The Axis: Letter One
Dear Susannah
My first impression was of a wall so immense that I could see no limit either to its height or width, one whose upper reaches were already lost from sight. The wall was far from static. It was continually growing in height if not in width. There was motion in its length and that motion was vertical.
Whatever source was driving the phenomenon didn’t expend itself on arrival at the surface. Like a geometric representation of the planet’s axis, it rose up through the ground with the same effortless and unstoppable ease that had marked its passage through crust and mantle alike, propelling itself skywards into the very dominion of space itself.
There were no terms of reference (no previous experience or knowledge) for what I was seeing, at least none outside of my imagination; and even that struggled to accommodate the sight before me: a column of energy (what else could it be?) whose perimeter far exceeded the circumference of the circle. Dimensions were difficult to grasp for my mind was still in shock but the scale was cosmic, far beyond the capacities of human endeavour. This was not man-made. Such a certainty was one of the few things my mind could grasp as I surveyed the extent of the phenomenon. Nor was there anything remotely terrestrial about it. The column’s interior reminded me of sky beset by a thunderstorm, with vast columns of smoke twisting around themselves like frantic serpents.
I looked across at Tanya, seeing in her bewildered features a mirror of my own expression. The eruption had thrown us to the ground, exaggerating (if that were possible) the scale of the object that towered above us, its grey-black body roiling and twisting like a hurricane, albeit one that preferred to retain its energies rather than unleash them in indiscriminate fury. But object was the wrong word. That implied something solid. Something finite. This force was neither. Its reach was apparently limitless, its ascending length drawing the eye into the heavens, into whose uppermost vaults it seemed to reach like the walls of some celestial cathedral.
Though the column clearly had a fixed boundary, its substance could not be described as solid, not in any meaningful way. Viewed from without, the body of the column was as intangible as mist, a vaporous conduit for the energy it carried. If any of that power was seeping out, it was utterly negligible. I stood, helping Tanya to her feet as I did so. We were scarcely twenty metres from the miracle (again what else could it be?), almost nose to nose with it, and yet were untouched by its energies. Another wonder in itself. The only disturbance I could feel, apart from the visual storm I could see raging within the interior of this celestial pivot, was the wind, the vortex created by its angular momentum, a force the equal of anything in the world of celestial mechanics. Some of this motion was transferred to the surrounding air, generating the chaos now engulfing the space around the column.
The wind, a storm in itself, was strong enough to threaten my balance, and drown out all but the loudest of shouts. It quickly gathered enough dust and debris to warrant a further retreat, an additional eighty metres that did nothing to reduce the scale of the column. I could detect no trace of menace in the structure. Great power and mass to be sure but nothing malevolent.
Neither Tanya or I were tempted to venture any closer. We were an inauspicious audience. But then the nativity itself had scarcely been witnessed by a larger gathering, and there was no doubt in my mind that we were present at a birth of some kind, an advent as significant as any the Magi might have seen. And like that other turning point in history this too would be a demarcation of sorts, a boundary separating two distinct halves of human history.
I was so absorbed by the sight before me, and so preoccupied in keeping my balance in the teeth of the wind, that it was sometime before I noticed the other sensation I would come to associate with the column. Where the wind was forceful, this other was subtle. Where one was everywhere, this other was more selective, more discerning in its presence, a discrete entity whispering its subtleties and entreaties in my ear. Or rather, not just in my ear but at my groin and, perhaps more predictably, at the nape of my neck. I could feel the hairs rise on my arms and the sudden emptiness in my core, an agitation in my nerve endings and an absence in my belly, as if the void I was looking at (and which was surely looking at me in turn) had found an echo in my gut.
Even if I’d been blind my senses would have told me that something of significance was nearby. Nor was it a monolith, with all the static bulk that implied, for there was motion in its length, suggesting dynamics I could only guess at, a polarity whose diverse claims were generating energies not seen since the beginning of the universe.