It had been a long time since my mother or father had spoken about the man called Noah at the meal table. Everyone in our district knew this man. All the kids I went to school with knew him, he was so different from other grownups. Never got angry, always ready to help others and we never heard him swear. The grownups said he was a bit odd because he was always talking about the God he worshiped and believed in. He said his God was the only living God who had made the earth and everything upon it a long time ago. He may have been a bit odd, but we liked to stop at his house on the way home from school because he was always kind to us and always had a good story to tell us.
Then one day, coming down to breakfast, my parents were talking about Noah again and the strange. things he was doing. Soon as school was finished, my friends and I went over to the place where Noah lived and we did not know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him. He told us that he was building a big boat because in about an hundred and twenty years his God was going to destroy all the wicked people by water. His God had told him how to build this boat and he would use it to escape the terrible flood of water. Maybe our parents were right about Noah after all, this religion had really gone to his head. Fancy building a boat here of all places, miles from any water. Where was all the water coming from anyhow?
Leaving school, I moved to another district and with my job, getting married, etc., I did not have much time to worry about the old man Noah. Then some of my friends came to visit us with their children, and at the meal table, curious to know what was going on in the old district I had grown up in, I asked about Noah and what he was doing. My friend said he had almost finished the boat and it had been heard that Noah was getting supplies stored inside the boat. It came to my mind then that one hundred and twenty years had almost passed. Would the man of God be right in what he had said ? Anyhow, nothing had happened so far, and we had other things to think about.
So time went by and we were getting a little excited about our vacation that was coming up. Getting up that particular morning, I knew that something was wrong. The sky instead of being clear and calm was almost blackened with great black patches. Then there were those strange rumbling noises which seemed to come from above and in the ground itself. All the neighbors were out in the street, so I went out to see what was going on. Then water started to come out of the sky so heavy we had to run inside our homes. Then the water commenced to come in under the door, the rumbling got louder, like giant hands trying to rip the earth in two. Suddenly, the sky was lit up with a great flash, the earth trembled, the walls of our home started to shake and fall. Taking my wife by her hand, we both ran for the door, almost falling over that silly old idol of the moon god we had had so long in our living room. Then I remembered Noah and the things his God had told him. He was right after all. If only we had taken notice of what he had told us.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One