_The Story of Earth _ Part Ten

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Out into the darkness of silent night and towering mountains she ventures today, breathing the thin mountain air of a place of great height. No stars light this sky, and the enveloping gloom gives a sense of unreality, bringing her focus close, not allowing her to look further than her immediate surroundings. As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she works out that she is standing on top of a pinnacle plateau that towers high above the surrounding landscape, a small area of land that is the shape and colour of a golden coin, a place from which there seems nowhere to go. She creeps carefully towards the edge, finding a drop which is vertiginous and dizzying, perhaps over several thousand feet, with far beneath her the twinkling lights of a city, the place where she is bound.

Although she obviously needs to get down to the bottom of the valley and off to the city of lights, she feels sick to the pit of her stomach. Vertigo washes over her as she searches the edge of the small plateau for a way down, looking for some way that she can take in order to escape from this lonely and abandoned place. After a long time searching, she realises that the small path that she had previously rejected as looking too unsafe will have to be ventured after all. She begins to make her way down, although it takes her an awfully long time to negotiate the precarious footings, and by the time she finally reaches the bottom, the darkness is fading with the breaking of the dawn.

The slow soft light gently unwraps the landscape, revealing the beauty that now surrounds her and she feels lifted by the sight of the open road ahead. She looks back at where she has just come from and the plateau actually doesn’t look that high now she sees it from below, and she wonders why it had seemed so tall and difficult from where she was standing at the top. It does not take her long to reach a city created from marble and gold, sandstone and silver, archways and waterways; the ancient city of Venice, although she is not entirely sure in which era, for she can see no people; dawn is not far behind her and the sun has not yet risen.

Weaving in and out of tall narrow buildings that block much of the sky from view, she comes finally to a small nondescript house that really does not look like anything special. The ancient door is green and carved with strange patterns, and she tries the heavy iron
handle, opening it easily to find that it leads straight into a very busy office environment. The interior is relatively modern, there are fax machines and photocopiers, stacks of paper, people running here there and everywhere, so that she feels that she is standing in a publishing house of some sort, and that people are trying to reach some sort of deadline; perhaps a newspaper lives here and they are rushing to issue the daily news in time for breakfast.

Feeling as if she is in the way, she finds an escape route, a small archway that leads conveniently up a narrow winding stair, turning and twisting round and round until it brings her to the very top of the building. As she steps out of the dark passageway, a small
window allows her to see inside room at the top and she peers through it to see what is going on. The space within is crammed with the mechanics of an enormous clock, a collection of golden cogs and wheels that are all locked into one another, turning slowly as the time ticks away. She can see the edge of a huge brass bell, glowing softly in the dim interior, and she wonders what time it is.

Time; she feels as if she is looking into the inner world of time, an endless series of circles, wheels within wheels, with nothing to indicate where on the circle she is. She recognises that it is all a matter of perspective, that time encircles her, that she is her past, and that she is also her futures, and that history will repeat itself always, until such time as she steps outside of the wheel, and chooses to do something different. Looking away from the golden cogs, she climbs up onto the parapet whilst the clock behind her starts whirring and creaking and her breath is taken away from her, as she stands dizzyingly close to the edge of what must be the tallest clock tower in Venice. The bell behind her strikes once, followed by all the other bells in the city, and she looks out over the rooftops, blessed by the glory of the rising sun and the adulation of a thousand pealing bells.

Looking around the corner of the parapet, she sees a figure dressed in brown, Malachi of course, still there, always there, guiding her right from the beginning; he doesn’t look round for he is in the moment, listening to the dawn of a city out of time……….And so here the story ends, ends for now at least. Looking out over Venice, a city that she has never been to that she can remember, but like every other journey that she has made, a place that has become a part of her world. She stands there looking out over the city, with the bells ringing in her ears; the sky is blue, the sun has risen on a new day, and she is looking out into forever.

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Earth 10 holds the honour of being the ‘last card travelled’ and indicates a culmination, an ending, or a completion. It is often connected with a ‘coming together’ of a project, a planned event, or even a family, signifying a desire to leave something to the world that lives after you, whether that is a child, a book, a painting, or the stories of your clan. Take in the view from the top; you can be certain that the climb was worth it.