‘Come, My servant. Come closer.’

Cassraw did not so much hear the voice as feel it suffuse through him. His body began to tremble, and his mind to whirl with a maelstrom of incoherent thoughts. It was as though all that he was, all that he had ever known, was struggling frantically to escape lest it be scattered and destroyed by the power that had just touched him. A preacher both by profession and inclination, however, he instinctively reached out and found his voice. It was hoarse, broken and shaking, but it served as an anchor to which he could cling, if only for the briefest of moments.

‘Lord, I see the dust of Your mighty chariot and I am less than nothing even before that. Guide me, Lord. Guide me.’ The words seemed pathetically inadequate.

Despite the screaming demands of his body following his precipitate charge up the mountain, Cassraw held his breath through the long silence that followed. Then the voice came again.

‘Come closer.’

Cassraw’s tumbling thoughts stopped short. He gazed around desperately, not knowing what to do and fearing to repeat his plea. The clouds were above him now, but from the south some residual daylight still lit the mountain, throwing long shadows like an unnatural, pallid sunset. It made all about him unreal, ill-focused and dreamlike; a strange image seeping through to him from some other place – a place in which he did not belong. Only the darkness overhead and his own awareness were real now – the one opaque, oppressive, unbearably solid, the other guttering and feeble. He felt as though he were not standing high up on a mountainside, but cowering in some dark cavern far below, in the very roots of the mountains, with their crushing weight towering above him.

Yet he must go upwards. There the Lord waited. Waited forhim.

He set off again, clambering recklessly over the rocks, heedless of the damage to his shoes and his cassock, heedless of the cuts and bruises he was gathering as he stumbled and fell repeatedly in the failing light.