whirled on Jarret. “Yes, but you were not drunk, yet you let him-“ “Don’t blame Jarret,” Gabe put in. “Chetwin challenged me to it. He would have branded me a coward if I’d refused.” “Better a coward than dead.” Oliver had no tolerance for such idiocy. Nothing was worth risking one’s life for-not a woman, not honor, and certainly not reputation. A pity that he hadn’t yet impressed that upon his idiot brothers. Gabe, of all people, ought to know better. The course he’d run was the most dangerous in London. Two large boulders flanked the path so closely that only one rig could pass between them, forcing a driver to fall back at the last minute to avoid being dashed on the rocks. Many was the time drivers pulled out too late. The sporting set called it “threading the needle.” Oliver called it madness.

We’re not the Furies,” I said. “We just want to talk.” “Go away!” he shrieked. “Flowers won’t make it better. It’s too late to apologize!” “Look,” Thalia said, “we just want—” “La-la-la!” he yelled. “I’m not listening!” We played tag with him around the boulder until finally Thalia, who was the quickest, caught the old man by his hair. “Stop it!” he wailed. “I have rocks to move. Rocks to move!” “I’ll move your rock!”Thalia offered. “Just shut up and talk to my friends.” Sisyphus stopped fighting. “You’ll—you’ll move my rock?” “It’s better than looking at you.” Thalia glanced at me. “Be quick about it.” Then she shoved Sisyphus toward us. She put her shoulder against the rock and started pushing it very slowly uphill. Sisyphus scowled at me distrustfully. He pinched my nose. “Ow!” I said. “So you’re really not a Fury,” he said in amazement. “What’s the flower for?” “We’re looking for someone,” I said. “The flower is helping us find him.” “Persephone!” He spit in the dust. “That’s one of her tracking devices, isn’t it?” He leaned forward, and I caught an unpleasant whiff of old-guy-who’s-been-rolling-a-rock-foreternity. “I fooled her once, you know. I fooled them all.” I looked at Nico. “Translation?

Emily climbed onto a large boulder, watching the heavens while listening to the waves that were melodically splashing to the granite rocks. Then, she petrified and curdled: two stars in the sky were moving quickly, changing the angles of the trajectory radically and sharply… disappearing and appearing again. In a few seconds, the third one joined them, doing the same. —But it can’t be real! —Emma exclaimed, finding herself reaching her arm upwards. —No… can’t be real… just can’t… The girl dropped her glance down, unconsciously hoping that if she didn't see the UFOs, they would stop existing. She took a long breath, and, making as huge leaps as she could do with her little feet, ran back to the streets of the village.

Something Rich and Strange She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won' t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she's afraid and she's suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don't breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought - that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism's colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

Local peasants, uncontaminated by scientific orthodoxy, knew better, however. The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story of how in 1834 he was walking along a country lane with a Swiss woodcutter when they got to talking about the rocks along the roadside. The woodcutter matter-of-factly told him that the boulders had come from the Grimsel, a zone of granite some distance away. “When I asked him how he thought that these stones had reached their location, he answered without hesitation: ‘The Grimsel glacier transported them on both sides of the valley, because that glacier extended in the past as far as the town of Bern.’ ” Charpentier was delighted. He had come to such a view himself, but when he raised the notion at scientific gatherings, it was dismissed.

There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called "adrenaline" sports—skiing, surfing and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills. Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport's essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap. It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let's get on with it! Let's run this damn river! And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river— say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you're thrown suddenly into the center of the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don't realize what's happening. It doesn't matter. The results are the same. The world goes dark. The river— the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you— the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You're helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you. Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you— before you see the rescue lines. You're hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear. That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again.

Snake,” Wyatt announced. “A big black one.” “There’s dozens of them,” Royce explained. “Where?” Alric asked. “Mostly behind you on the walls.” “What?” the king said, aghast. “Why didn’t you say something?” “Knowing would only make traveling slower.” “Are they poisonous?” Mauvin asked. They could all see the silhouetted shoulders of Royce’s shadow on the far wall shrug. “I demand you inform me of such things in future!” Alric declared. “Do you want to know about the giant millipedes, then too?” “Are you joking?” “Royce doesn’t make jokes,” Arista told him as she looked around, anxiously hugging herself. Immediately her robe brightened and she spotted two snakes on the walls, but they were a safe distance away. “He must be joking,” Alric muttered quietly. “I don’t see any.” “You aren’t looking up,” the thief said. Arista did not want to. Some instinct, a tiny voice, warned her to fight the impulse, but in the end she just could not help herself. On the low ceiling, illuminated brightly by the robe, slithered a mass of wormlike bugs with an uncountable number of hairlike feet. Each was nearly five inches in length and close to the width of a man’s finger. There were so many that they swarmed over each other until it was hard to tell if the ceiling was rock at all. Arista felt a chill run down her back. She clenched her teeth, forced her eyes to the floor, and focused on walking forward as quickly as possible. She promptly passed Alric and Mauvin, both moving quicker than normal. She reached Royce, who stood outside the corridor on a boulder at the entrance to a larger passage. “I guess I was wrong. Looks like I should have told you earlier,” Royce said, watching them race forward. “Are there…?” she asked, pointing upward without looking. Royce glanced up and shook his head. “Good,” she replied. “And please, if Alric wants to know these things, fine, but don’t tell me. I could have gone the rest of my life not knowing they were there.” She shivered. Everyone scurried out of the corridor except Myron, who lingered, staring up at the ceiling and smiling in fascination. “There are millions.

At half-past two o'clock of a moonlit morning in March, I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake, and though I had never before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened, shouting, "A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake!" feeling sure I was going to learn something. The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one another so closely, that I had to balance myself carefully in walking as if on the deck of a ship among waves, and it seemed impossible that the high cliffs of the Valley could escape being shattered. In particular, I feared that the sheer-fronted Sentinel Rock, towering above my cabin, would be shaken down, and I took shelter back of a large yellow pine, hoping that it might protect me from at least the smaller outbounding boulders. For a minute or two the shocks became more and more violent--flashing horizontal thrusts mixed with a few twists and battering, explosive, upheaving jolts--as if Nature were wrecking her Yosemite temple, and getting ready to build a still better one.

Ronan was waiting for her beyond the estate’s guarded gate. From the looks of things, he had been waiting for some time. His horse was nosing brown grass as Ronan sat on a nearby boulder, throwing pebbles at the general’s stone wall. When he saw Kestrel ride through the gate on Javelin, he flung his handful of rocks to the path. He remained sitting, elbows propped on his bended knees as he stared at her, his face pinched and white. He said, “I have half a mind to tear you down from your horse.” “You got my message, then.” “And rode instantly here, where guards told me that the lady of the house gave strict orders not to let anyone--even me--inside.” His eyes raked over her, taking in the black fighting clothes. “I didn’t believe it. I still don’t believe it. After you vanished last night, everyone at the party was talking about the challenge, yet I was sure it was just a rumor started by Irex because of whatever has caused that ill will between you. Kestrel, how could you expose yourself like this?” Her hands tightened around the reins. She thought about how, when she let go, her palms would smell like leather and sweat. She concentrated on imagining that scent. This was easier than paying heed to the sick feeling swimming inside her. She knew what Ronan was going to say. She tried to deflect it. She tried to talk about the duel itself, which seemed straightforward next to her reasons for it. Lightly, she said, “No one seems to believe that I might win.” Ronan vaulted off the rock and strode toward her horse. He seized the saddle’s pommel. “You’ll get what you want. But what do you want? Whom do you want?” “Ronan.” Kestrel swallowed. “Think about what you are saying.” “Only what everyone has been saying. That Lady Kestrel has a lover.” “That’s not true.” “He is her shadow, skulking behind her, listening, watching.” “He isn’t,” Kestrel tried to say, and was horrified to hear her voice falter. She felt a stinging in her eyes. “He has a girl.” “Why do you even know that? So what if he does? It doesn’t matter. Not in the eyes of society.” Kestrel’s feelings were like banners in a storm, snapping at their ties. They tangled and wound around her. She focused, and when she spoke, she made her words disdainful. “He is a slave.” “He is a man, as I am.” Kestrel slipped from her saddle, stood face-to-face with Ronan, and lied. “He is nothing to me.

A woman pushed her way through the swarm of people. “She’s the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, and known to be a fornicator.” I called out again in protest, but my denial was swallowed by the black odium that boiled out of their hearts. “Show us your pocket!” a man yelled. One by one, they took up the petition. Gripping my forearm, Chuza let their shouts grow fevered before he reached for my sleeve. I writhed and kicked. I was a fluttering moth, a hapless girl. My skirmish yielded nothing but jeers and laughter. He snatched the sheet of ivory from my coat and lifted it over his head. A roar erupted. “She is a thief, a blasphemer, and a fornicator!” Chuza cried. “What would you do with her?” “Stone her!” someone cried. The chant began, the dark prayer. Stone her. Stone her. I shut my eyes against the dazzling blur of anger. Their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw. They seemed to be not a multitude of persons, but a single creature, a behemoth feeding off their combined fury. They would stone me for all the wrongs ever done to them. They would stone me for God. Most often victims were dragged to a cliff outside the city and thrown off before being pelted, which lessened the laborious effort of having to throw so many stones—it was in some way more merciful, at least quicker—but I saw I would not be accorded that lenience. Men and women and children plucked stones from the ground. These stones, God’s most bountiful gift to Galilee. Some rushed into the building site, where the stones were larger and more deadly. I heard the sizzle of a rock fly over my head and fall behind me. Then the commotion and noise slowed, elongating, receding to some distant pinnacle, and in that strange slackening of time, I no longer cared to fight. I felt myself bending to my fate. I ached for the life I would never live, but I yearned even more to escape it. I sank onto the ground, making myself as small as I could, my arms and legs tucked beneath my chest and belly, my forehead pressed to the ground. I fashioned myself into a walnut shell. I would be broken apart and God could have the meat. A stone struck my hip in a sunburst of pain. Another fell beside my ear. I heard the stomp of sandals running toward me, then a voice glittering with indignation. “Cease your violence! Would you stone her on the word of this man?” The mob quieted, and I dared to raise my head. Jesus stood before them, his back to me. I stared at the bones in his shoulders. The way his hands were drawn into fists. How he’d planted himself between me and the stones.

I became expert at making myself invisible. I could linger two hours over a coffee, four over a meal, and hardly be noticed by the waitress. Though the janitors in Commons rousted me every night at closing time, I doubt they ever realized they spoke to the same boy twice. Sunday afternoons, my cloak of invisibility around my shoulders, I would sit in the infirmary for sometimes six hours at a time, placidly reading copies of Yankee magazine ('Clamming on Cuttyhunk') or Reader's Digest (Ten Ways to Help That Aching Back!'), my presence unremarked by receptionist, physician, and fellow sufferer alike. But, like the Invisible Man in H. G. Wells, I discovered that my gift had its price, which took the form of, in my case as in his, a sort of mental darkness. It seemed that people failed to meet my eye, made as if to walk through me; my superstitions began to transform themselves into something like mania. I became convinced that it was only a matter of time before one of the rickety iron steps that led to my room gave and I would fall and break my neck or, worse, a leg; I'd freeze or starve before Leo would assist me. Because one day, when I'd climbed the stairs successfully and without fear, I'd had an old Brian Eno song running through my head ('In New Delhi, 'And Hong Kong,' They all know that it won't be long...'), I now had to sing it to myself each trip up or down the stairs. And each time I crossed the footbridge over the river, twice a day, I had to stop and scoop around in the coffee-colored snow at the road's edge until I found a decent-sized rock. I would then lean over the icy railing and drop it into the rapid current that bubbled over the speckled dinosaur eggs of granite which made up its bed - a gift to the river-god, maybe, for safe crossing, or perhaps some attempt to prove to it that I, though invisible, did exist. The water ran so shallow and clear in places that sometimes I heard the dropped stone click as it hit the bed. Both hands on the icy rail, staring down at the water as it dashed white against the boulders, boiled thinly over the polished stones, I wondered what it would be like to fall and break my head open on one of those bright rocks: a wicked crack, a sudden limpness, then veins of red marbling the glassy water. If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence? Might the river beat me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out in the quiet waters, down behind the dye factory, where some lady would catch me in the beam of her headlights when she pulled out of the parking lot at five in the afternoon? Or would I, like the pieces of Leo's mandolin, lodge stubbornly in some quiet place behind a boulder and wait, my clothes washing about me, for spring?

The Obstacles That Lie Before Us There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was simple: He would place a large boulder in the middle of the main road, completely blocking entry into the city. He would then hide nearby and observe their reactions. How would they respond? Would they band together to remove it? Or would they get discouraged, quit, and return home? With growing disappointment, the king watched as subject after subject came to this impediment and turned away. Or, at best, tried halfheartedly before giving up. Many openly complained or cursed the king or fortune or bemoaned the inconvenience, but none managed to do anything about it. After several days, a lone peasant came along on his way into town. He did not turn away. Instead he strained and strained, trying to push it out of the way. Then an idea came to him: He scrambled into the nearby woods to find something he could use for leverage. Finally, he returned with a large branch he had crafted into a lever and deployed it to dislodge the massive rock from the road. Beneath the rock were a purse of gold coins and a note from the king, which said: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.” What holds you back?

I still cherish my childhood memories of the sun opening the dusky eyelids of the west and the misty mornings against the backdrop of of Kgalatlou Mountain. The green prime of summer, twingling leaves of acacia yrees of Manthakge Plains, pure clear sky, the smooth plough fields and lush green meadows. In winter, that green carpet will be replaced by drearily looking land like a dim picture of the drowned past, all signs of life and feeling gone out of it, with the plough fields scorched and naked, the streams of Manyane silent, and the grass of the meadows looking like burned powder.  I still remember and cherish the touch of autumn nights and the ruddy moon leaning over Madibong. When I think about this, a sorrowful silent tear always roll down my cheek, I become sad and gripped by grief because of what has now become of the land of my forefathers. I have known and cherished its distinguished  rocks, fauna, and flora since I could stand and walk. I know its mountain slopes, plains, its rocks, and bushes like the veins and knuckles at the back of my hand. The ever changing beauty of Leolo Mountains, from the aloes of Segodi Boulders to the lilies of Legaletlweng; the imposing Letheleding Boulders towering over Manyane Dale. The interesting contrast of granite ingenious sedimentary rocks of Leolo Mountains and the red sand rock of Seolwane Mountain, the red sandy soil of Leruleng, the dark clay soil of Marakane and the red fertile loom soil of Sehalbeng Plains. The Magnetite rocks Ga - Sethadi and the shale rocks of Malatjane.

That man,” she announced huffily, referring to their host, “can’t put two words together without losing his meaning!” Obviously she’d expected better of the quality during the time she was allowed to mix with them. “He’s afraid of us, I think,” Elizabeth replied, climbing out of bed. “Do you know the time? He desired me to accompany him fishing this morning at seven.” “Half past ten,” Berta replied, opening drawers and turning toward Elizabeth for her decision as to which gown to wear. “He waited until a few minutes ago, then went of without you. He was carrying two poles. Said you could join him when you arose.” “In that case, I think I’ll wear the pink muslin,” she decided with a mischievous smile. The Earl of Marchman could scarcely believe his eyes when he finally saw his intended making her way toward him. Decked out in a frothy pink gown with an equally frothy pink parasol and a delicate pink bonnet, she came tripping across the bank. Amazed at the vagaries of the female mind, he quickly turned his attention back to the grandfather trout he’d been trying to catch for five years. Ever so gently he jiggled his pole, trying to entice or else annoy the wily old fish into taking his fly. The giant fish swam around his hook as if he knew it might be a trick and then he suddenly charged it, nearly jerking the pole out of John’s hands. The fish hurtled out of the water, breaking the surface in a tremendous, thrilling arch at the same moment John’s intended bride deliberately chose to let out a piercing shriek: “Snake!” Startled, John jerked his head in her direction and saw her charging at him as if Lucifer himself was on her heels, screaming, “Snake! Snake! Snnnaaaake!” And in that instant his connection was broken; he let his line go slack, and the fish dislodged the hook, exactly as Elizabeth had hoped. “I saw a snake,” she lied, panting and stopping just short of the arms he’d stretched out to catch her-or strangle her, Elizabeth thought, smothering a smile. She stole a quick searching glance at the water, hoping for a glimpse of the magnificent trout he’d nearly caught, her hands itching to hold the pole and try her own luck. Lord Marchman’s disgruntled question snapped her attention back to him. “Would you like to fish, or would you rather sit and watch for a bit, until you recover from your flight from the serpent?” Elizabeth looked around in feigned shock. “Goodness, sir, I don’t fish!” “Do you sit?” he asked with what might have been sarcasm. Elizabeth lowered her lashes to hide her smile at the mounting impatience in his voice. “Of course I sit,” she proudly told him. “Sitting is an excessively ladylike occupation, but fishing, in my opinion, is not. I shall adore watching you do it, however.” For the next two hours she sat on the boulder beside him, complaining about its hardness, the brightness of the sun and the dampness of the air, and when she ran out of matters to complain about she proceeded to completely spoil his morning by chattering his ears off about every inane topic she could think of while occasionally tossing rocks into the stream to scare off his fish.

finally there was only one corpse left. A large man, weighing well over two hundred pounds, lay tightly wedged between two boulders deeply imbedded in the earth. His shirtless torso had a sickly greenish sheen. The only way to dislodge the man was to wrap arms around him in a bear hug and pull him from the rocks—not a pleasant prospect. We huddled in a silent group and looked at the dead man, building our resolve. Finally, SSgt. Ken Bollinger spoke, “I’ll do it.” The rest of us sighed in relief. Ken had a body builder’s muscular physique. He would need his great strength to free the wedged corpse. Sergeant Bolliger positioned a vinyl body bag next to the man-in-the-rocks. Then he lay on top of the corpse and worked his arms under and around the dead man’s chest. He intertwined his fingers, locked his grip and squirmed to his knees, struggling for leverage. As Ken heaved upwards we watched in awe as his muscles bunched and his face reddened with herculean exertion. And suddenly, the man-in-the-rocks came apart in the middle, his entrails spilling onto the ground. Some of us groaned and turned away, but Sergeant Bollinger was unfazed. He methodically filled the body bag with the largest parts of the corpse, then scooped the remaining organs and pieces into the bag. When he was finished not a speck of the person remained on the ground. We gave him kudos as he slowly stood. His uniform was slick with gore and stank of death, but he appeared totally unfazed. We all praised him, “That was hardcore Ken.” he looked at us quizzically, genuinely taken aback. “No big deal.” he said.

Homer looked back at me. 'Pete, can I tell ya somethin' real important?' 'Sure, what is it?' I couldn't imagine what Homer was about to say. He sat down on a rounded rock. I sat down too. 'One thing I've learned is that ya never know what's gonna happen to ya in this old life. Everything can change, just like that.' He snapped his fingers, loud and fast. 'You never know what might happen to ya and that dawg ah yers. Ya know what you should do? You ought to settle down here ... On my mountain.' His words were coming quickly and eagerly. 'I'll teach ya all the ways of livin' up here, and someday when ya get a place built, you can have yerself a family.' Homer wasn't kidding me. 'And, besides, ya know I ain't gonna be here forever. When I leave, then you can take care of this place for me. You understand more than anyone why I love this place so much. I know ya wouldn't let them lumbermen and hunters come up here and hurt my place.' There was a shell around Homer and reaching his heart was like breaking a granite boulder with your bare hands. But now, Homer's heart was breaking. After he finished he turned away from me. When he turned back, his questioning eyes were teary. 'Homer, what you just said was beautiful.' I looked down at my boots and rolled a rock back and forth under my heel. 'But, I don't know. I'll have to give it some serious thought, okay?' As quickly as Homer had broken his stride and opened himself up, he was fast on his feet walking back up the mountain. He stayed as quiet as the king trees that he loved so much, never again saying a word to me about his amazing invitation.

He cannot will his entry into and exit from the activity on a daily basis. There is not, as there is for most workers, a brief interval of exemption at the end of the day when he is permitted to enact a wholly different set of gestures; the timing of his eventual exit will by determined not by his own will but by the end of the war, whether that comes in days, months, or years, and there is of course a very high probability that even when the war ends he will never exit from it. Although in all forms of work the worker mixes himself with and eventually becomes inseparable from the materials of his labor (an inseparability that has only its most immediate sign the residues which coat his body, the coal beneath the skin of his arm, the spray of grain in his hair, the ink on his fingers), the boy in war is, to an extent, found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor: he will learn to perceive himself as he will be perceived by others, as indistinguishable from the men of his unit, regiment, division, and above all national group (all of whom will share the same name: he is German) as he is also inextricably bound up with the qualities and conditions – berry laden or snow laden - of the ground over which he walks or runs or crawls and with which he craves and courts identification, as in the camouflage postures he adopts, now running bent over parallel with the ground it is his work to mime, now arching forward conforming the curve of his back to the curve of a companion boulder, now standing as upright and still and narrow as the slender tree behind which he hides; he is the elms and the mud, he is the one hundred and sixth, he is a small piece of German terrain broken off and floating dangerously through the woods of France. He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. He is dark blue like the sea. He is light grey like the air through which he flies. He is sodden in the green shadows of earth. He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.

In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm. My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect. Somehow I had to get on that chopper with him. I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross onto my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting. One chance. What the heck. Neil shook his head at me, smiling. “God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,” I replied, with a smile. “And I’m your man.” (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy--and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.) The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy. “I have to accompany him at all times,” I shouted back over the engine noise. “His feet might fall off at any moment,” I added quietly. The pilot looked back at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve. He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me. “Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.” I shook his hand firmly. Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself. And with that the pilot took off and disappeared from view. Mick and Henry were laughing. “If you pull this one off, Bear, I will eat my socks. You just love to push it, don’t you?” Mick said, smiling. “Yep, good try, but you aren’t going to see him again, I guarantee you,” Henry added. Thanks to the pilot’s big balls, he was wrong. The heli returned empty, I leapt aboard, and with the rotors whirring at full power to get some grip in the thin air, the bird slowly lifted into the air. The stall warning light kept buzzing away as we fought against gravity, but then the nose dipped and soon we were skimming over the rocks, away from base camp and down the glacier. I was out of there--and Mick was busy taking his socks off. As we descended, I spotted, far beneath us, this lone figure sat on a rock in the middle of a giant boulder field. Neil’s two white “beacons” shining bright. I love it. I smiled. We picked Neil up, and in an instant we were flying together through the huge Himalayan valleys like an eagle freed. Neil and I sat back in the helicopter, faces pressed against the glass, and watched our life for the past three months become a shimmer in the distance. The great mountain faded into a haze, hidden from sight. I leaned against Neil’s shoulder and closed my eyes. Everest was gone.

To a wandering man in the wilderness a back trail must be as important as that ahead, for it might be the direction taken tomorrow, and when one faced around the trail looked far, far different. Gigantic boulders seen from one direction might be low, flat rocks seen from another . . . all things were different. Studying trails had taught him much about life, that much depends on the viewpoint.

Just as legendary rivers were used to represent the flow of life, so Mount Athos is a handy image to show human vulnerability. Its minerals themselves reminding us that ours is a planet constituted around Nature’s awesome violence! Struggling to survive then, is integral to our existence. Literature on these issues, transforming rock and boulder into a subjective mountain, where fleshly mountaineers set forth, in the blinding brilliance of an alpine dawn, to ascend their own transgressions, remains telling. Breathing in, when nearing the top, to smell the pure air of spiritual comprehension: of heady intrinsic freedom, only to descend, once more, into the obscure and the pedestrian; albeit existentially transformed! In this way, indeed, Mount Athos transfigures many a man.

She had envisaged them traveling to Boston together, or perhaps even beyond--as far away as the Alps, climbing over boulders to hunt for pasqueflowers and rock-jasmine. He would say to her, "What do you make of this specimen?" and she would say, "It is fine and rare.

A rock, a large piece of rock weathers off a cliff and dives deep into a pool of gushing water. Back washed, It journeys roughly and knocks of other rocks, smashing through the waves as it loses itself in scattered pieces except for its core. That core travels far and wide, it coarsely gets ground by gravel pieces smaller than itself and bullied by boulders all of which it bears up as it withstands the pressure of a distant journey off the shore. At some point, it gets dry and it encounters mud, it gets smeared dirty but the mud doesn't stick, the rain washes of the mud and it rolls off into the sand. It dances in the sand and dives into the bottom of the waves. Rising like a phoenix through the ashes, it emerges polished, looking more beautiful than it did when it got edged of the cliff. It rises a pebble, smooth and sleek. Coveted by rocks starting their dive. To be a pebble you have to run the turbulent tidal race.

But the delight of wading that clear mountain water, scrambling over rocks, or sitting on a boulder in the sunshine and gazing with dreaming eyes into the brown pebbled pools below, was enough joy without feeling the tug of a trout on the end of the line. Often we could see them in the sun-flecked depths below, quiet as shadows except for the occasional waving of a fin.

At the top, I put the camera's viewfinder to my eye and slowly turned, the way my grandmother had taught me. From every vantage point something remarkable filled the screen- clusters of wild red columbine, fallen boulders forming geometric designs against the wall, crusty green lichen gnawing on rocks, a Baltimore oriole popping from a thicket of brush, and, at my feet, a grasshopper clinging to a stem of purple aster. I could spend a day here and barely scratch the surface. The sun felt warm on my shoulders as I bent down to capture the blossoms of yellow star grass, the feathery purple petals of spotted knapweed, and the lacy wings of two yellow jackets as they alighted on tiny white blossoms of Labrador tea. By the time I finished taking photos of a monarch butterfly resting on milkweed, I realized an hour had passed.

You are the only one I want,” she whispered. Immediately she felt buoyant. It was as if she had finally shared a secret that had grown too big inside her, magical words that saved her from drowning. Cass threw her arms around Luca’s neck, inhaling the scent of sweat and sea air. She realized with a start that she was still wearing the chain-mail shirt. Luca held her tight against him. “Then I am the luckiest man alive.” He pulled back so he could look down into her eyes. “And I never thought I’d say this,” he said, his fingertips coming to rest at the bottom of her chain mail. “But you look lovely in armor.” Cass smiled. As she raised her hands, he slipped the chain mail over her head. He dropped the shirt unceremoniously on the ground and then embraced her once more. “There should be a pair of batèlas moored at the most northern part of the island. See that Maximus takes you down the back path so you don’t have to navigate the rocks in the dark.” Back path? She had struggled her way up those boulders for nothing? No. Not for nothing. She had done it for Luca. As the stars looked down on them and Maximus waited a discreet distance away, Luca kissed Cass gently and then released her to the night. “Please be safe,” he said. “I cannot lose you again.

There should be a pair of batèlas moored at the most northern part of the island. See that Maximus takes you down the back path so you don’t have to navigate the rocks in the dark.” Back path? She had struggled her way up those boulders for nothing?

enough so that by scrambling over its bow one could land on the tumbled heaps of rocks and boulders just beneath the opening. “Let’s take a look,” he said eagerly. “Jerry, will you hold the boat here?” “Sure. Go ahead.” Within a few minutes the others were climbing up the boulders toward the cave mouth. Presently they vanished into the dark interior.

A few hundred feet below the car, jumping from foam-flecked rocks to dark, cool pools, a mountain stream churned over boulders, laughed back the sunlight in sparkling reflections, filled the canyon with the sound of tumbling water.

Behold the voracious sea, who appears innocent and blue. Her folds are gentle and she is hemmed with white, like a divine robe. She is a liquid sky and her stars are alive. I meditate on her, from this throne of boulders where I had myself carried from my litter. She is truly amid the lands of Christianity. She receives the sacred water by which the Annunciator washed away sin. Over her beaches every holy face has bowed, and she has rocked their transparent images. Great mysterious anointed one, with neither ebb nor flow, azure candle, set in the terrestrial ring like a liquid jewel, I interrogate you with my eyes. O Mediterranean Sea, return to me my children! Why have you taken them?

Although the hill is not high enough to enable one to see Nantucket in its entirety, Altar Rock is the best seat in the house when it comes to imagining how the island originally came into being. Between 22,000 and 16,000 years ago, a giant glacier stretching across what is now Nantucket Sound bulldozed Saul’s Hills into a rough approximation of their present form. This is where the icy shovel of the bulldozer stopped, dumping the boulder we see beside us.

Hate's got nothing to do with love. In the realms of powerful four-letter words 'hate' belongs down in the slums with 'burp' and 'fart' and 'piss' and 'moan'. Hate's just another bargain-basement addiction, as useful to the broken-hearted as the smokes and the smack and the cheap red wine. Hate is a gallstone. Hate is puppy fat. Weight we don't need. Another boulder to heavy for most. The hateful want the hated to be buried by their boulders, but they can't seem to let their boulders go. Some rocks are just too fuckin' big to throw. So the boulders of hate only bury the hateful. Void spaces once filled with love will never be filled with hate. Void spaces once filled with love can only be filled again wih love.

Far, far away in the West, where things were blue and faint, Bilbo knew there lay his own country of safe and comfortable things, and his little hobbit-hole. He shivered. It was getting bitter cold up here, and the wind came shrill among the rocks. Boulders, too, at times came galloping down the mountain-sides, let loose by mid-day sun upon the snow, and passed among them (which was lucky), or over their heads (which was alarming). The nights were comfortless and chill, and they did not dare to sing or talk too loud, for the echoes were uncanny, and the silence seemed to dislike being broken—except by the noise of water and the wail of wind and the crack of stone.

he heard a voice saying ‘GO’. He crawled to a tree and snapped off a couple of limbs to make improvised ice axes and led Sandra out from under the wing. They stepped and slid down the icy slope an inch at a time. Norman kicked holes with the toes of his trainers and dug the stick in as best he could. Sandra followed behind, her feet half on the snow, half on Norman’s shoulders, her arm still hanging uselessly. The slope slanted across as well as down, drawing them towards an even steeper and icier funnel section of the gulley. Norman tried to keep away from this lethal chute. He looked back up the mountain. They had only gone 9 m (30 ft). They would never make it at this pace. ‘We need to go faster.’ And he turned round to encourage Sandra, only to see her slipping into the insane drop of the funnel. Her hand, her arm, her hip and then her whole body were gone. Norman pushed himself in after her. Momentum took them right across the funnel and Norman caught her as they clattered into jagged rocks on the far side. Bone smashed onto stone as they scrabbled furiously with sticks, fingers, feet – anything to get a grip. Bouncing like a pinball between the boulders they finally came to a stop. Norman’s knuckles were shredded to the bone. But he was too cold to feel any pain. Sandra moaned and started talking about God. There was nothing to do but inch on down the endless chute.

Norman slid down a 30 cm (12 inches) wide bench of snow beside the creek on his hip until he reached a rock bowl. At the far side, the stream emptied over an icy waterfall on to sharp rocks 15 m (50 ft) below. Somehow he used cracks to worm his way down from rocky crease to icy blister. The slope wasn’t steep here, but Norman had to traverse giant shale boulders. His stomach was chewing itself and exhaustion tore at him like an animal. He staggered woozily on until looked up and saw the meadow of snow 180 m (600 ft) down slope. But the mountain still wasn’t done with him. Now the enemy was a snarling mass of buckthorn, which lurked below a thin layer of snow. He dropped into it and stuck deep in the well formed by the jagged branches, unable to climb out. A plane passed high above. He yelled and waved. It circled. It had seen him. No. It sailed over the massive ridgeline. ‘I never gave up. My dad taught me to never give up.’ From Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad. With the last ounces of his strength, Norman scrabbled and slithered out of the nest of buckthorn. With a flush of euphoria he found he had made it to the oasis of the snow meadow. It was tempting to sit down and celebrate, but he knew he might never get up again. He had to push on. But how would he get out? The vines wove a dense forest on the other side of the meadow. Then, he found some footprints. They were fresh. Norman followed them. After a few minutes, he realized the boot tracks made a circle. Was he delirious? Panic flooded his system. Then: ‘Hello! Anybody there?’ Norman screamed his lungs out. A teenage boy and his dog appeared out of the thickening gloom. ‘You from the crash?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Anyone else?

His white hands were smooth as wax, only blemished by the brown spots of age,” wrote Faubion Bowers, a major who often rode guard in the front seat. “His fingers were exquisitely manicured, as if lacquered with polish. He held them in his lap, peacefully. His profile, which I knew better than his full face, was granitic. He was always immaculately clean-shaven, and I never saw a nick on him. He had large bones, an oversize jaw that jutted a little. From face to walk, from gesture to speech, he shone with good breeding….He was really very beautiful, like fine ore, a splendid rock, a boulder.

They were deep into the forest, climbing over mossy rocks and logs, far from anything familiar and so very different from the city she'd been living in, yet it felt as familiar as a childhood dream. She tried to keep track of their path: left beside the tree with a triple trunk, straight by a boulder made of pink quartz, across a stream that trickled over mossy stones, but after a while she fell into a kind of meditation. Everything felt soft and alive, and she felt as if she were welcomed within.

In 1741, the ninety-five-year-old Thomas Faunce asked to be carried in a litter to the Plymouth waterfront. Faunce had heard that a pier was about to be built over an undistinguished rock at the tide line near Town Brook. With tears in his eyes, Faunce proclaimed that he had been told by his father, who had arrived in Plymouth in 1623, that the boulder was where the Pilgrims had first landed. Thus was born the legend of Plymouth Rock.

Before the time of Allan and Delair, Comyns Beaumont reviewed the work of Establishment geologists, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz and James Geikie. He exposed their scientific palaver for the nonsense it is, and wrote of the Ice Age theory in these words: What! No Ice Age which came and went, spreading over hundreds of thousands of years as all good geologists proclaim? No smothering ice sheets which enveloped the British Isles and much of the northern parts of the continent, changed the climate to Arctic conditions – although, strangely enough, much of our fauna and flora survived despite it – and compelled all the survivors to flee? No lengthy periods of ice alternated with warm and even sub-tropical climatic interludes? No. Nothing of the sort. There was admittedly a tremendous convulsion of nature, which had the most direful effect upon the inhabitants of Scandinavia, the British Isles, and those in Northern Asia. It resulted in giving us, it is true, bitter cold, tremendous floods, and cruel dampness. That it affected the climate in the north adversely and permanently cannot be denied. It did other things as well. But no Ice Age – (Riddle of Prehistoric Britain) It was an event…sudden, rapid, devastating, and appalling in its magnitude, and destructiveness. It was a celestial impact of an immense cometary body…It rained or distributed rocks, stones, boulder clay, till, gravel, sand, and other material over great areas, utterly obliterating certain parts, elevating others, and entirely missing some regions. It created islands, drowned others, caused immense tidal waves which swallowed up coastal lands, consumed huge spaces with electric waves, set up volcanoes, and swept away cities and largely populated districts almost in a flash

I felt then that [this] was another special place. A place where climbers lived who cared for it, and knew it well enough to say that the yellow rock was more brittle than the red, or that there are hidden holds inside that crack, or that the number of condors is on the up, that the boulder in the next valley gives good shelter, or at what time exactly does the sun shine on that face of the mountain. Simple shared knowledge. That which we have of our home rocks. —Paul Pritchard,

Whether it is a speck of sand on the beach, a pebble, a rock, or a boulder, each contributes equally to the beach, for they make up a part of the beach in their own way. Each participates in the world in its own way.

The age old question, what is Love? Isn't it the greatest gift from the holy one Above? Is it pure and white like a new born Dove? Does it cuddle you up,Like a hand in a Glove? Answer this hard question that what is LOVE?? the force that propels you ,through pain and despair, the benevolence,the blessings,from the heavens above, the ray of sunshine that pierces the clouds, a perennial hope, that's what is love; Its the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, Its the mirth that ends melancholy's reign, A fountain of glee,the elixir of life, Its the drug that heals,and cures all the pain; Its an eternal promise, never meant to be broken, Its the bond that adheres two hearts together, People may die and their stories may end, But their love is immortal,it lives on forever; Its the river that cuts through boulders and rocks, and the stream that flows through our barren lives, And on its long course, it leaves behind a trail Of vivid fragrant flowers,and clear blue skies; Love is felt by the heart,relished by the soul, Blissful like the divine touch of the Gods, I yearn for more ballads and more metaphors, But i fall short of verses, can't bind love in words.

Six heads erupted from the water with fangs flashing and mouths roaring. On the neck of one of them was Asherah, riding it like a steed. She pointed down at the approaching form of Mikael. The monster focused on the angel as a target. The sound of gurgling from deep within its bowels warned Mikael. He had been caught by this attack before, at the beach of Mount Sapan. He was not going to let it happen again. He dove behind a huge boulder as a stream of fire poured out from the dragon head and blackened the entire area of stone. Another head reached down and Dagon leapt onto it, pulled away before Uriel and Gabriel could reach him. Ba’alzebul and Molech dashed headlong at the seven heads. Ba’alzebul’s muscular form launched an amazing thirty feet to catch one of the gaping jaws as it swung past the rocks of the beach. Molech was not so glorious. He could only make a good twenty feet. It was not enough to reach his target. He landed in the water in a belly flop. Uriel and Gabriel could not help but look at each other, smirking. One of the dragon heads reached down and picked Molech out of the water with its teeth and placed him on the back of another neck. The head that Ba’alzebul had caught had a sword stuck in the roof of its mouth, the hilt sticking out of its head. It was Gabriel’s sword, from their confrontation at Sapan generations earlier. Ba’alzebul pulled it from the creature’s mouth and swung around to mount its neck. He raised the sword high in victory, as all seven heads plunged back into the deep, carrying its four riders away from the grasp of the angels. Mikael stepped down to the shoreline to stand by Uriel and Gabriel as Raphael and Raguel helped the trapped angels get free from the rocks. They looked out onto the frothing, swirling waters left behind by the exit of the gargantuan and its riders. There was no way the archangels could ever chase that chaos monster. “You have to hand it to that Asherah,” said Uriel. “She is one goddess with chutzpah, taking her chances with enchanting Leviathan.” Gabriel added, “And I thought Ashtart was gutsy.” “Ashtart cut your gut in half back at Mount Hermon,” said Uriel wryly. “If I had not found your legs in the waters of the Abyss you would have been a paraplegic until the Resurrection.

Ice Age 2,588 million years ago, at the start of the Pleistocene, the Earth entered an Ice Age. It followed 50 million years of climatic downturn, and was the first full-blown ice age for a quarter of a billion years. Cooler, arid conditions alternated with warm, wet conditions as ice sheets ebbed and flowed in higher latitudes. The ice sheets alternately locked up vast amounts of fresh water, then released it again as temperatures rose. This alternation between a cooler and a warmer climate has continued right up to the present day. The cold spells are often referred to as ‘ice ages’. In particular the end of the most recent glacial period 11,600 years ago, is popularly known as the end of the last Ice Age. In fact the warm spells – interglacial periods – are no more than breaks in an on-going ice age. The current Holocene epoch, that followed the last glacial period, is such a break. In theory, glacial conditions will one day return, though the effects of anthropogenic (human caused) global warming make this uncertain. Glacial periods are not necessarily periods of unremitting cold, but alternate between colder and warmer intervals known respectively as stadials and interstadials. The idea that there were periods when glaciers extended beyond their present-day limits gradually emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century. Geologists sought to explain such phenomena as rock scouring and scratching, the cutting of valleys, the existence of whale-shaped hills known as drumlins and the presence of erratic boulders and ridges of rocky debris known as moraines. The term Eiszeit (‘ice age’) was coined in 1837 by the German botanist Karl Friedrich Schimper.

Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My

Lucien bent down and once again sifted through rock and sand, looking for gods knew what. Sunlight stroked him lovingly, the bitch. He’s mine. “Go away, Anya,” he repeated. Grrr! She materialized. Rather than slap him, though, she sat on a boulder beside him. He was shirtless again, his skin slightly burned, cut up and bruised. He didn’t face her. “I said go away.” “Like I’m going to obey you. You aren’t my daddy. Unless you want to be. ’Cause I’ve been a bad, naughty girl and I need a spanking.” A

We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Powell wasn’t overstating their ignorance. At this point, they had no clear idea how far they had come or how much canyon lay ahead of them. They did not know how many turns the river would make, how many rapids there might be, or whether their supplies would sustain them through the time it would take to negotiate these obstacles. And they had no way of knowing that their most serious challenges lay ahead. Just

When I find her, she's standing by some boulders near the rim of her clearing. Ivy's holding a rock as she looks under it, as if she'll find me under there. "Ivy? I'm right here." She doesn't answer. She doesn't even turn around. She just sets the rock down and moves on to the next one, calling out my name. "Rylan?" "Ivy, I'm right behind you." Why won't she look at me? "I cannot find you...Rylan." Ivy talks to herself as she lifts up each rock. "Where did you go? Why are you...not here?" "But I am, Ivy. I'm right here." Ivy finishes searching under the rocks and for a moment gazes out into the dense trees. "Where are you, Rylan? Why am I...alone?" "You're not!" I cry out in frustration. "I'm right behind you! Just turn around and look!" She does. Ivy turns around and walks toward me until we're only a foot apart. But she isn't looking at me. She's looking over my shoulder, just like Dad. "Do you see me now?" I furiously waved my hands in front of her face. "I'm right here." When Ivy speaks again, she's talking to herself. "Rylan? Where are you?" She stretches out her hand and touches me with it. It goes right through me. Like I'm mist. Like I'm a ghost. Like I wasn't even here to begin with. "Ivy!

On their right an embankment of tumbled rocks and boulders sloped steeply to the water below. From the opposite side rose a jagged cliff. The little-traveled road was winding, and just wide enough for two cars to pass.

He dreamt of the Earth: a ball of rock hurtling around a naked fire. Four and a half billion years old, the product of a grand melee of smashing dust, gas, and boulders, it was bombarded on all sides by lethal radiation and surrounded by an infinite expanse of lethal, frozen vacuum. A fragile sheen of gas and some lucky magnetism were the only things that kept it from succumbing to the black. Its core was as hot as the surface of the sun. Its crust, nearly 4,000 miles removed, was where his entire species lived: ants swarming on a chunk of decaying bread. Every nation, every religion, every story and every life had happened there, suspended precariously between the lethal darkness of space and the crushing heat of the Earth's interior.

Drake's whip hand spun Diana like a top. She cried out. That sound, her cry, pierced Caine like an arrow. Diana staggered and almost righted herself, but Drake was too quick, too ready. His second strike yanked her through the air. She flew and then fell. “Catch her!” Caine was yelling to himself. Seeing her arc as she fell. Seeing where she would hit. His hands came up, he could use his power, he could catch her, save her. But too slow. Diana fell. Her head smashed against a jutting point of rock. She made a sound like a dropped pumpkin. Caine froze. The fuel rod, forgotten, fell from the air with a shattering crash. It fell within ten feet of the mine shaft opening. It landed atop a boulder shaped like the prow of a ship. It bent, cracked, rolled off the boulder, and crashed heavily in the dirt. Drake ran straight at Caine, his whip snapping. But Jack stumbled in between them, yelling, “The uranium! The uranium!” The radiation meter in his pocket was counting clicks so fast, it became a scream. Drake piled into Jack, and the two of them went tumbling. Caine stood, staring in horror at Diana. Diana did not move. Did not move. No snarky remark. No smart-ass joke. “No!” Caine cried. “No!” Drake was up, disentangling himself with an angry curse from Jack. “Diana,” Caine sobbed. Drake didn’t rely on his whip hand now, too far away to use it before Caine could take him down. He raised his gun. The barrel shot flame and slugs, BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM. Inaccurate, but on full automatic, Drake had time. He swung the gun to his right and the bullets swooped toward where Caine stood like he was made of stone. Then the muzzle flash disappeared in an explosion of green-white light that turned night into day. The shaft of light missed its target. But it was close enough that the muzzle of Drake’s gun wilted and drooped and the rocks behind Drake cracked from the blast of heat. Drake dropped the gun. And now it was Drake’s turn to stare in stark amazement. “You!” Sam wobbled atop the rise. Quinn caught him as he staggered. Now Caine snapped back to the present, seeing his brother, seeing the killing light. “No,” Caine said. “No, Sam: He’s mine.” He raised a hand, and Sam went flying backward along with Quinn. “The fuel rod!” Jack was yelling, over and over. “It’s going to kill us all. Oh, God, we may already be dead!” Drake rushed at Caine. His eyes were wide with fear. Knowing he wouldn’t make it. Knowing he was not fast enough. Caine raised his hand, and the fuel rod seemed to jump off the ground. A javelin. A spear. He held it poised. Pointed straight at Drake. Caine reached with his other hand, extending the telekinetic power to hold Drake immobilized. Drake held up his human hand, a placating gesture. “Caine…you don’t want to…not over some girl. She was a witch, she was…” Drake, unable to run, a human target. The fuel rod aimed at him like a Spartan’s spear. Caine threw the fuel rod. Tons of steel and lead and uranium. Straight at Drake.

Leaving the Connecticut River March 8, 1704 Temperature 40 degrees Thou shalt not kill. Ruth lay down and inched forward until she could look over the edge of the cliff to see what had happened. The force of Otter’s fall had brought snow and rock down upon him. One hand stuck out, and part of his face. But I say unto you which hear. Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you…And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other. What could Jesus have been thinking when he said that? This enemy was the murderer and slaughterer of innocent women and children. Ruth was not going to love him, she would never do anything good unto him, and certainly she was not going to offer him yet another chance to strike her in the face. She rejoiced that this enemy had no choice about living or dying, any more than her father and brother had had a choice about living or dying. She thought of her mother, giving water to the wounded French officer, and for that gesture, being left behind. She wondered how Mother felt now, alone in a world where her men had died to save her while she helped their enemies. The savage was alive, trying with that one hand to dig himself free. A rim of ice fell like knives upon him. Ruth cried out. The Indian made no sound. Ruth scuttled backward, out of his sight. She could go get help. Or let him die. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t supposed to be Ruth who had to love the enemy. That was just a verse you repeated in meeting. She was not going to take it seriously, loving her enemy. But it was the Word of the Lord. The Twenty-third Psalm moved through her mind, as warm and sure as summer wind. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. If she broke the commandment and failed to love her enemy, she would never lie down in green pastures. Not on earth, not in her heart, and not in death. Ruth worked her way through tangles of thin saplings and around boulders. She slid down rock faces. Sweating and sobbing over terrain that could not have been made by God, only by devils, she reached Otter at last. Her bad lungs sounded like sand rubbed on floors. She dug him out, not carefully. She might have to save him but she would not spare him pain. He was bleeding where ice had sliced him and by now her mittens were shredded, and their blood mingled, flecked scarlet on white snow. When he was finally on his feet, she said, “It’s not because I wanted to, you know.” Otter took a short careful step and paused in pain, Ruth thought, though pain did not show on his face. “It’s so I won’t be a killer like you,” she said. He snapped a branch in his strong hands to use as a cane. Laboriously, they made their way up the cliff, crawling part of the way. “Actually, I hate you,” said Ruth. Huge hot tears fell from her eyes and she knew that hate was not as simple as that. Nor were the commandments.

Maybe Artist is hard job. It is not for me to say. But I would be surprised if it was as hard a job as Rock Thrower. Throwing rocks is not so easy. For example, five years ago, one of my shoulders detached from my arm when I was throwing a boulder off a cliff. And two years after that, the other shoulder detached also. I can still throw rocks. But now, when I throw them, I am screaming. Not just once in a while, but constantly. Every time I throw a rock I am screaming, so loud. I do not always realize I am screaming—it is just part of my life. Usually, by sundown, I have no voice left. It is gone, you understand, because I was screaming so much from the pain of throwing rocks. Another thing is that sometimes I fall off the cliff, which is a bad situation.