Alexander Reached for Heaven and Sank Toward the Deep

The Conqueror Who Bowed at the City Gate

Alexander had already taken most of the world. He had defeated Darius and stood in his place. He had marched through kingdoms without sleeping. Now he came to Jerusalem, and the city had not surrendered because the High Priest Jaddua had been waiting for a dream that would tell him what to do.

The dream came. Open the gates. Dress the priests in white. Go out to meet the army.

The procession walked out of the city in full priestly regalia, the High Priest at the front wearing the golden plate inscribed with God's name on his turban. Alexander's generals expected him to charge. Instead the conqueror dismounted. He walked forward alone and bowed before the man in white robes.

His officers were horrified. His own soldiers did not understand. One general asked afterward why Alexander, who accepted no man's superiority, had prostrated himself before a Jewish priest. Alexander answered that he had not bowed to the man. He had bowed to the God whose name the priest wore. He had seen this figure in a dream before the campaign began, and the dream had promised victory. What looked like submission was recognition. The god of the Israelites had already told Alexander he would win, and Alexander was returning the courtesy.

The Eagles and the Edge of Sky

After he had conquered what the earth offered, Alexander turned his eyes upward. He wanted the edge of the sky, the place where the air ran out and something else began.

He caught two great eagles and starved them for days, until their hunger was a kind of engine he could steer. Then he built a cage or throne of some kind, stood in it between the birds, and held meat fixed on a pole just above their heads, just beyond reach. The eagles beat their wings trying to reach the meat, and the beating lifted Alexander with them. Up and up, higher than any army could follow, higher than any map extended, the wind tearing at the cage, the ground falling away beneath him until the cold became unbearable and his eyelids froze.

He looked down. The earth below him was like a tiny circle in a vast sea of nothing, the great sea that ringed it shrunk to a thread of silver. He was a speck of ambition surrounded by air, and the air had stopped giving him anything to breathe.

He released the meat, and the eagles, suddenly free to drop, plunged after it and carried him down.

The Glass Box and the Lightless Water

The sky had refused him its secrets. Alexander turned downward. He had a glass box built, sealed, air-tight, and descended into the sea inside it. Down through the green, down through the dark, down through water that became pressure and then cold and then something else entirely. The glass held, and through it he watched the colors die one by one as he sank past the place where fish lived and past the place where light had ever reached. The sea closed over the box until there was nothing above him and nothing below.

Then he heard a voice.

An iron axe, the voice said, has been falling for seven years. It has not yet touched the bottom.

Alexander signaled to be pulled up.

The Two Edges He Could Not Claim

The world had two edges he could not claim. The sky ended in frozen darkness before heaven began. The sea had no floor that a living man could reach. He had conquered every human kingdom and could not conquer either direction of the infinite. The axe still fell somewhere beneath him, year after year, into a depth that did not answer to armies. What he had built would last only as long as men could agree to honor it, which Maccabees told everyone was not very long.