Rabies (2nd part)

PHASE I – INCUBATION

'The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and has still to appear'.
Revelation of St. John the Divine, 17,8.

It was the first Sabbath of a hot, dry July in a certain year after the Creation of the World according to the Hebrew Calendar; a different year by the Hedzhiri, or Mohammedan calculation, and yet another year for the Christians. For those with no belief in God it was some unknown year after Satan's Fall, and it was no year at all for those fortunate ones for whom time no longer existed.

The place was the Plain of Ezdraelon in biblical Samaria and preset-day Izrael. It stood in the shade of the Har-Carmel mountain and the river of Quishron wound past it. It was called Tell-el-Mutesellim; but in the tongue of local people it was Harmagedon, though everyone knew it by its ancient name of Maggido.

A full moon shone over the ruins of the once famous town; from it there no longer came the hubbub of the market place, the lazy march of the warriors of Izrael, nor even the neighing of Solomon's four hundred stallions. The only sound came from the clear night sky, from the jets of the El-Al flight from Lod Airport, Tel-Aviv, to Rome, whose red navigation lights mingled with the yellow spider's web of the Mediterranean stars.

Nothing moved; it was as if everything had been caught up in some magic spell.

Nothing except one shadowy form.

It was gray and amorphous. It had no likeness to any known thing. The diffused, pre-dawn light could make no firm shape of it. It came up out of the ground and soundlessly, like some dark, primitively colored picture of night floating above mater, merged into the ruins of the south-western rampart of Solomon's fortress.

In the west, Lucifer, the morning star, glowed brightly, the falling star. It would disappear in the west, above the place which had its shape, the radial shape of a star.

The shadow slipped easily over the rocky ground which fell in steep, rough, stony sweeps towards the plain. Behind it the earth took on the virgin hue of hoar frost. The leaves on the olive tree, sycamores and palms hung down stiffly in thin crystal membranes. The rock became smooth and slippery as if raised up from the seabed. The landscape lost its brownish yellow warmth and was turned into the frozen waste of some unreal north. In the height of summer Maggido was gripped by an Artic blast.

At the feet of the mountain firm where once the marshes of Ezdraelon had given off their poisonous vapors, but where now stood rows of ploughed furrows, as yet untouched by the cold, the shadow stopped.

If it had a body, it must have raised its head, since with that sudden movement its indistinct, phantom shape was turned into something which resembled a powerful animal.

It stayed for a moment on the spot from where, beneath the fading moon, could be made out the high wall of the 'Rose of Sharon' kibbutz, built after the last war with Syria. From the kibbutz, like some painful memory, reached out the sharp, aggressive smell of people.

And taking on the shape of a wolf, or of a dog with foam dripping from its jaws, the shadow set off towards it.