"What did they do to you, Mother? Why are you so sad?"
"I'm not sad, my son," she answered, drying her tears. "Never in my life have I been so happy."
Saying this, the widow threw herself on her knees and said in a loud voice:
"By this act I know that you are a man of God! The truth of the Lord comes from your words!"
Elijah embraced her, asking her to rise.
"Let this man go!" she told the soldiers. "He has overcome the evil that had descended upon my house!"
The people gathered there could not believe what they saw. A young woman of twenty, who worked as a painter, kneeled beside the widow. One by one, others imitated her gesture, including the soldiers charged with taking Elijah into captivity.
"Rise," he told them, "and worship the Lord. I am merely one of His servants, perhaps the least prepared."
But they all remained on their knees, their heads bowed.
"You spoke with the gods of the Fifth Mountain," he heard a voice say. "And now you can do miracles."
"There are no gods there. I saw an angel of the Lord, who commanded me to do this."
"You were with Baal and his brothers," said another person.
Elijah opened a path, pushing aside the kneeling people, and went out into the street. His heart was still racing, as if he had erred and failed to carry out the task that the angel had taught him. "To what avail is it to restore the dead to life if none believe the source of such power?" The angel had asked him to call out the name of the Lord three times but had told him nothing about how to explain the miracle to the multitude in the room below. "Can it be, as with the prophets of old, that all I desired was to show my own vanity?" he wondered.
He heard the voice of his guardian angel, with whom he had spoken since childhood.
"Thou hast been today with an angel of the Lord."
"Yes," replied Elijah. "But the angels of the Lord do not converse with men; they only transmit the orders that come from God."
"Use thy power," said the guardian angel.
Elijah did not understand what was meant by that. "I have no power but that which comes from the Lord," he said.
"Nor hath anyone. But all have the power of the Lord, and use it not."
And the angel said moreover:
"From this day forward, and until the moment thou returnest to the land thou hast abandoned, no other miracle will be granted thee."
"And when will that be?"
"The Lord needeth thee to rebuild Israel," said the angel. "Thou wilt tread thy land when thou hast learned to rebuild."
And he said nothing more.
PART II
THE HIGH PRIEST SAID THE PRAYERS TO THE RISING sun and asked the god of the storm and the goddess of animals to have mercy on the foolish. He had been told, that morning, that Elijah had brought the widow's son back from the kingdom of the dead.
The city was both frightened and excited. Everyone believed the Israelite had received his powers from the gods of the Fifth Mountain, and now it would be much more difficult to be rid of him. "But the right moment will come," he told himself.
The gods would bring about an opportunity to do away with him. But divine wrath had another purpose, and the Assyrians' presence in the valley was a sign. Why were hundreds of years of peace about to end? He had the answer: the invention of Byblos. His country had developed a form of writing accessible to all, even to those who were unprepared to use it. Anyone could learn it in a short time, and that would mean the end of civilization.
The high priest knew that, of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, the most terrible--and the most powerful--was the word. Daggers and spears left traces of blood; arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided.
But the word managed to destroy without leaving clues. If the sacred rituals became widely known, many would be able to use them to attempt to change the Universe, and the gods would become confused. Till that moment, only the priestly caste knew the memory of the ancestors, which was transmitted orally, under oath that the information would be kept in secret. Or else years of study were needed to be able to decipher the characters that the Egyptians had spread throughout the world; thus only those who were highly trained--scribes and priests--could exchange written information.