The following is a chapter from the novel, Divine Elemental, by Raywat Deonandan. All international copyrights are retained by the author.

Chapter 14: The Sleeping God

The entirety of human history is but an instant when compared to the ancientness of the Earth, a single still in a lengthy motion picture. The Earth herself is but an inconsequential foetus pushed aside by the evermore important and unimaginable solar and galactic maturity. Geological periods lasting hundreds of millions of years occupy hours of playing time in that movie, providing a lush and ever changing tapestry upon which life has chosen to paint its random and delightful parasitical designs. Such periods, lasting longer than the sum totality of sentient life, have arisen and faded on many occasions, leaving behind only ossified evidence and tortured landscapes. Alien terrains once characterized our Earth, their evolving nooks and ragged valleys giving rise to peculiar biota of completely foreign and vanished orders sprung from unfamiliar philosophies.

In a time we dreamily call the mid-Permian, 250 million years ago, a forgotten ocean named Tethys stretched along the latitudinal area that now separates Tibet from Nepal. And a supercontinent sprawled across the globe. Its name was one of primal elegance and Titan-like indignance --Pangaea-- matching well the Hellenic charm of its abutting sea. In these days, the god Shiva's fire howled in the belly of the world, jetting through holes in the crust to quake the ground and melt the rock. The quantum mechanical god Vishnu, it goes, slept beneath it all, dreaming the universe. From his navel sprouted a lotus, upon which the incarnation of divine grace, the greater god Brahma, also slept, dreaming the events that transpired in Vishnu's universe. Brahma opens his inner eye, and a world comes into being. He closes that eye, and a world goes out of being. Together they slumbered, Vishnu and Brahma, dreamer and dream, lover and loved, thought and sense.

Pierced by Shiva's fire and shaken by the beat of his drum, the Pangaea monstrosity split into an orphanage of directionless masses which swam apart like a brood of fish bursting from a single egg sac. Two daughter continents, one that would become known as Europe and Asia, and the other a twisted geologic stepchild, turned toward a high-speed collision of centimetres per year, a tragedy that would last a heartbeat in geologic time, but 200 million years by way of human reckoning.

The collision was a beautiful cacophony of slow fusion, a meeting of rock with mud, of water with air, and of distant biotic cousins. The geologic stepchild pushed aside Tethys with godlike muscularity, constraining her voluminous tears to stream in rivers that would soon be recognized for their holiness. Shiva would rejoice, would spring to his feet in dance. Delicious wet soil was churned up, dragging with it nitrates and phosphates lapped up by the confused and displaced biota, fueling a green infection of the suture that now characterized the mating of continent with stepchild, pushing aside the mighty mother Tethys with contraceptive disdain.

Overthrust portions of the stepchild stacked upon one another, fed by Shiva's fire and encouraged to reach for the sun. The tears of Tethys no longer could bathe this behemoth, for its altitude would know no equal on the Earth. The Greeks would know Tethys as the wife of Oceanus, the Titan and world-girdling sea, and as the mother of countless rivers. The Hindus would not know her, but would bathe in her most revered creations, the rivers that would seem to flow from Shiva's long hair as he supposedly reclined and danced at the head of the stepchild's overthrust, on Kailasa, the Hindu Olympus nestled at the mouth of the great Himalayan range.

But Shiva only knew one dance, that of a circular two-step that he dressed up as an elegant cosmic ballet. The stumbling dance required that his torch and drum must play both creation and destruction. As a result, the end of the Permian would see the biggest global extinction of life ever to be experienced by the embryonic Earth. Half of her children would perish, fifty percent of taxonomical families and ninety percent of species. Entire living philosophies inconceivable to hard-wired human brains would vanish forever with a disdainful shrug of Shiva's left shoulder. Brahma's restless sleep would cause him to moan then, bits of his immense body pinched and bruised by the events transpiring on his beloved Earth, in his restless dream.

Save for a few treasured niches, oxygen was evacuated from the waters, and rainforests were cooled. The Earth was a planetary garden no more, beaten as she was by the higher purpose --or vanity-- of gods. But the remainder of the supercontinent Pangaea would find its voice, rotating in the warmth of the ancient seas, coaxing the flourishing of hot life anew, until the Earth was a jungle teeming with lush vegetation, fearless insects and the terrifying thunder lizards we would call dinosaurs.

The stepchild's overthrust, what men would know as the Himalayas, would have been finally visible as the world's highest points when Shiva grew clumsy yet again, faltering in his two-step and raising the flame instead of the drum. It was 65 million years ago when an errant pebble from that galactic ancientness found its way into the eye of the childish Earth. It would make contact in the Gulf of Mexico, raising tides and dust, blocking out the sun and splintering the crust. The sleeping god would feel the pain in his side, feel the spill of souls dribble from his snoring mouth. The thunder lizards would perish, of course, as would countless species of animals and plants. But some, among them the lithe and mysterious insects, would persevere, whatever secrets accrued through millions of years of racial memory safely stored in the vaults of their genes.

Shiva sat for a while, regaining the yogic serenity that the sadhus insist he invented, perhaps afraid to dance again lest his clumsiness cause yet another catastrophe. The lingering drops of Tethys' mother milk dripped from his ascetic hair, pooling at the feet of the new mountains at the stepchild's suture, coalescing into a mighty river that raged down the plains of the new subcontinent, nudging the odd plants and spores that were differentially scattered, outbred or preserved from the days of that slow beautiful collision, and perhaps awakening other ancient elemental things who tend not to leave geologic evidence of their passing, but who are nonetheless dreamt by Brahma with fatherly judiciousness.

Precious deltas and vistas were fed by the torrent, sprouting oases of sustained life. Similar niches emerged thousands of kilometres to the west, in the fabled fertile crescent. New animals born of a new philosophy soon grew to prominence, reaching for the mantle of rule left vacant by the destroyed thunder lizards. The lizards, of course, remained as but a genetic whisper, emerging in emotion and reflex, issuing unheard suggestions from the wet darkness of the human hindbrain. As with all who strive for such dominance, the humans were streaked with understandable arrogance and a presumed special relationship with the forces that gave them rise. They pooled at these new lush vistas, benefitting from ready access to resources, freeing their oversized brains to consider issues of wider or lesser importance: knowledge, gods, morality and conquest. Human civilization, born of arrogance in the wake of planetary catastrophe, saw first light in these two vistas, these western and eastern cradles.

Brahma dreamt of one such arrogant man in the western vista. Alexander saw the path of gods who tread regularly between civilization's two cradles. He would follow that path, destroy all that lay in his way, and connect with the ancientness that flowed in his veins. In the divine dream, a million babies were born, cried, grew, married, procreated and died. Some committed foul deeds, a few rose to celestial moral heights, and most conducted lives not unlike those lived by the billions of non-human beings cast beneath hundreds of millions of years of geologic renewal. Wars were fought, books and songs written, ideas wrought, crimes committed, prayers offered and voyages undertaken. In one restless dream, the Greek king camped with his men beneath an enormous girdling tree, eating rotting shell fish and drinking coconut milk. Mortal eyes would have missed the amorphous forms that surrounded the soldiers, the technicolour elemental storm that paradoxically raged invisibly and soundlessly about them. If only they would look up, look through the layers of illusion that bound them to a linear existence, that yoked them to lives not so unlike that of the millions of species of beasts that had come before. But they rarely did.

The motion picture is a vanity, an unnecessary visual crutch that depends upon that manufactured dimension, time. That the cosmic dream resembled a motion picture was a curiosity that was not to be analyzed by the unconscious mind of a non-existent god. After all, time could be removed and the natural state of simultaneity restored. When it was, events transpired at once, the dream becoming impossibly but unmistakably chaotic. One such simultaneous event was the transfiguration of a forest fox into a beautiful woman, or so the story goes. Another was the instantaneous arrival of another arrogant but chubby western man into the eastern cradle, his prior existence unnoticed or unimportant, given the universe's true simultaneous nature. His story, you see, begins in India.

That this man and the daughter of the forest fox stood together beneath the same tree as that against which an arrogant king had once rested, embraced by the same technicolour storm of invisible and silent forces, would have been amusing and ironic to the sleeping god, if only he were real, and not the manufactured deity of an over-religious people. Perhaps in his amusement he would have restored the temporal nature of the dream-movie, allowed himself to watch events transpire in agonizing sequentiality. He would have seen this arrogant man and the daughter of the forest fox return to the tree day after day, ostensibly observing those boring fig wasps with such ridiculously narrow "scientific" intent. He would have seen a fractured trust become sutured together, leaving a noticeable scar akin to the Himalayan scab that marked the wound between continent and stepchild.

His god's eyes, the fables tell, were inner eyes that would see all dimensions and all spectra. Surely, he would need to squint and concentrate to perceive the little story told between these people, obfuscated as it was by the storm of events unperceived by humans. Maybe he would have taken the time --for, after all, time was an illusion, they say-- to watch the pink man read delicate letters of intimate pain presented to him as offerings of trust. Brahma the dreamer, Brahma the voyeur, Brahma the watcher of romances --blasphemous characterizations, to be sure. With his godly perception, he would have seen the man stiffen with the remaining embers of a shame he did not even know that he felt. One hopes the beneficent one would have offered help with this, licking away that blackness from Iskandar's spirit, though such was impossible for a sleeping deity who, after all, was mere fiction.

It is possible he would have cared more for the flying treasures, the repositories of invaluable ancient biological knowledge locked in the flesh of Earth's oldest animals. A god's attentions cannot be monopolized by only one of his creations, as the invisible ones --whose presence no human society has ever doubted or proved-- also require to be dreamt with vigor, lest Brahma's attention waver, his inner eye blink, and such creatures' existence quietly end. But it is pleasant to consider that a mythical being of infinite resources might find satisfaction in the hesitant, awkward but warm and wet kiss between the pink man and a daughter of the forest fox. It was a lengthy kiss, leading to others and more, days in the making. It was a small thing, an inconsequential thing, given the infinite number of events occurring simultaneously elsewhere in the universe. But it was no less important. If the sleeping god were to look away, the lovers would falter in their existence. Their first kiss was thus worthy of his watchfulness, as were the instances of escalating physical intimacy that followed in subsequent days.

One would think that the fictitious sleeping god had seen many such identical scenes of love, had lazily noted the affectionate nudging of thousands of species, even those whose emotional core was dissimilar to the modern primate's. Yet his own emotional timbre was perfectly reflected in that of the humans, a species whose members uniquely and occasionally sought the celestial in spirit, in thought and in action. If only the sleeping god were real, and not himself dreamt by imaginative humans, he would have the sense to worry, no doubt squirming uncomfortably on Vishnu's navel-lotus. He would see that the scab that grew atop the wound of broken trust had not fully healed, proving a poor bedrock indeed. Shiva's fire still burned, volcanoes were still active, and change was yet afoot.