Short Story: The Lion in the Desert

by Joseph Jennings
It was midmorning in Western Samaria.  The cool, blue-green waters of the Jezreel splashed slowly by the bank under an olive tree, and the road which led up from the nearby ford was bathed in a dusty-yellow hue which comes only on a sunlit morning.  It was quiet here; completely quiet but for the rustling of the waters, and so ideally solitary that it seemed a perfect place for one to be alone with God.
Seated upon the picket-fence which ran along the wayside of the road was an old man.  He had situated himself in a particularly sunny spot, not a furlong away from the olive tree; he possessed a crooked staff, which he held in one hand, and a face so scarred by wrinkles that its main features were indistinct.   His attire was a dirty blue robe which extended to his ankles and he had no shoes or headdress.  A sign hung on the fence beside him swing steadily in the breeze, reading, in crudely written figures, ‘FORTUNE-TELLER’.
Presently, a much younger man came along down the road.  Contrary to the white-haired older man, he was black-haired and black-eyed, and was dressed in an earth-brown tunic secured around the waist with a green sash.  When he came upon the elder on the picket-fence, he swiftly cast away the apple he had been eating.
“Good morning”, said the old man.
“Good morning”, the other responded.
“Would you like your fortune told?”
“I suppose so.”, said the younger man.  “I’m in no hurry.”
The old man smiled.  “Here, then.” he said, “take this loaf of bread.  I work not for money but for satisfaction.  It was inquired once whether God can spread a table in the wilderness; and that question is one that I can answer.”
The other took the loaf curiously, and took a bite off the end.
“You will be joined with a group of men,” said the old man, “in the city which you are going to. You will take a new profession and take a new master; you will do many great things, and for your work you will be admitted thirty caesars.”
“Will I be my master’s most important servant?” inquired the listener.
The old man looked at him.  “His mission,” he said, “will be impossible without you.”
The listener seemed well satisfied with this, and without asking any further questions he went away down the road.  The aged man continued to sit quietly on the sunny picket-fence; and he did not have to sit long idle when a second man came trudging up the path.  This one was dressed more lavishly than the first, wearing an immense gabardine, and he seemed slightly older: and yet he somehow looked downtrodden, having that horrible misanthropic expression so common among agnostics and other non-believers, who believe only that there is nothing to believe in.
“Good morning.” said the man on the picket-fence.
The second man offered a dismal “Good morning.”
“Would you care to have your fortune told?”
This newcomer turned and looked at the old man.  His eyes had a malicious, snappish sort of look in them.  “Will I have good or bad fortune?” he quickly asked of him.
The first only smiled.  “Take this loaf of bread, friend.” He said, “I work not for money but for satisfaction.”
“I’ve heard that before.” mumbled the other: but he accepted the loaf and took a bite to see if it was any good.
The fortune-teller was silent for a moment, and then he smiled again.
“I see good fortune for you.” he said.  “Your old father, Annas, has died.  You are now the High Priest.”
Though visibly stunned, the well-dressed listener would not consent to be visibly happy.
“So you say,” he said indignantly, “but that rank has no benefits in itself.”
“For you it does,” responded the elder.  “You will be faced with a problem no other has yet faced; and you will so become the most famed High Priest in history.  Your name will be remembered thousands of years hence.”
The other laughed; but did not say anything.  Without a word he took another bite of the loaf and set off at a brisk pace down the road.  The quiet old man looked blankly after him.
 After a time, there came down the road a third man.  He was simply dressed, almost as simply as the one on the picket-fence, and was obviously younger than the first two men who had stopped by to have their fortunes told.  He was haggard and his robe was unkempt and dirty.  He looked like one who had abstained from eating for a month.
“Good morning.” The old man said.
“Good morning.” The younger man gravely responded.
He looked up at the man with gravity equal to that of the greeting.  The elder smiled kindly, lifting up his head slightly from its bent position.
“Would you like you fortune told?”
For the first time the other noticed the business-sign swinging on the picket-fence beside the speaker,  he seemed caught by surprise by it, and said nothing.
The old man thrust his hand into the folds of his dirty tunic.  “Here”, he said, “take this loaf of bread. I work not for money but for satisfaction.”
He offered the bread to the man.  For a moment the addressed looked silently at the loaf, and then looking at the old gift-giver who held it, said, “What- just bread?”.
The face of the aged bread-dealer remained expressionless.  He continued to smile simply, silently offering the loaf to the man.
“I am sorry,” he said at length. “I have nothing else to offer.”
“I know you don’t.”, scoffed the younger man bitterly.  He then went quickly off down the road.
 The young man’s pace slowly quickened as the picket-fence faded from view behind him.  He was headed nowhere in particular, but yet was suddenly flushed with an acute sense of purpose. Soon all signs of the Jezreel had disappeared from eye and ear, and the billowing clouds above began to mingle with the horizon.  The grass around the path began to grow thicker, and the land itself began to slope; and suddenly the path ahead abruptly ended at the pinnacle of a steep grade.  The traveler stopped.  Stretched across the broad valley beneath was an enormous city, nestled in the mountains, enclosed by a high wall and gateway and boasting some of the broadest, tallest, and most impressive monuments to be found in those lands.
 The amazed beholder turned to look at an elm tree just ten feet away from the grade.  There leaning against the sturdy, knotted trunk, his crudely lettered business sign hung on a branch, was the old man who had sat on the picket-fence by the banks of the Jezreel.
“Are you sure you would not like your fortune told?” he inquired in his shaky voice.
“It has already been told.” The other retorted.
The elderly man smiled, and then signed a moment later.  “I fear you don’t understand,” he said regretfully, “I’m only trying to help.”
“Help what?  I do not want your help.”
 The first man grunted, and then eased himself from his uncomfortable position, settling upon an old root.
“I’m sorry to be troubling you so much, my lad,” he said, “I merely want to talk to you.  I really haven’t had a good talk with anyone, recently.  I’m too solitary for my own good.”
The second man said nothing.
“You know what I feel, when I look out over such large cities,” the former began, by way of a conversation, “is a feeling of sheer helplessness.  It is surely a common sentiment.  We all feel small and insecure when we are in the presence of something quite the opposite; we feel as if it is hopeless to try to conquer and defeat it.”
“The deceitful tongue loves all words that devour,” quoted the younger man.  Both were silent for a moment and then the elder resumed:
“But you must know of what I speak.  You feel it yourself.  Look out over this expanse beneath us; look at those mighty monuments, those towering walls and houses, and tell me whether a pang enters your heart.  This sight before us is a thing of beauty, but yet a beauty so terrible that it is deadly.  What a power we men have become, what a collective force to be reckoned with; what fierce compulsion, what strength divine must be necessary to subdue us.”
The kindly old man with the long white beard stopped when he had said this.  Then he chuckled softly to himself, gave the sign hanging above him a playful tap and sank into a dreamy doze, there on the root of the elm tree.  The younger man stood motionless for a minute or more, looking down at the city, contemplating what the elder had spoken of.  He then suddenly turned and began to walk swiftly over the grassy plain, almost running, leaving the old man with the business sign dozing far behind.
Meeting up with the main road shortly after, the traveler continued along it, by no measurable amount slowing his frenzied speed or even attempting to.  The frantic thoughts reverberating throughout the young man’s mind were not the thoughts of a philosopher but were akin more to the thoughts of a suicide.  As the path recklessly continued the land around the dusty trail gradually grew more barren and rocky.  The grass surrounding the area disappeared; all other vegetation, tree or copse, grew scraggly and black, and as the darkening clouds gathered above the desert, the landscape was shadowed, and the smell of death permeated the choking air.
And yet, though the tract became more hazardous with each step further, the rash young sojourner continued and then, after what must have been hours of thoughtless wandering, a new terror dominated the horizon before the start wasteland.
He beheld, looming high into the sky above him, the Jebel Gilboa; tallest of all mountains in this formless desert, its pinnacles black and jagged in contrast to the grayish sky.  The path led straight up its side.  He began to ramble aimlessly up its steep slope, stumbling upon stones, scraped on the knees by dying briers and dead plants, nearing and nearing the distant summit, slowly mounting the most imposing of all the Jebels of the west.
Finally the poor man had scaled the grade.  He looked out over the land laid out far and wide beneath, shadowed by the amassing clouds.  No trace of anything else could be seen.  He was alone; alone on top of the mountain, itself strange and solitary in a world all at once strange and solitary.  He turned around.  There again, seated on a black stone near the other slope, his sign hung on a dead tree next to him, was the old fortune-teller.
He was viewing the young man almost quizzically, with his bleared eyes from under his wrinkled, aged eyebrows, his dirty, tattered robe flapping vigorously in the strong wind which now blew by them, and his beard unkempt and the hairs scattered.  Neither one spoke at first, they silently regarded one another for some time.  Then the man seated on the stone said in a sharp voice:  “Let’s have no more fooling.  You know who I am, and I know who you are.  You know your fortune: you know your choice.  I have offered you my bread and you say it is all I have to offer.  I have shown you that there is more than just one way to win the realms of men, and you say that there cannot be.  Now hear me!” He said suddenly. “This is my final offer, and your final chance to accept.  I will confound both your arguments with one blow.  Look at this land, the Earth, below you, view this formless rock to which you have so rashly confined yourself.  This corrupted paradise which will be impossible to make pure.  Look here!”
He held out his empty hands appealingly towards the man who stood before him.  “Look at these withered hands.” He cried. “These hands hold all that which you have seen spread before you.  The souls of humankind are mine, and not yours.  All that which is theirs is mine.  All that which they have made is mine.  They themselves are mine! You cannot own them-  You cannot save them- unless…
He thrust one of his empty hands into the folds of his tunic, and it emerged not empty but holding a loaf-  a loaf of bread.
“Take one bite.” He said, his voice hovering just above a whisper. “just one bite off the end…and I will give it all to you.”
He offered it again to the young man.  The latter did not take it; he stood rigid, staring at the old fortune-teller, absolutely motionless- and then he suddenly snatched it, and struck it to the ground.  “Do not strike deals with Me”, He said menacingly. “I do not bargain with serpents. What We have created is Ours, and We will pay no price to own it.  Listen to Me now, before I depart from you again.  These lands are lands which you have stolen.  You were not there when grass first grew upon them and when life first was breathed into them.  You could not know the purpose of thse lands or to what end they will ultimately come to. You have corrupted them and made them your own but they live as slaves and not as sons.  They will rebel against you in the end; we will rebel against you in the end; all creation will band together and rebel against you in the end…and then you will see…and then you will be sorry.”
“You will soon be forced to eat your words!” snarled the old man.
“Eat my words?” laughed the young man; and as he laughed, the shadows and shapes of their surroundings began to morph together and spin around; the gray, drab colors began to change, the clouds disappeared, and the old stones sunk to form a pathway.  And when the younger man had at last stopped laughing they both were no longer standing on the summit of the mountain.  They were again in that same sunny spot by the road and the picket-fence, where all this had started.
“Eat my words!...” laughed the young man again, as if nothing had happened.  “Why, I eat nearly nothing else!”
And He laughed for a third time, and without saying goodbye, He left that place directly and went off down the road, haggard, ragged, dirty, hungry, unkempt, and full of joy.
And the old fortune-teller, sitting in his old sunny spot on the picket-fence running along the wayside, not a furlong away from the olive tree and the Jezreel River, with his crudely lettered business-sign swinging softly beside him in the slight breeze, looked blankly down after Him, and wondered why he had even bothered.