The sun burns scorching fire in the dry heat of day. Ancient crags rise like colossal stone giants stepping over the bare savannah, strewing stone rubble in their wake. Tiny white butterflies flit along a treacherous gravel path etched along the mountainside from the weary tread of decades of oxen and sheep trudging to fertile pasture o'er the faraway hills.
Around the bend a waterfall cascades a merry dance in the shadow of an overhang and
spreads feathery wet fingers into a deep blue lake below, the sound a constant
trickle of delight. As the gaze shifts, a delicate long legged deer crashes, started, into the undergrowth of the tangled forest edge, the greenery of the shadows clashing markedly with the harsh desert landscape now out of sight.
A shimmering lake deepens to span the low point of the valley below. The sound of a fish eagle rises like a triumphant battle cry on the soft breeze. Whirling dusts skips a dance across the path in the eddy's wake.
Fluffy white clouds mass and then darken, burgeoning grey with the heavy promise of rain. A flash lights up the landscape and then a crack of thunder echoes like a heavy handed whip. Fat rain drops fall, splashing dust as they plop earthwards, and then soaking the parched landscape. The scent of dirt and rain mingles. Runoff gathers in rivulets of streaky wet.
The storm is over in an instant. Light slips through as clouds part and scatter, as if a giant hand dips them aside. A startling rainbow shimmers into presence, arcing over the valley, a promise of life anew. Ancient cycles turn as time ticks on.
"I will establish my covenant with you: all flesh will not be cut off any
more by the waters of the flood, neither will there ever again be a
flood to destroy the earth." God
said, "This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and
you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual
generations: I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be for a sign of a covenant between me and the earth.
" (Genesis 9:11-13 WEB)
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