said to cain, If you have no plans that require you to leave today, I will offer you my hospitality for the night as a small recompense for being kind enough to accompany me, If it is in my power, I hope to be able to do you more favours in the future, said cain, but abraham could not grasp the meaning that lay behind those mysterious words. They set off to the city, and abraham said, Let us go first to the house of my nephew lot, son of my brother haran, he will tell us what has been going on. The sun had already set when they reached sodom, but it was still light. They saw a huge rowdy crowd gathered outside lot's house, We want to see the men you took into your house, bring them out to us, that we may know them, and they pounded on the door, threatening to break it down. Abraham said, Come with me, there's another entrance at the back. They entered just as lot, barricaded in behind his front door, was saying, Please, my friends, do not commit such a crime, I have two unmarried daughters, you can do what you like with them, but do not harm these men who sought shelter in my house. The crowd outside continued shouting furiously, but suddenly their cries became lamentations and tears, I'm blind, I'm blind, they were all saying and asking, Where is the door, there was a door here and now it's gone. To save his angels from being brutally raped, a fate worse than death according to those who know, the lord blinded all the men of sodom without exception, which proves that there could not have been even ten innocent men in the whole city. In the house, the visitors were saying to lot, Leave this place along with all the members of your family, your sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and everything else you have in the city, because we have come here to destroy it. Lot went out and warned his future sons-in-law, but they did not believe him and laughed at what they judged to be a joke. It was dawn when the messengers of the lord said again to lot, Take your wife and your two remaining daughters and leave the city if you do not wish to be punished as well, for while that is not the lord's will, it is exactly what will happen if you do not obey. Then, without waiting for an answer, they took him, his wife and his daughters by the hand and led them out of the city. Abraham and cain went with them, although not into the mountains which is where lot and his family would have gone had they followed the angel's advice, for lot asked instead to be allowed to stay in a small town, almost a village, called zoar. Go, said the messengers, but do not look back. Lot entered the town when the sun was coming up. Then the lord rained down fire and brimstone upon sodom and upon gomorrah and razed both to the ground, destroying all the inhabitants and everything that grew there. Wherever you looked, you could see only ruins, ashes and charred bodies. As for lot's wife, she disobeyed the order not to look back and was transformed into a pillar of salt. No one has ever been able to understand why she was punished in that way, for it is only natural to want to know what is going on behind you. It's possible that the lord wanted to punish curiosity as if it were a mortal sin, but that doesn't say much for his intelligence either, just look at what happened with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, if eve hadn't given adam some of the fruit to eat, if she hadn't eaten it herself, they would still be in the garden of eden, and we know how boring that was. On the way back, they happened to stop for a moment on the road where abraham had spoken to the lord, and cain said, There's an idea I can't get out of my head, What's that, asked abraham, There must have been innocent people in sodom and in the other cities that were burned, If so, the lord would have kept the promise he made to me to save their lives, What about the children, said cain, surely the children were innocent, Oh my god, murmured abraham and his voice was like a groan, Yes, your god perhaps, but not theirs.
Chapter 8
In an instant, the same cain who had just left sodom, travelling along proper roads, was suddenly transported to the sinai desert where, to his great surprise, he found himself in the midst of a multitude of thousands all encamped at the foot of a mountain. He had no idea who they were, nor where they had come from, nor where they were going. If he were to ask any of the people next to him, he would immediately betray the fact that he was a stranger, and that might bring him all kinds of embarrassments and problems. Keeping prudently on the back foot, therefore, he decided to call himself neither cain nor abel this time, just in case the devil should decide to stir things up and introduce someone who had heard tell of that tale of two brothers and who might then start asking awkward questions. It would be best to keep eyes and ears open and to draw his own conclusions. One thing was certain, the name of moses was on everyone's lips, some uttered it in a tone of ancient veneration, but most did so with a rather more contemporary note of impatience. They were the ones who kept asking, Where is moses, he went up to the mountain to speak to the lord forty days and forty nights ago, and we have received neither word nor command from him since, the lord has obviously abandoned his people and wants nothing more to do with us. The road to self-deception is narrow to begin with, but there's always someone ready to broaden it out, for as the proverb says, self-deception is like eating or scratching, it's all a matter of beginning. Along with those waiting for moses' return from mount sinai was a brother of his called aaron, who had been appointed high priest during the time of the israelites' captivity in egypt. The more impatient among them addressed themselves to him, saying, Since we do not know what has happened to moses, why don't you make us some gods to guide us, and aaron, who was, it would seem, neither a model of steadfastness nor very brave, instead of refusing point-blank, said, If that's what you want, take the gold earrings from your wives and sons and daughters and bring them here. They did as he asked, and he then melted the gold, poured it into a mould, cast it and made of it a golden calf. Apparently pleased with his work and oblivious to the serious confusion he was about to create around that future object of worship, namely, was it the lord himself or a calf replacing him, he announced, Tomorrow we will hold a feast in honour of the lord. Cain heard all this and, piecing together odd words, scraps of dialogue, snatches of opinion, he began to form an idea, not just about what was happening at that moment, but about what had gone on before. He was greatly helped in this by conversations overheard in a tent used as a dormitory for soldiers, those without families of their own. Unable to think of anything better, Cain had told them that his name was noah, and he was made welcome and invited to join in their conversations, for jews have always been a talkative people. The following morning, a rumour spread that moses was finally coming down from mount sinai and that joshua, his aide and the israelites' military commander, had gone to meet him. When joshua heard the shouts of the people, he said to moses, There is a noise of war in the camp, What you hear, said moses, are not the happy songs of victory or the sad songs of defeat, it is merely the sound of people singing. Little did he know what awaited him. When he entered the camp, the first thing he saw was the golden calf and the people dancing round it. He seized the calf, smashed it into pieces and ground it to powder, then, turning to aaron, he asked, What did this people do to you that you allowed them to commit so great a sin, and aaron, who, for all his faults, knew the world in which he lived, replied, Do not be angry with me, for you know that these people are set on mischief, it was their idea, they wanted other gods because they no longer believed that you would return, and they would probably have killed me if I had refused to do as they asked. Then moses stood at the gate of the camp and cried, Whoever is on the lord's side let him come to me. All the tribe of levi gathered around him, and moses proclaimed, Thus says the lord god of israel, take up your swords, return to the camp and go from door to door killing your brother, your friend, your neighbour. And in this way nearly three thousand men died. And the blood ran between the tents like a flood that had sprung up from the earth, as if the earth itself were bleeding, everywhere lay bodies cleaved in two, with throats slit or guts hanging out, and so loud were the screams of the women and children that they must have reached the top of mount sinai where the lord would be rejoicing in his revenge. Cain could barely believe what he was seeing. Burning sodom and gomorrah to the ground had evidently not been enough for the lord, for here, at the foot of mount sinai, was clear, irrefutable proof of his wickedness, three thousand men killed simply because he was angered by the creation of a supposed rival in the form of a golden calf. I killed one brother and the lord punished me, who, I would like to know, is going to punish the lord for all these deaths, thought cain, lucifer was quite right when he rebelled against god, and those who say he did so out of envy are wrong, he simply recognised god's evil nature. Some of the gold dust blown by the wind stained cain's hands. He washed them in a puddle as if ritually shaking from his feet the dust of a place where he had been ill received, then he climbed on to his donkey and left. A dark cloud hung over mount sinai, where the lord sat.
For reasons it is not in our power to explain, mere repeaters as we are of ancient stories, constantly wavering between the most ingenuous credulity and the most resolute scepticism, cain found himself plunged into what we can, without exaggeration, call a tempest, a calendric cyclone, a temporal hurricane. During the few days following the episode of the golden calf and its brief existence, his ever- changing presents followed one upon another with incredible rapidity, emerging from the void and hurling themselves back into the void in the form of random, disparate images, with no continuity or connection between them, at times showing what appeared to be the
