Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He went back and sat down again.

When Anna called for a second time, he put his head in his hands.

But he did not go out.

As soon as she realized that he wouldn’t come, she went with the others to the top of the mountain. They sat down in the hollow. Anna got food out of her bag, and they began to eat. No one spoke. Everyone took longer over the meal than normal. The sea was a mere five yards below them now. What had been a long, continuous mountain ridge an hour ago was now a string of small islands. On the nearest one they could see people sitting just like them, huddled on the island’s highest point, while the waves beat against the land just below them.

That was all. The rest was sea.

Vast and gray the sea lay all around them. Its glinting surface stretched away on all sides, gently curving toward the horizon, beneath the sky’s thick, dark cloud layer.

The changes had been so many and so great, and had come in such a short space of time, that it was only now Anna fully realized where they were. That sense of location that always tells us where we are, even when we’re not thinking about it, that seldom allows us to be surprised even when, sunk deep in thought, we get up toward the end of the day and go over and look out the window, had become disrupted in Anna over the past few days. If she looked down for a moment and thought about something else, she would get the same surprise each time she lifted her head again: is this where we are? It wasn’t that she’d thought she was somewhere else, just that she’d assumed it quite unconsciously. When she glanced up, it was the valley she’d expected to see. Or the summer farm. Or the waterfall. Or even the mountain from the day before.

But not this.

All of them sitting out at sea, eating.

The baby had gone to sleep, and Rachel put him on the blanket between them.

Everyone sat there looking at him.

Rachel smiled.

“Isn’t he lovely?” she said.

She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the cheek.

Around them dusk was falling. In the western horizon the clouds glimmered weakly in the light of the setting sun. They had moved right into the middle and made a ring of luggage around them. The sea was six feet below them now. It was totally calm, they saw no movement in it, not even a wave. Yet it rose. It rose quite noiselessly.

“Yes, he is lovely,” Anna said. “I’ve never been so proud of anyone as I was when you gave birth to him.”

“Haven’t you?” said Rachel, smiling again.

She placed her hand on Jerak’s knee.

“I think I screamed the most dreadful things at Mom. Luckily I can’t remember what they were.”

She looked at her mother.

“Can you?”

Anna smiled.

“It’s all part and parcel,” she said.

Then there was silence.

Shortly afterward the first ripple came lapping in toward them. It didn’t recede but just rolled on, and seemed to well slowly up as it mingled with a ripple that came stealing in from the other direction.

They crept closer together. Rachel lifted the baby and held him to her. Jerak put his arms around her.

“Is he sleeping?” whispered Anna.

Another ripple washed in between them.

Rachel shook her head.

“He’s awake. He’s looking at Jerak.”

Javan stood up. Anna turned her head and glanced the same way.

Perhaps fifteen yards away lay the ship, black in the grayish dusk. It was drifting toward them.

Anna looked down. Water covered the entire mountain now.

All was sea.

But the ship was approaching.

Could Noah have changed his mind? Was he going to pick them up after all?

Of course he was going to pick them up. The boy was here. The boy was here .

“Noah!” she shouted. “Dear Noah, we’re in danger!”

Noah had been sure it was all over when he heard her sudden cry.

If he waited a bit longer, he would never again be able to hear her voice. That was the easiest, the most sensible thing. At the same time he wanted her to know that he knew what he was doing.

When he rose to go up, his wife held him back.

“Don’t go up there,” she said. “Please. Wait an hour. Then you can go up. But not now, my dear.”

He shook himself free of her and went up the steps to the top deck, bent his head beneath the low roof and went aft.

The ship was ten yards off when Noah came out. They saw him quite clearly. He was dressed in white, and his skin was white, and he stood in the stern looking down at them.

“Noah!” Anna shouted. “You must save us! Save us, Noah!”

Noah remained motionless where he stood. He just stared at them.

Anna took the baby from Rachel and raised him above her head so that he could see.

He saw.

When, immediately afterward, Anna laid the child to her breast and turned away, she was no longer despairing or angry or scared; all of these feelings had vanished into a great calm. They were going to die. And Noah would live on with the memory of what he had done.

Soon after, Noah also turned on his heel, moved down the deck, and was gone.

He did not return, and slowly the ship drifted past them, into the night. Nobody spoke. Anna looked down at the baby. He gazed at her with his placid, dark eyes. She handed him to Rachel and sat down.

Suddenly Javan burst out laughing.

“Well, I never thought I’d live to see that! ” he exclaimed.

Everyone laughed.

When the laughter had died out, nothing more was said for a long time. They sat silently staring out into the darkness as the water rose around them. Rachel held the baby tightly to her breast. When the water was up to their waists, she glanced at her mother. Her mother smiled back.

“Is he asleep?” she whispered.

Rachel shook her head.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said.

Gently, she pushed the baby down and held him under the water. She looked at her mother the whole time.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said again.

THE GREAT flood rose for one hundred and fifty days before it began to recede. Because the water sank as slowly as it had risen, the surface of the earth was covered with water for about three hundred days. It then took another fifty-four days for the ground to dry out and for the former balance between land and water to be reestablished.

So about a year passed between the time Noah boarded the ark and his disembarkation. In the course of it, all living things had been wiped out. All human beings were dead, all animals were dead, all birds were dead. All insects were dead. All trees were dead, and all grass, and all plants and flowers. The only life that had survived was that in the seas. But not all life even there: static life died out, and the bottom-dwelling creatures died out, because of the weight of water. But fishes, seals, whales and sharks survived. Plankton survived, jellyfish survived.

Ah, what a sight it was. The entire earth covered in water. Even the highest mountains were beneath the surface of the waters. They swelled and increased over the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the waters , it says in the Bible. More and more the waters increased over the earth until they covered all the high mountains everywhere under heaven. The waters increased and the mountains were covered to a depth of fifteen cubits .

Fifteen cubits is just under fifty feet. As the highest mountains on earth are about 29,000 feet and the deepest marine trench about 37,000 feet, it’s possible to work out that, at its deepest, the water that covered the earth in the great flood was 66,000 feet and, at its shallowest, fifty feet.

The pressure on the earth’s surface must have been enormous. Knowing as we do that the weight of glaciers can flatten entire mountain chains, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that this huge volume of water must have radically altered the world’s topography. In addition, there was the force of the water itself — whether rising, standing, or receding. In ocean thousands of feet deep, what could those currents not stir up? Or carry with them? Or crush, break, bend, or twist? The sands of entire deserts must have been lifted up and washed away, just as the sea now lifts and washes away sand from coastal shorelines, which can be heaped with stones some years, covered with the finest sand in others. Mountains must have collapsed, cliffs toppled and the great stones from them spread over vast areas; wooded hills must have been torn up, valleys filled in, whole mountain ranges pressed into the earth’s crust.