They Watched the Voice Carve Itself in Fire

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Morning, and Nothing Hidden

They had washed their clothes two days earlier and had kept away from the mountain since, because a boundary had been set around the foot of it and anyone who crossed it was to be stoned or shot through, man or beast. On the third day it came, and it came in the morning.

That mattered to the man standing near the boundary more than he could have said at the time. It was full daylight. He could see the faces of the men on either side of him, and they could see his, which meant that afterward not one of them could tell him he had been asleep and dreamed it, and he could not tell himself that either. Nothing was smuggled in under a cover of dark. Whatever happened on that mountain happened in front of everybody, in ordinary light, with the whole camp standing in the open where it could be counted.

Then the thunder started, and the shofar (a ram's horn) under it, getting louder instead of dying away, which no horn does when a man is blowing it.

Not One Bolt Like Another

He had watched weather all his life and he started counting, since counting is what a frightened man does with his hands full of nothing.

The first bolt went down white and straight. The next one did not look like the first. Neither did the one after it. In an ordinary storm the lightning repeats itself until a man stops looking, the same flash out of the same kind of cloud, so he learns the rhythm and turns his back on it and finishes his work. Here every stroke arrived with its own character, and none of them came twice, and after a while he stopped counting, since counting assumes the things being counted are the same thing.

Above all of it the cloud on the peak went from grey to something thicker, the arafel, dark enough that the top of the mountain simply stopped existing. Light and dark had divided the mountain between them and both of them were wrong. The bolts lit the sky and left that cloud exactly as black as it had been.

He Saw the Sound

The first word came, and he saw it.

It did not arrive at his ears and stop there. It went out over the camp and into the rock, and the letters opened in the stone while the word was still being spoken, cut and burning at the edges, the way a flame takes a line across cloth. He was looking at speech. His ears were full and his eyes were doing work they had no business doing, and the two would not sort themselves out into their proper places no matter how he tried.

His legs went out from under him and he was on his knees in the sand without having decided anything.

The tablets were not being prepared somewhere for later. They were being written in front of him, at speed, by the voice itself, and every letter that opened in the rock was a letter he could not afterward pretend he had not watched arrive.

Sounds of Sounds

The old man beside him went down at a different moment, and the boy behind them did not go down at all.

Afterward, in the tents, they tried to lay the accounts side by side and could not make them match. The old man had heard weight, so much of it that his chest had felt pressed. The boy had heard something a boy could carry and had stood through the whole thing with his mouth open. One woman said a single word had arrived at her separately from the rest of them, in her own hearing, as though it had been aimed. Nobody could catch anybody else out in a lie, because each account held together on its own and none of them fit together, and they all came from the same hour on the same plain under the same mountain.

There had been one voice. It had come to each of them in the measure that person was able to take, which is why it multiplied into sounds inside sounds and flames inside flames without ever splitting into two gods.

They Stood Far Off, and Moses Went In

Seeing the sound is what broke them. The people moved backward as one body and stood a long way off, and from there they sent word to Moses that he should speak with them himself, since they would hear a man, and let God not speak with them any more, because they would die of it.

So the words came through one man after that.

Moses went the other way, toward the mountain, past the boundary and up, while the whole camp watched him get smaller against the rock. He came to the edge of the arafel and did not stop at it. The cloud took him the way water takes a stone, and the camp stayed where it was, far back, looking at the place on the mountain where the dark had closed.