I expected to hear assurances, but he said nothing. With his help I stepped onto the tree, which was red with blood. My feet were cut immediately, and I began to bleed. I walked only ten yards before my feet were bloody pulps, and I could go no farther.

I looked at him, not knowing what to do—only that I wanted to cross the chasm but knew I could not.

The Woodsman picked me up and held me in his arms. For a fleeting moment I remembered my father holding me like this when he carried me into the emergency room after my bike accident on my tenth birthday.

The Woodsman walked on, picking up the pace. If he made one false step, I’d fall into the abyss. For a passing moment I wished I’d stayed on the safe ground of the chasm’s edge. Safe? I questioned myself. How much worse could anything be than to be stranded on the rim of the abyss?

If the Woodsman can’t do what he claims, all is lost. But if he can’t do what he claims, all is lost anyway.

As we crossed the chasm, he stopped near the middle and with his hands wiped the dirt and blood off me and onto himself. The dirtier the Woodsman became the cleaner I became, until he was completely dirty and I completely clean. He picked me up again, and I looked down into the abyss and shivered at the spiraling darkness below, a drain that seemed to suck ever downward. He drew me close to his chest, and I felt secure in his strong arms. What place could be safer? I gazed into those wide brown eyes and felt I was not just seeing him but seeing the universe itself for the first time.

As we approached the far edge of the chasm, I sensed I was not the same person who’d stepped out onto the tree on the other side.

Before I knew it, the Woodsman had jumped off the tree with me still in his arms, cushioning me from the impact. When he put my feet on the ground, I looked at the terrain, flat and lush with vegetation. I looked back at the abyss and gazed wide-eyed at how far we had come—for in the distance the eastern mountain above the chasm was but a small marker on the horizon, and the mountain above Babel that I’d first descended was only a remote mound of motionless smoke.

I stared at the chasm. Was I imagining this? How could we have crossed something so immense at all, much less in what had seemed only a few minutes?

The Woodsman put his hand on my shoulder.

“I did it all for you.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I would have done it for you alone.”

I hung my head, feeling both unworthiness and awe.