The Sacred And The Profane - Rabbi Desiree R. Ntolo (best books to read all time txt) 📗

light, like a laser shot out of it and down toward me. Well I thought it was toward me, because I instinctively turned my eyes away and protected my head with my raised arm and bent elbow…

*

“Get up, Puree!” Shouted my grandmother’s angry voice. “From whom did you inherit that laziness? I left you a bit of weeds to clear away and I still find them here! What have you been doing while I was gone, heh? And what will people think? What will they say in the future, heh? That I did not teach you how to work with your hands? You listen to me Young Lady, I don’t want anyone going and insulting me wherever you shall go to be married. I don’t ever want to hear any of that “your rotten mother” name-calling!”
Her voice had startled me, I opened my eyes and I realized that I was lying on my side curled up in a foetal position. And my grandmother was standing above me, a very angry expression on her face.
I got on my feet, feeling dizzy, nauseous and disorientated. I felt a bit strange. I did not feel like I had slept; I felt rather lost. “Well?” She said. “Come on; let’s go home, it is late!”

*
We set off for the village, with me walking ahead, not having said anything. What could I say anyway? I realized that a whole hour had passed from the moment I had first seen the flying vessel until my grandmother had come and shouted at me.
As she walked behind me, she suddenly asked me: “did you cut yourself?” I replied that I did not. And she said: “Well there is something like a bloodstain on the back of your dress”. And she even touched the stain, which was on my lower back.
I did not pay too much attention to that and said nothing… There had been so many times in the past, when I had found bloodstains on my clothes without having been wounded.
I remained quiet all evening, barely eating and not singing or joining in any conversations. My grandmother became worried and asked me if I was ill. I replied that I just felt very tired and wanted to sleep early. And I went to bed at seven that evening.
I said my ‘Bedtime Prayer’ and prepared for sleep, installing myself very comfortably on my back. I was restless, turning this way and that, even though I felt quite sleepy. Finally I realized that I felt a slight pain in my lower back every time I lay on it. Once I understood this I lay on my stomach and immediately began to fall asleep.
Then I felt some sort of click behind my right temple, as if someone had pressed a button, or a light switch or something like that. And then I listened amazed, at this speech:
“Greetings, you must now be lying down, ready to rest as you hear this message. As you must have guessed, we are the ‘people from the sky’, those who pilot the space vessels that you have been seeing since you were little. We have been waiting for you to get older before we could communicate with you. We are ‘Elyonin’. We are those about whom your grandfather spoke to you, and we have been watching you since and even before you were born. Now it is necessary for us to tell you why we have been regularly showing ourselves to you and to no other children of your age in your home village.”
“Tomorrow, do not go together with the older lady. Go instead to the cocoa plantation where you usually go and we shall meet you there at eleven o’clock in the morning, Earth time. Do not worry, we shall help you, there should be no problem.” And the voice stopped.
This was quite a weird speech to say the least. Of course I had become wide-awake and had sat upright as soon as I heard the first word. The voice had a metallic sound, as if the speaker were using a microphone.
I sat, looking slowly around my bedroom after raising the wick of my lamp, wondering whether my ‘young uncle’ Joseph were not hiding in my room and playing one of his practical jokes on me. But the voice that I had heard was a strange one and had spoken in French, while if it had been Joseph, surely he would have spoken ‘Ewondo’ our mother tongue. And furthermore the voice had not sounded like his, at all.
And to make sure, I decided to see if I would hear the same speech again. So I lay down again and concentrated strongly, calmed myself down and began breathing rhythmically. Then I did it again. I sort of stopped breathing for a second, brought my teeth together and just switched the ‘click’ on again. I did not know how I knew how to do it, but I just naturally and easily went through the process; which had not taken more than ten seconds from the moment I had begun to concentrate. And sure enough the voice came back:
“Greetings, you must now be lying down, ready to rest as you hear this message…” And the whole message was repeated word for word as I had heard it the first time…
Then I realized that somehow, that speech had been recorded in my brain; and that I could run and rerun it in my mind as often as I wanted to. I listened to it several times until I was finally overcome by sleep.

*

The following day, it was soon time to go to the farms. My grandmother wanted to know whether I would go with her, but I declined, telling her that I would rather rest a little more; then later on I would go to our cocoa plantation, and pick some of the pineapples that we grew there in remarkable quantity. It had virtually become a ritual for me to go to that cocoa plantation as soon as I came from the city.
I loved to be alone and meditate, and that plantation was my favourite place. I would go there, pick some cocoas from the trees, break them open, lie on my back, and suck the sweet juices from the white cool beans.
My grandmother who had always indulged me and let me do whatever I wanted to do, made no objections. She was used to seeing me go off in the forests by myself for long periods of times, and coming back when I wanted to.
And this morning, she instinctively knew that I wanted to be by myself. I waited for her to leave, to be absolutely sure that she would not follow me, and then after she had gone for a whole half hour, I set off for the cocoa plantation.
It was just a short distance from our village; it took some ten to fifteen minutes’ walk to get there. Unlike the farm where my grandmother had to go to; it was two kilometers away and she had to cross a river and a swamp to get there…

*


TWO BEINGS APPEARED AT THE DOOR
A
At last I headed toward the cocoa plantation, walking halfway through the village and at last turning behind the property of an old man called Michel Ovanda, where the trail to our plantation was. From Michel’s property’ it is just five minutes’ walk to where I was going; and I soon left the trail and walked into our plantation. Many questions were swirling in my mind. I had been seeing those silvery flying things in the sky for as long as I could remember, to the point where they no longer were a novelty to me as such, but I had always wondered what the people who piloted them looked like. And now I could not help shaking with anticipation and excitement.
Doubt swept my mind as I stood in the plantation, not knowing exactly where to go or what to do. Did I dreamt that message that I had listened to over an over again the night before? I decided that I did not; it would have been too incredible. ‘Now would this ‘silver thing’ be waiting, if indeed it were going to meet me? I asked myself aloud.
At that moment I strongly felt that I should go toward a fairly large clearing at the edge of the plantation, where no cocoa trees had been planted. My mind went back to a few short years before, when my grandfather and I had solemnly buried one of our ‘creations’, a ‘golem’ called Kima, in that very same clearing.
I arrived at the clearing and stood there, feeling uneasy and also feeling remorseful that I had refused to go and help my grandmother at the other farm for no good reason.
Suddenly I became aware of a distinct change in the immediate area of the forest surrounding me, and I was again covered in goose pimples. For I realized that for about five minutes, the birds had stopped singing, the crickets were quiet, no birds had flown overhead and all the other insects had gone quiet.
I slowly began to retreat under the cover of the cocoa trees, and immediately I heard the low humming sound that I guessed could only come from ‘them’. I finally looked up, and evidently there it was, now looking enormous as it was just about twenty meters above the ground. But it was really about seven meters in diameter. A red light flashed at its bottom, and on top of it there was a white light also flashing.
The lights were so strong that even though the sun was shining, I could see the flashes reflected strongly on the trunks and branches of trees. It was similar to the one I had seen the day before, and it also bore the same Star and Triangles logo.
It came still closer and descended until it was about three meters above the ground. There seemed to be no door, either at the bottom or on the side facing me; the surface was perfectly smooth and uniform.
I stood absolutely still, holding my breath and not even daring to blink; keeping my mind absolutely blank of any thoughts. I suppose that I that moment I would have been incapable of thinking if I had tried to.
The low humming sound was reduced to what seemed to be its lowest level; then what seemed to be the outline of a door appeared on the smooth silver-coloured side of the flying object facing me. The outline of the door was under the form of a white light.
And I had guessed correctly, for the door opened and two beings appeared at the opening. One was Brown-skinned, the other was White. Both of them were very tall, taller than any tallest human being I had ever seen. Both had long, shoulder length hair and both looked perfectly human. The Brown-skinned one’s hair was black, the other’s was blond. And both wore brilliantly white long robes with long and ample wrist–length sleeves and no hoods.
As the door had been opening I had been slowly retreating even further under the trees, and when I saw the beings I gave way to terror and was about to scream or run away when the two beings crossed their arms on their chests in the Essene way. The Brown one then raised both his hands, his fingers straight up in a typically Cameroonian calming gesture, and softly said in French, looking in my eyes:
“Do not be afraid, DÉSIRÉE”.
This had an immediate effect on me. I suddenly came to my senses and slowly walked back toward the clearing. How did they know my name? Who taught them