First the goats saw him, or so I believe, for that is what I remember. The bleating of goats in the evening air, chill with a hint of winter. The sound of their voices soared over the deep, empty hills, over the graves of my fathers. I moved to the door of my tent, shivering a little in the dying evening, and pulled my robe around me. A man was coming up from the pastures. I heard my wife, Sarah, my companion through everything, breathe softly, and turn over. The man stood at the top of the hill and seemed to smile. It seemed to me his eyes blazed with light. He had no shadow.

I was afraid.

I came from Ur, of Sumer, and I trusted their gods. My father told me that first came the deep, then the mountain of heaven and earth, then the air which split the mountain. He taught me of An the father, Ki the Earth, and he told me tales of Enki, the crafty one, dragon slayer and creator, father of the great Euphrates. He spoke to me of Inanna the princess of spring, and of Enlil, father of the gods.

But even then a voice came to me like fire and then I had no soul but the fire, and I could not stay where I was nor be what I had been any longer.

We spoke for a long time, as the torch of evening plunged into night. I did not know it at the time, having never seen the sea, but his voice was the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks, power and grace. I would follow that sound when I could find nothing else to follow, when the words he spoke then dwindled for me, like a campfire does as night surrounds it.

I cannot remember the exact words he used. I only remember the sound of his voice, and the way the night flickered where he stood. I only remember being afraid, and knowing that I had to leave. And after he left, I remember I stood for a long time listening to the voices of those goats, watching over my still and quiet land, where I had been born and raised and spent my youth, where the hand of Enki spread its abundance among my simple people. My father's land, covering my father's bone. That, I will never forget.

I sat for a long time at the entrance of my tent, watching the night and the dancing stars, the messengers of the gods, their lamps on the starry ways. And I listened to the sweet breath of my wife sighing from the pallet we had shared together. And I listened to the wind.

And the sun rose slowly, and I remember the stars vanishing, the many stars, and then there was one.

And I remember, as the sun rose, I climbed the little hill, and the little clumps of grass crackled under my feet as the frost melted from them. And in the cool, glowing light of morning I looked out over the land, and I watched as all the little living things struggled again towards the light and I said yes, I will leave, yes, I will find a new land.

Chapter 2

Abraham

It had been many nights

And God passing our tent like a Bedouin army

The Earth shaking

And the red wind, flashing in the darkness like a wound

While we huddled in our tents and pretended to hear nothing

One day a man came up out of the desert

But just a man

Only I saw that his feet would not touch the ground

And he held two mirrors, and he said

Choose thou, Abram

And I looked, and one held a red world

Wrapped around with angry voices, shouting,

And one, blue as a still lake, peaceful and beautiful, but

Hollow, and the sound the wind made on it

Was like God's lips on a flute

I was 40 years old when I left Ur, the city where I was born. Sarai and I had been married for 10 years—it was usual in those days to take a wife later in life, after one has become a man of substance, but even then I was somewhat late. Sarai, too, was somewhat older than was typical, for all that she was barely twenty.

The great city of Ur is sacred to the god Nanna, lord of the moon. It is an ancient city, older than men remember. The walls of our neighboring city, Uruk, with whom we alternately warred and traded, were built by great Gilgamesh himself who had seen the very face of Inanna, goddess of spring. Who had helped her, and even, it is said, spurned her advances. The temple in Eridu, they said, had been built from the corpse of the great sea monster himself, the leviathan.

There are flax weavers in Ur, wonderful weavers, who can make the cloth as soft as the clouds themselves, out of the produce of the rough fields, a kind of miracle. I knew that quite well, for I had been a shepherd in my younger days, as many of the young boys were, and during lambing season, we would spend weeks out in the hills around the city, tending our flocks. The city is fed by an endless stream of meat from the granges outside the walls and shimmering silver fish from Euphrates, our mother. Scroll-makers, and clay craftsman, scribes and dignitaries. Every morning in Ur you wake to the trumpets of the prayer sayers, chanting Nanna to sleep, every night they call him again from the waves to the sky.

All of that is in my blood, my father’s blood, though I have left it long ago. I have never in my life slept past the moment when the last sliver of moon disappears behind the mountains, nor ever turned to bed until he has fully come again. No matter where one goes in life, nor what one sees, there is no way to stop being what one has been.

Do you understand what I'm telling you? There was this world full of gods and people, populous cities with all their moving parts, fields and sheepfolds, a way of life old as the sky. Then the voice filled with fire came to me and told me to leave this world and go into the wilderness. Be alone as I am alone. And the sun rose with a thousand colors I had never seen before and changed my heart.

As we left the city, I felt the old gods watching me. I could feel them clustered around the bowl of Earth in the blackness, watching, and for just an instant I could not tell who it was who was performing for whom. Sarai’s arms were around my waist, on the swaying donkey, and the whole sky was watching us.

Perhaps the gods did nothing because they knew where we were going. What I heard, drowning all the sounds of the prosperous city, was the roaring silence of the waiting wilderness.

With my wife, astride that donkey, otherwise alone, we went forth to what we did not know.