The Survivors Trilogy, Book 2
When Chaim Rosenberg starts to hear things in the Spirit, he soon learns that others are hearing them too. With the help of a small group of Australian Aborigines, spiritually sensitive people from throughout Australasia are drawn together in a movement that will mark the start of a new age in human consciousness.
This novel by Dave Mckay is neither a sequel nor a prequel to his best seller "Survivors", but it is an equel. It tells the same story and covers the same period of time, but does so from a radically different Australasian perspective.
Excerpt:
Chaim looked deep into the lifeless blue eyes of the child that lay on the ground in front of him. She would have been only about six years old. Long ringlets of golden hair stirred in a gentle breeze around her tiny horror-stricken face. Her frilly white dress was covered in blood. There was in her face all the innocence of childhood, and yet Chaim sensed in her death all the worst of human depravity as well.
Around her lay other bodies, stretching for as far as he could see. But this one child was the only one on whom he could focus. Her face and her death embodied the suffering of each individual in a disaster that could not be comprehended through the use of numbers alone. He understood that she was part of the greatest destruction of human life that had ever occurred on earth. Millions had been killed overnight. Exactly how they had died was not clear, nor was it clear how Chaim had escaped. In fact, it was not even clear what country he was in. All that mattered was the awfulness of what lay in front of him, and his own feeling of helplessness.
Deep sobs wracked his body, though he cried silently. He was overcome with grief and compassion, but he was also overcome with a feeling of personal responsibility, like all of this was his fault, or perhaps like there was something he could do to ease the suffering, but he did not know what it was. Tears began to form in his eyes.
And then he awoke.
Three nights in a row the same dream had come to him. It was just a dream; and Chaim was intelligent enough to know that it would go away eventually.
Still, during the past two days, those innocent blue eyes had returned to his thoughts over and over, to haunt him even during his waking hours. The feeling was one of revulsion at whatever had caused this, but there was also a feeling of great despair over what to do about it. Being only a dream, of course, it was not possible to do anything; and so Chaim, in his own way, would shake it off by having a laugh at himself for being so obsessed, and then just wait for it to fade from his memory.
There was a protest rally that afternoon to attend, and then the flight to catch tomorrow morning, and so Chaim turned his attention to these and other events of the day.
Chaim Judah Rosenberg was in his late fifties, grey-haired, short, plump, good-natured, and single. He was a lecturer in comparative religions at the University of Newcastle, and a faithful member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) for the past 18 years.
Although respected for his knowledge of all the world’s great religions, Chaim's speciality was new religious movements. He had been invited to participate as the Australian Quaker representative at an interfaith conference to be held in Chennai, India, starting that weekend. The university had gladly given him leave to attend.
