Message #19183

[Bianca]

The house stood, like the majority of Russian houses on the northern rivers, with its windows looking east and south. One little window faced northwest and this "sun" was shining through it, colouring the white wall of the big Russian stove crimson. This glow moved from right to left, towards the east. And there was ordinary sunlight coming through the other windows and onto the other wall of the stove.
I looked at the sun blazing down on the stove through that window and my jaw dropped. I had never seen anything like it. And the noise kept on rumbling. There was no relief. My grandfather sat on the stove and began chanting a prayer out loud. He chanted and told me, "Stiopa, let's pray! All of you pray! It's happened… It's come…" [The shamans had warned people about the end of the world.]
What praying? I wanted to run somewhere and there was nowhere. The noise was all around. And a fiery ball was coming at us. It kept creeping across the stove… And then it stopped…
The fiery sphere that appeared in a clear, cloudless sky approached the earth with a growing rumble. It grew as you watched, blazed and became so full of powerful fiery light that it was impossible to look at it. At some elusive instant, the terrible rumbling turned into an incessant roar and the sphere stopped moving, hanging above the ground, like the Sun hangs above the horizon just before sunset. It is hard to establish the length of time it stopped, but the fiery sphere stayed motionless long enough for its immobility to impress itself upon an astounded human mind.
I was afraid to look out of the window, but on the stove I could see that it had stopped. Then suddenly it gave such a burst of speed, flashed across the stove and was gone. The thundering noise was awful. The earth shook. I was knocked to the floor and the glass from the little window was scattered about as if someone had pushed it in… I wasn't down on the floor for long. I jumped up, thinking, "Where's Grandpa? Don't say he's been knocked off!" He was lying on his stomach on the very edge of the stove and kept asking me, "Stiopa, what is it? Stiopa, what is it?" He was wet and white, white… I think the ground was still shaking, the floor shifted under my feet, or perhaps my legs were trembling. It was dreadful!
...Nobody could understand where it had got to, that sun. It had been shining just a moment before. And so strong that the shadows disappeared instantly. And the light, clashing with light, stripped the world of its familiar, pleasant shapes. Everything, from the smallest blade of grass to the cedar tree, suddenly seemed different from how it had always been. Colours vanished; so did the usual three-dimensionality of the world, warmth, tenderness. Our world had gone…