The Sea Stood Like a Stoppered Flask Over Egypt

The charioteer took his last full breath on the dry road between the walls, and after that his chest would not work in either direction.

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Nothing was pressing on him, which was the part he had no time to understand. There was no weight on his ribs and no water in his mouth. His lungs had been stoppered, the way a flask is stoppered when it is bound at the neck so that it lets nothing out and takes nothing in, and his spirit was sealed inside him with whatever air he already had.

The Smell Came First

What reached him instead of water was the smell. The sea had gone thick around the wheels and it was boiling like a pot over a fire (Job 41:23), and the reek came up off it and got into him and made him faint where he stood, though he was still upright in the car with the reins wrapped around his fists.

His horse had stopped screaming. The left wheel had locked into ground that had been a road a hundred heartbeats ago and was now something between mud and jelly, and behind him six hundred cars were doing the same thing at the same time, six hundred drivers going purple and quiet with not one drop of water on their faces.

He had come down that corridor at a gallop. He had seen the walls standing on either side and had read them as a road, since a road is what it looked like, and he had whipped the horse forward into it because the men ahead of him were going and because a chariot in a line does not stop.

A Ceiling Built Like a Heart

He looked up, because a man looks up.

The two walls were not standing straight anymore. They had leaned in toward each other overhead and met and were holding, and the shape they made above him was a dome. Nothing about it was falling. It had a curve a mason would have recognized, a deliberate arch closing off a room, the way the two chambers of a heart are joined by the arch between them.

He had expected a collapse. A collapse he could have understood, since water held up comes down, and coming down is the only thing water knows how to do. This was not a collapse, though, and it took him a moment to find the word for what it was. Somebody had roofed him.

Under the vault the column stopped moving. Men were still in their cars with their hands still on their weapons and their faces going dark, and the whole army stood there arranged in ranks inside a building that had been put up around it in less time than it takes to turn a horse.

Ten Cubits Away, a Garden

Through the water he could still see across the corridor, and there were people over there, and they were eating.

The same sea that had shut his chest was behaving entirely differently ten cubits off. On that side the walls were a bed of spices, and a north wind and a south wind had been called up to blow across them so the smell would carry (Song of Songs 4:16). Children on that side had their mouths against the wall. Sweet water was coming out of the salt for them, running water, living water, the kind that comes out of a struck rock, and a woman was catching it in a cup and holding the cup for somebody smaller.

They were eating and drinking and laughing in a corridor made of the same body of water that was killing him.

He had put a whip across the backs of people who looked like her. He was going to die of the smell of a sea that she would remember all her life as a garden, and there was no room left in him to say anything about it, because his mouth would not open outward any more than it would open inward.

Dead and Not Dead on the Sand

The sea put him on the shore and did not finish him there.

He lay in the wet sand among several thousand men in every stage of leaving, some already gone quiet, some still working their jaws, the way Rachel lay dying on the road to Ephrath with breath enough left to name her son. It was a beach of dead men, though he was not dead yet, and there was a long stretch of daylight between those two facts.

They had not all been killed the same way either. The blows had come down on that army in different kinds, one worse than the next, the way the plagues had come down on Egypt in different kinds, so the beach sorted the army into a long row of endings that did not match each other.

Israel walked that shoreline and looked at them. Nobody was spared the looking, and nobody could go home afterward and say that the enemy had simply disappeared into the water and become a rumor.

The Song Started While He Was Still There

They began to sing before he was done dying.

He could hear it from where the water had set him down, a whole nation coming in on one line and then the next, and it did not stop and it was not a small sound. It went on over the noise the men beside him were making, which was not singing.

Behind them all the vault held its shape a while longer over an empty road. Then the sea forgot the whole arrangement, and the arch came apart, and the water went back to being water over the place where the road had been.