It begins without event. A flat, calm firmament of white, black, and blue disguises a landscape of mountains and valleys, magically suspended above an empty world. The only barrier between sky and the below is a line of fragile and fleeting bubbles.
The instant the world is made, its destruction becomes inevitable. Trickles of sand, just two or three particles wide, seep through the barricade. The channels are tremulous, hesitating to fall too fast, drifting slowly from heaven to earth. The effect is slight at first but gradually takes shape on the empty ground. The percolating streams build into dells and hillocks, imperceptible and without a sound.
Is this how our world's own peaks were formed? Valleys overhead, invisible above the rippled skies, dissolving into mountains below? Or when God said, "for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return," was this the picture Adam drew in his mind's eye? An ocean of dust, dissolving inescapably into a lower ocean?
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts.
