It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. But it was a thing of death.Īli got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat.

Their signature could be a thing of beauty. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. This was the body of a slave.ĭown from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way.

Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag. She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. “Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

The descent book jeff long