Fire from Heaven
“ . .. knowledge shall be increased . . .”
Dan.12.4
For many years the tiny kingdom of the Nabusites, an obscure subtribe of one of
the less distinguished tribes of Israel, had suffered border raids from their powerful
heathen neighbours, the Goromites.
In their latest incursion, the Goromites had occupied the northern corner of the
Nabusite kingdom, expelling the local populace. On the plain they installed a sacrificial
altar to their god, Gorom-Magon. On this altar the king of the Goromites proposed
to sacrifice any Nabusite daring to enter his newly annexed territory. His missive
to this effect, written in a barbarous cuneiform script, was duly delivered to Haran,
king of the Nabusites.
King Haran knew this was no idle threat. Indeed, from his palace, a day’s march away,
he could see the altar piled high with brushwood and its retinue of unruly, gesticulating
priests.
The king was able to view the scene by means of a curious instrument invented by
his nephew Peniel, who had recently graduated from the Great School at Alexandria.
The seeing tube consisted of two sliding copper tubes, each of which contained a
disc of transparent material. By adjusting the length of the instrument, it was possible
to see clearly things at a great distance.
“This is an abomination,” said King Haran, removing the tube from his eye. “I’d like
to send out one of my prophets to call down fire from heaven on the wretched thing,
as Elijah did to the prophets of Baal. Saturate it with water first, then whoosh!”
“Why not call your prophets in, uncle?” asked Peniel.
“To tell the truth, dear boy,” said King Haran, “We only have one prophet, old Hananiah,
and I don’t think he goes in for this sort of thing. He’s probably retired by now,
anyway.”
But the more King Haran thought about calling down fire from heaven, the more he
liked the idea. He sent for the Nabusite Book of Prophecies and searched it for references
to visitations on Goromite invaders. He read about floods, earthquakes, whirlwinds,
pestilences, eclipses and other dire judgements. Fire, to his disappointment, was
not mentioned.
King Haran sent for Hananiah in person. The aged prophet arrived at the palace in
a decrepit chariot, drawn by a team of mules. He tottered up the steps, his white
beard and hair fluttering in the wind, supported by a son at each arm. The king noticed
the prophet’s tunic was on back to front and his sandals did not match. Was there
a message in this, the king wondered, or had the old man simply got out of bed in
a hurry?
One of the sons held the mouthpiece of a trumpet to Hananiah’s ear and gestured to
the king to speak into the belled end.
“Hananiah,” shouted the king, “can you hear me?”
“Wonderfully clearly,” said the old man. “Just like the Lord Himself.”
“Can you call down fire from heaven?”
“Fire from heaven? If you have faith, my son, nothing is impossible.”
The prophet smiled benignly at the king. It was not a very satisfactory answer, but
the son had removed the trumpet from his father’s ear and clearly it was all the
response that the king would get. He dismissed Hananiah, promising to send for him
should he be granted faith for fire from heaven.
“I don’t suppose you could help, could you?” the king asked Peniel a few days later.
“Did they teach you how to exercise faith at the Great School, by any chance?”
“No, but they taught us a lot about something called science,” said Peniel. “With
science, all things are possible; even fire from heaven.”
“How about water that burns?” asked the king.
“That too,” said Peniel. “Leave it to me, uncle, and I’ll see what I can do.”
A few days later, Peniel told the king he had to make a short expedition to the southern
desert to collect samples for a scientific experiment. On his return, he borrowed
pots and pans from the palace kitchen to undertake his experiment. He returned them
to the chef covered in a thick black coating which no amount of scrubbing would remove.
Peniel then announced he had a plan.
“To bring down fire from heaven is not difficult,” Peniel began. “My old tutor Archimedes
at the Great School used this technique to set fire to the Roman fleets when they
were besieging Syracuse. To create water-that-burns has never been done before. I
have discovered a method, but I will need your help.”
“Tell me what you need, dear boy, and you shall have it,” the king promised.
“In the desert, two days’ march to the south, there is a well from which issues stinking
pitch. I need many vessels of this pitch, as much as can be carried by three hundred
men.”
“I shall order it to be done,” said King Haran.
“Now,” said Peniel, “I’d like you to look at these drawings.”
He unfolded a great sheet of parchment.
“A tower must be built of bricks. Inside this tower must be arranged many tubes made
of beaten copper. There must also be fashioned two great cisterns of bronze, completely
enclosed save for tubes at the top.
“The greater cistern must be built within the tower. The lesser cistern must be placed
outside the tower and have wheels of iron so that it can be drawn by a team of oxen.”
King Haran could not quite understand the details in the drawings. Nor could he make
any sense of the strange symbols that Peniel said came from a language called mathematics.
But he had unbounded faith in his young nephew’s abilities and gave orders for the
work to proceed. The brick tower rose, course by course, in a corner of the courtyard.
The palace echoed to the sound of hammers as the artificers in bronze and iron wrought
the tubes and cisterns. When the greater cistern was filled with pitch, Peniel retired
to the tower and closed the door behind him.
Looking down from his bedroom that night, the king beheld a sight that filled him
with wonder. For, lo, it seemed the tower had become a smoking furnace. As he watched,
the door opened and Peniel appeared, silhouetted against the red glow within. He
wiped his brow with a rag and adjusted a tube leading from the tower into the lesser
cistern.
The sight also struck dread into two Goromite spies, who reported to their king that
Haran was offering human sacrifices to Moloch.
In the morning, King Haran hurried down to the courtyard. A faint odour of stinking
pitch hung over the palace. Peniel, looking pleased with himself, ladled some of
the clear liquid from the cistern and held it up to the king.
“You can tell the king of the Goromites, uncle, that we are ready to call down fire
from heaven.”
Once the protocols were drawn up, preparations for the trial by fire from heaven
proceeded rapidly. Although assured of success by his priests, the king of the Goromites
took the opportunity to offer a holocaust to Gorom-Magon. It comprised certain courtiers
whom he suspected of harbouring plots against himself and a particularly obnoxious
stepson, who had poisoned his own mother and sister. The Goromite king regarded their
empty places at the royal table with satisfaction. Gorom-Magon would be well-pleased
with the costly sacrifice.
As custom decreed, the two armies faced each other across the plain. At the midpoint
between them, stood the altar to Gorom-Magon, a massive platform of crudely hewn
timber smeared with the blood and fat of the sacrificial beasts. Atop the piled-up
brushwood, the mound of carcasses was already black with flies.
The priests advanced on the altar, barking in the guttural Goromite tongue. They
bore knotted whips which they flailed from side to side as if to ward off clouds
of mosquitoes.
King Haran could almost feel pity for the priests as he observed the scene through
the seeing tube. Primitive superstitions died hard among the Goromites. Soon they
would turn the whips on each other, and finally on themselves, lashing themselves
into a frenzy. When their miserable efforts to call down fire upon the altar failed,
the priests would be slaughtered to a man by their own army.
He raised a speaking tube to his lips.
“Your time is nearly up, O priests of Gorom-Magon. Perhaps your god is sleeping late
this morning?”
Meanwhile the Nabusite preparations were well in hand. Old Hananiah sat in his mule
cart beneath an umbrella, sipping a sherbet. He had his back to the Goromite altar.
It was said the old prophet would not look on a heathen idol unless to pee on it.
Haran observed Peniel filling the soldiers’ pitchers from the wheeled cistern. Water-that-burns
was truly a great discovery, and had he not seen it with his own eyes, he would not
have believed it possible.
Time was now up for the exhausted Goromite priests. As the king had predicted, no
mercy was shown by the humiliated Goromite army and the desert sands ran red with
the priests’ blood.
Protocol now called for the altar to be drenched with water, to make the job of ignition
more difficult. King Haran’s commando team advanced at a jog towards the altar of
Gorom-Magon, each man bearing a pitcher of water-that-burns on his head. They poured
the water over the altar and sacrificial offering until the sand round it was saturated.
Hananiah’s mule cart was trundled forward of the Nabusite lines so he could be seen
by the Goromites. The aged prophet, his eyes averted from the abomination, was supported
by his two sons.
Peniel gave the sign. He stood with his back to the sun, the seeing tube held above
his head and pointed towards the altar. King Haran observed a bright shaft of sunlight
dance across the plain and alight on the altar. A wisp of smoke appeared. Simultaneously,
Hananiah’s sons raised their father’s arms above his head – unfortunately spilling
sherbet down his tunic.
The fire did not so much fall from heaven as burst outwards and upwards, engulfing
the altar. A rushing wind whipped up the sandy plain and the air itself seemed to
ignite. The fearsome column of flames, topped by a pall of thick black smoke, struck
terror into the Goromites. Above their screams the voice of Haran’s commander-in-chief
could be heard, urging his men forward.
During the mêlée in the Goromite camp, one of the king’s sons, who was
fitting a new handle to his dagger, or so he claimed, accidentally stabbed his father
in the back, not once but several times.
Great were the victory celebrations in the Nabusite kingdom, and loud was the praise
for King Haran and his nephew. But Peniel did not attend the festivities. He had
again shut himself in the tower workshop, where he kept the artificers in bronze
and iron hard at work. Their skills were taxed to the limit fashioning cisterns,
tubes, rods, rings and wheels to the specifications in his drawings. Loud were the
complaints that such designs had never been attempted before in the history of their
Guild.
Some weeks later, Peniel called King Haran into the workshop to unveil his latest
invention. It was, he said, an engine to harness the power of water-that-burns.
“It is based on the screw pump invented by Archimedes,” Peniel explained, as King
Haran looked on with interest. “There are many parts in the engine but the principle
is simple. Water-that-burns – let’s call it fuel for short – is contained in this
cistern. It flows through the tube into the cylinder with the screw, where it is
ignited by the revolving flint wheels. As it explodes, the fuel drives the screw
shaft, which sucks more air and fuel into the chamber, and so the cycle is repeated.
Let me demonstrate it.”
Peniel cranked the starter wheel. There was a gurgling sound and a grinding as the
small flint wheels began to rotate against the greater iron wheels inside the cylinder.
The engine rocked back and forth on its mounts, as if possessed with a legion of
demons. King Haran looked with horrified fascination at the revolving shaft and the
many wheels to which it was connected. It was fearsome to observe how the greater
wheels rotated about the lesser, and easy to imagine the wheels were full of eyes.
“We can connect these wheels to the axle of a special iron chariot,” Peniel continued.
“The engine will drive the chariot faster than the swiftest horses in your kingdom.
It will carry with ease a load requiring the strength of twenty horses.
“We can build many such chariots, great chariots that will travel on iron bands from
one end of your kingdom to another, and small ones that will travel on the roads
from one town to another. We can build special war chariots that will rain down fire
on all your enemies. The engine will even drive your ships through the ocean, from
one end of the world to the other.”
Peniel rotated a knob and the wheels ceased their fearsome gyrations.
“The horseless chariot will make the Nabusites the greatest power the world has ever
seen. Even the Roman Empire will quail before the might of your iron war chariots
and war ships.
“Under your wise rule, peace will break out. Every nation will wish to purchase the
stinking pitch that lies in vast reservoirs beneath your southern desert in order
to drive their own chariots. Your kingdom will enjoy wealth such as Solomon himself
could not imagine. Future generations will rise up to honour and bless the name of
Nabusite.”
King Haran was greatly impressed by the plans Peniel laid before him, and promised
to give them his full consideration. But, for three days and nights, the king could
not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, there came fearful visions from the deep.
He saw iron towers with arms on wheels that rose and fell, sucking stinking pitch
from beneath the earth. He saw fiery furnaces that belched black smoke across the
sky, causing pestilence and death.
He saw horseless iron chariots that sped hither and thither through city streets,
maiming and killing all who stepped into their path. He saw iron dragons that ploughed
through the seas with men inside their bellies, spitting fire from their fearsome
horns. He saw iron eagles that flew through the air with a sound louder than thunder,
raining fire and destruction on the ground below.
These and other sights too terrible to relate King Haran saw as he lay sleepless
on his bed. It was a relief when, on the fourth day, the fearful visions ceased and
he could get some sleep. He understood now why the Nabusite prophets like Hananiah
became somewhat eccentric in later life.
He sent for Peniel to announce his decision.
“I and all the Nabusites are grateful for your efforts,” said King Haran. “Your display
of fire from heaven would have done credit to Elijah himself.
“I have considered your plans for the horseless chariot and the development of our
kingdom, and it is clear that your ingenuity knows no bounds. But I fear that neither
the Nabusites nor any other nation are ready for the power of water-that-burns. We
do not have the wisdom to use that knowledge. Without wisdom, such knowledge would
lead to man’s destruction of the earth and of himself.
“I would rather the name of Nabusite disappear from the history books than be remembered
as the king who loosed the horseless chariots into the world before their time had
come.
“Mankind is not ready for your discovery, dear boy. Let us first learn to harness
the power of the wind, rivers, waves, and the sun and leave the power of water-that-burns
beneath the ground for a latter age to discover.”
King Haran stretched out luxuriously in his new marble bath and practised turning
the hot tap on and off with his toes. His cat Rameses perched on the edge of the
bath, hoping to spot a fish in the water.
Rather than dismantle the refining tower, Peniel had converted it into a water heating
system for the palace. If it was good enough for the Romans to enjoy hot and cold
running water in their bathrooms, it was good enough for the Nabusites. And it solved
the problem of disposing of the manure from the royal stables.
Horseless chariots would create massive unemployment problems for the horse breeders
and stable owners in his kingdom, he reflected, to say nothing of the damage they
would cause to the picturesque Nabusite villages with their narrow tree-lined streets.
And the fumes of water-that-burns would certainly not be good for people’s health.
He much preferred the scent of orange blossoms on the evening breeze.
Thinking about flowers reminded him of a saying by one of the Nabusite prophets,
that the desert would blossom like a rose. The more he thought about the idea, the
more he liked it.
He would have Peniel construct a system of cisterns, tubes and screw pumps to carry
water from the river Keresh into the southern desert. Properly irrigated, the desert
could indeed be turned into rose gardens. The market for flowers in big cities such
as Alexandria was huge. He made a mental note to consult the Book of Prophecies for
hints on rose growing.
Satisfied that he had the affairs of state well in hand, King Haran rang the bell
for dinner.
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