What he did amazed me yet brought me no comfort, because when I turned and looked, the chasm was still there, and I still had no way to cross it. Nothing had changed.

He walked away from the scroll, toward me. There he stood, only three feet from me, a solitary figure dressed in a plain old tunic, spotted with woodchips, not looking like a champion or a hero, just a wandering woodsman. He gazed at the sprawling blue sky above us, then to Charis in the distance, as if looking toward home. Then he grabbed me with his eyes, holding me.

I squirmed away from his hold, then pointed my finger down at the chasm. Despair and anger welled up in me and exploded into a shouting challenge: “How can I cross the abyss? You demand of me the impossible! Is my longing for Charis your way of torturing me? Have you brought me here just to rub my face in misery?”

10

THE WOODSMAN FOLLOWED my pointing finger and gazed down into the abyss. His eyes watered. I could sense wheels within wheels moving inside him, a churning depth of ponderings and musings beyond my comprehension, as if the wheels had been turning ages before I asked my question.

The Woodsman moved away from the abyss, set his eyes, and focused on something behind me.

I turned and followed his gaze. My jaw dropped. Impossible! Why hadn’t I seen it before? It was a great tree, reminding me of a Ponderosa pine, yet many times larger than a California redwood, perhaps sixty feet in diameter and rising above the clouds. The reddish bark was unusual, very rough, with splinters so jagged they looked like barbed fishhooks. The tree cast a long shadow to the west, plunging down into the chasm.

When I looked back at the Woodsman, he held in his hand a great sword. He walked to the tree, put his hands on it, and touched his head against it softly. He lifted up the great sword in his hand, felt its sharpness with his finger, then swung it back and uncoiled it against the trunk of the tree. The stringy cedarlike bark exploded, and chunks flew off.

I couldn’t imagine how this tree might be cut through, not by the greatest ax and certainly not with a sword.

Why are you doing this?

I watched as he swung the sword again and again with terrible force. He took off his white outer robe and rewrapped it around his midsection, leaving his dark chest bare. His sinewy muscles rippled as he hewed the wood. He thrashed and pounded, again and again. Sweat poured down his forehead and off his cheeks. Small capillaries in his cheeks and brow burst with the pressure, mingling blood with sweat.