The Lake of Glass
By Josh Shiben
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
“Silicates,” said Jacob, nodding towards the mound of sand he’d collected in his palm. The dry heat of the Libyan Desert weighed on Mary, oppressive and unrelenting. She could feel it drying her out as they spoke, and she rested her hand on the comforting weight of her full canteen. “With enough heat, applied for enough time, you can melt them.” Jacob let the red-orange powder slide through his fingers, sprinkling down to the ground like an hourglass. “Make glass.” Mary nodded. She had seen lightning glass once as girl – she and her sister had found it on the beach after a storm. Fulgurite, her father had called it. Petrified lightning. It had looked like a small piece of coral, hollow glass buried partially in the sand. The strike had heated the sand, cooking it into glass as it fled from the angry sky.
Mary turned to look at the vast expanse of black marring the barren desert around them, and tried to imagine something large enough and hot enough to create it. Squinting her eyes in harsh sunlight, she surveyed the smooth field of glass. Something had cooked the Earth here. Something unimaginably hot and huge had burned this scar into the desert ages ago, and there it had sat for eons, buried in the sand until a recent sandstorm had brought it to the surface. Jacob had estimated the thing to be thousands of years old, but without samples, accurate dating was impossible. The black and circular sea of glass glared angrily back at Mary in the sun, like a giant cigarette burn I the cheek of the Earth, or the pupil of a massive yellow eye, staring out into the sky. “What could cook that much glass?” she wondered aloud. The field was nearly a hundred yards across, and of an unknown depth. Jacob shrugged, and lifting his equipment, began the trek towards the scorched desert.
“Who knows,” he called back to her. “A meteor maybe?” Mary frowned as she too lifted her backpack and began following Jacob towards the marred ground. She doubted a meteor could leave such a flat sheet – wouldn’t the force shatter the ground? Jacob droned on ahead of her, his voice carried back to her on the still, barren air. “Geological activity? Like a lava flow? Maybe some Bedouins had some sort of ceremony here. A big fire or something.” Mary took a glance back at the two excavators who had accompanied them. Ahme and Moha Hassan sat in their machines, cooling themselves in the air conditioning while they waited for direction from Jacob and Mary. Envying their comfort, Mary sighed and continued her march towards the glass. Her feet sunk into the burning sand as she walked, fighting against her every step, and Mary again thought of the beach and her childhood. Of her father, reading poems to her and her sister as the waves broke gently on the nearby shore. Frost and Whitman, Eliot and Yeats. They swam up from her memories on the waterless beach with its shores of frozen glass.
After a few minutes’ walk, the pair reached the edge of the lake, and Mary took her first close look at the strange formation that had brought the two of them to a place so barren, that even the desert nomads had forsaken it. The color was a dark, almost black green that reminded Mary of bile, or of the rotten slime on turned vegetables. The surface was mostly smooth, polished by the shifting sands of the Libyan Desert since its conception, giving the illusion that one could see very deeply into the semi-opaque substance.
She set to work brushing sand off of the lake, scouring the hot desert sands for the edge of the glass structure, while Jacob busied himself with photographs of the stain itself. The two worked quickly, both excited by the work and equally eager to get out of the oppressive Libyan sun. The dark glass was hot, and Mary could feel the heat radiating off of it, as if she were standing in front of an open grill or campfire. It baked the hair on her arm like a hot campfire that she was sitting too close to.
She turned as Jacob murmured to himself over her shoulder. “My God,” he whispered, staring down into the black, murky glass. Mary watched as he walked across the solid lake. He’d found an edge, and had been walking radially across the center of the lake, streaming behind himself a line of tape, but now he stood, peering down into the cloudy substance. “It looks like there’s something in there.” He murmured through eyes squinting from the heat. Mary stood up and shielded the sun from her eyes while she looked at Jacob. “A shape or something.” She walked towards him, painfully aware of heat pouring upon her from both the angry sun above and the glass oven below her. She peered into the glass and, for just a moment she saw a face; the unblinking eyes of a skull, peering up at her from the past. But as she looked deeper into the glass, she saw nothing but darkness. The human mind looks for faces in things, she told herself – Jesus in the bark of trees, Presidents in toast, animals in clouds. But she said nothing, returning to the side of the lake and busied herself with dusting for the lip. After a moment, Jacob had joined her, and together they brushed in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.
Within a few hours, they had found the edge of the glass sheet, and had begun the arduous process of digging out from under it. Ahme and Moha Hassan helped then, digging with shovels initially, and then bracing the large structure as they dug more and more sand out from under it. The lake itself was conic, with its point thrusting downward into the desert like a smoothed pyramid buried upside down, forming a sort of spear piercing the Earth as it thrusted downwards into its heart. Jacob led the excavations, eager to look for remnants of the stone-melting fire trapped in the sand, certain that some uncovered remains would solve the enigma of the desert’s scar.
When enough of the sand had been removed to fit in the larger equipment, Moha maneuvered his small backhoe to the side of the glass and carefully began scooping out bucketfuls of the reddish sand from under the lake. The hot sun was just lowering beyond the highest of the sand dunes at the horizon, and it glowered at the four of them. An angry semi-circle of crimson, it cast the entire world into reddish pallor and shadows, as if a bloody tide had swept over the desert. They would have to set up camp soon, as the lake sat too far from Al Kufrah to make a daily pilgrimage to and from the city a reasonable undertaking.
Mary walked back out to the center of the dark lake and peered into its depths. She squinted hard, peering into the murk where Jacob had seen the shape, but she saw nothing but shadows and glass. Refractions of light and desert sand and pollutants. She kicked at a ridge in the glass in a sudden surge of home-sickness, before letting out a long sigh into the oppressive heat of the late-day sun. She missed the beaches of her childhood; the lapping waves and salty breeze carrying peals of laughter.
Shouting startled Mary from her reverie. She spun to see the arm of the back
hoe pushing against the glass sheet, and could feel the glass at her feet strain and reverberate. Ahme and Jacob were shouting at Moha, who appeared to be slumped over the controls of his machine, unresponsive. The term “heat-stroke” slid across her mind, but Mary stood, rooted to the glass in shock. The arm of the backhoe pushed up from under the lake, and the entire sheet groaned in protest. Ahme moved quickly, and within a moment was in the cab, pulling the limp Moha from the vehicle, while Jacob took control of the arm.
Though the arm of the backhoe was no longer pressing on the glass, the structure continued to vibrate and bow, almost undulating in the stillness of the air. The reverberations increased, almost as if the lake itself were contorting and twisting itself rhythmically, slowly increasing the amplitude of the disturbance. Looking down, she saw the sand sliding between her feet as the lake rocked and flexed like a true body of water.
Mary took two steps towards the shore, stopping when a loud crack echoed off of the dunes like a gunshot. She turned to see a sharp fissure spreading through the center of the lake, inching along the surface as if it were a sheet of thin ice cracking under her weight, spider webbing through the center of the hot surface while she looked on in disbelief. The center bowed upwards noticeably, the glass vibrating as if something