The Eye of God

Giovanni was deep in thought and staring out to the horizon and, at first, did not notice the blue-white light that slowly began to envelop the hilltop. However, as the light and the warmth it emitted intensified, he turned about, trying to locate its source. In the sky high above where he sat, about a thousand meters to the east, he saw a ball of blue-white light surrounding a fiery red center moving toward the hillside. At first, Giovanni thought it was a comet or a meteorite. On several prior occasions from that very same vantage point, during the August Perseids meteor shower, he had seen streaks of light move across the sky. However, what he now saw was very different.

It was unlike those other fiery projectiles from space he had observed on other nights. Those objects had had well-defined shapes—round bodies and trailing tails and rapidly streaked across the sky before burning up in the atmosphere. Unlike a comet, this sighting, this mysterious object, had no trailing tail and did not streak across the sky. It moved very slowly toward the spot where Giovanni was sitting. What astounded him even more was that, although the object illuminated the area around him, there was no connecting beam of light extending from it to the hilltop. At first, fascinated by what he saw, he stared up in wonder at what appeared to him to be a giant eye. However, his fascination changed to anxiety as the light intensified and moved closer. Am I in danger? he thought. Unsure of the nature of what he saw, he decided it would be wise to take refuge behind the boulder. As he rose rapidly from where he sat his foot slipped on some loose stones and his body pitched forward. With nothing to grab onto for support, Giovanni’s body lunged forward off the boulder. With his arms outstretched in front of him, he began to slide down the slope of the hill.

With nothing to grab on to and nothing in his path to stop his descent, he should have continued to slide and roll to the base of the hill some two hundred meters below. However, for reasons he could not understand, his forward motion stopped after he had moved less than ten meters. Startled and frightened—but surprisingly feeling no pain—he rolled over and looked up at the sky above him. The blue-white glow that he had seen in the sky now enveloped him; it felt warm, soothing, and not at all threatening. His body began to relax as he looked up at the night sky. The sky was filled with hundreds—no, thousands—of stars; he had never seen so many stars before. Amazed, he continued to look up as a sense of contentment, a sense of peace, came over him. Slowly, he closed his eyes and drifted off into a peaceful sleep.