The cold that settles over a mountain dawn is the kind that deepens sleep and weighs down the eyelids. I told myself that as I lay still in bed, fingers searching for the warmth of the heavy wool blanket like a wall between me and the breaking day. Then the rooster crowed — a single sharp cry that cut through the mountain's silence — and sleep never returned. I lay still for a moment, listening. Nothing but wind shifting the leaves outside the window. I pulled back the blanket, rose slow and reluctant, and dressed for work in the darkness of the room, my fingers knowing every location by heart.
In the kitchen, my mother had already beaten me to waking, as she always did. She never needed a rooster to rouse her; her body kept the hours of dawn without permission. She had set the table quietly, humming something low that I could barely hear. I asked what she had made and she laughed and answered: soft-boiled eggs, country butter, a loaf of bread she had pulled from the clay oven only minutes ago, and a cup of fresh milk. I thanked her and sat down to eat, looking out the small window at the mountains as they began to show their shapes in the first pale light, like faces asleep that slowly wake.
My father was not with us. "He left at dawn for the weekly market," my mother said, settling across from me. "He took three sheep to sell and buy supplies for winter before the snow arrives." She paused, then added in a quieter tone: "He said the snow will come early this year. He read it in the thickness of the sheepskin." I smiled. My father reads nature the way other men read books. I never knew whether it was inherited wisdom or an ancient faith that things speak to those who know how to listen.
When I finished eating, I filled my water bottle and sealed it tight, packed some bread and a piece of dried cheese into my bag, and headed straight to the pen. The gate swung open and the sheep surged forward in their familiar way — sound and warmth and the smell of wool and earth. I walked them toward the distant pasture, a stretch of land that was flatter than the rugged terrain surrounding it. Our ancestors would never have settled in this harsh mountain place had it not been for the Zennane River, which cuts through the village with its eternal water, feeding the earth, quenching the thirsty, keeping life possible in the heart of the stone.
I reached the pasture and sat beneath a wide tree, for autumn sun on these heights shows no mercy, even when it looks gentle. I leaned against the trunk and took out the book. I had bought it at the market last month — a market we visit only once a month, one whose road vanishes when snow falls and the paths become impossible for weeks on end. I had read half of it in the first sitting, then stopped against my will when the sun went down.
Its title alone had followed me everywhere: "The Hidden Truth and the Ancient Secret." It spoke of civilizations that disappeared before written history began, of signals they left in stone and in caves, as though they were messages for those who would come thousands of years later. With every page I read, I felt the writer was describing these mountains specifically. Our caves. Those drawings I have never been able to explain.
Midday arrived with its deceptive heat. I glanced at the flock; some were grazing, others sleeping through their quiet afternoon rest, lying on their sides without a care. I said to myself: me too. I folded my wool coat into a pillow, rested my head against it, and closed my eyes on the last sentence I had read: "Every ancient secret stays alive as long as someone is searching for it." Sleep took me before I could think about what it meant.
A burning light woke me when the shade pulled its face away. I opened my eyes to the endless blue sky and felt the heat of the sun on my cheek like a hand shaking me awake. The afternoon was nearly gone. I sat up, ate what was in my bag, drank the water, then rose to find the sheep.
They were not where I had left them. That was nothing unusual after a midday rest — they wander in search of fresh grass. I put on my cap and walked slowly, circling the area, until I spotted them in the distance moving like white pieces across a green board. Reassured, I made my way to a tall rock I knew well — I had sat on it since childhood, back when my father was the one who herded the sheep and took me along. I sat and resumed reading.
The truth is, I have been fascinated by mystery since I was small. In the Atlas Mountains where we live, there are ancient caves and places filled with rock carvings that confound the mind. I visited them for the first time with my grandfather when I was seven. He stood before the carved ceiling and said nothing for a long time. Then he said quietly: "These people were here long before us. They left this because they wanted something said." I asked him what they wanted said, and he answered: "I don't know. That's why we come back." And since that day, I have kept coming back.
Those carvings were not idle scratches. They are a complete language that no one has been able to translate to this day. Among them are drawings of machines and creatures that belong to no era we know, as though whoever drew them was describing another world — or warning of something whose time had not yet come. I would spend hours before those walls, tracing the lines with my finger without touching them, as though being close was enough.
I noticed the sun tilting toward the horizon — time had passed quickly, as it always does when the mind is occupied. I saw the sheep coming back on their own from a distance, carrying inside them a clock that never fails. I stepped ahead of them as usual to lead the way, but my feet took me toward the caves this time, not the pen. I did not decide this. I walked toward them the way a sleeper walks toward a voice that is calling.
I entered the cave and the light stopped at the entrance. The darkness here is not the absence of sight — it is something else, something with weight and cold and the smell of ancient stone. I took out my small lighter and struck a flame; shadows rose across the walls and danced. Everything was in its place as I had left it — the tangled lines on the right, the drawing of that tall creature on the left that resembled nothing I knew, and the dense writing covering the entire ceiling like a page from a book that cannot be read.
I raised the lighter toward the ceiling and moved my eyes across the carvings in their usual order. Then I stopped. In the northern corner of the ceiling, where the wall met the roof in a slight curve, there was a drawing I had never seen before. I was certain of this. I tried to convince myself that it had always been there and I simply had not noticed, but a strange certainty refused to be persuaded. I have memorized every corner of this cave over years. This drawing had not been here.
I leaned close until the flame nearly singed my forehead. The carving was a square panel cut into the stone, its borders surrounded by letters from that unknown language, dense and precise, as though written by a hand that knew exactly what it was doing. And in the center of the panel, carved roughly three centimeters deep: an open human hand, fingers spread wide, as though waiting for another.
Something came over me that I have no name for. I began to move my hand slowly toward the stone, and my fingers started to tremble the closer I got, my heartbeat quickening until it felt ready to leap from my chest. I was not afraid — or so I told myself. It was more like standing on the edge of something whose depth you cannot see, but you know it is deep.
When only a few centimeters separated my hand from the stone, I glimpsed for a moment a faint blue light rising from within the carved palm — as though something sleeping in the rock had begun to wake.
In that moment, the bleating of the sheep reached me from outside the cave — a sharp, anxious sound, as though they were calling. I turned involuntarily toward the entrance, and my hand pulled back on its own. I turned quickly back to the carving, and found no trace of the light. The stone was grey and cold and silent, as it had always been.
I told myself it had probably been an illusion. I picked up my staff and walked out. But my hand still felt the warmth of something it had not touched.
At home, my mother was preparing dinner by the light of the gas lamp. No electricity here, no paved road, and we are far from the nearest town in a distance measured by hours of walking, not kilometers. But the house was warm, and the smell rising from the pot was enough to bring a person back to themselves after a long day. I greeted my mother and asked about my father; she said he had not returned yet — which was expected, the journey to and from the market takes a full day.
I went to my room — that clay room which holds all my memories — the small wooden shelf I had built myself at thirteen, the old chest that keeps my few books, the narrow window that faces the eastern mountain and lets me see the first light every morning. I lit a candle, set it on the chest, and changed my clothes, still thinking about the carving.
I came out to find my mother alone, spinning wool by lamplight. I sat across from her and we began to talk. I told her I had nearly finished the book; she smiled and asked: "What does it say?" I thought about how to answer, then said: "It says there are things in the earth older than anything we know." She looked at me for a moment with calm, steady eyes, then returned her gaze to the wool and said: "I have known that for a long time."
The door opened and Asmaa came in — sixteen years old, her eyes bright in the lamplight as though she had carried something of the outside light in with her. The moment she sat down she looked at me and said in a tone that left no room for refusal: "Brother, read me a story before dinner." I glanced at my mother; she smiled without looking up. I opened a book at random and read a story about a sailor who had lost his way in a sea he did not know, until my mother called us for dinner.
Then we heard the door, and my father's voice calling me from outside. I went out and found him standing in the dark, his clothes dusty and his face tired but content. I helped him bring in what he had bought — winter supplies, flour, oil, thick rope, and small things the house cannot do without. We had dinner together, the conversation easy, about the market and the people my father had met on the road.
When I lay in bed and the candle went out, everything came back: that carving which had not been there before. That faint blue light. And that urge still pressing against me even now — the urge to place my hand over the carved palm in the stone — as though there were words that wanted to be said, and had found no one willing to listen.
I could not sleep for long. And when I finally did, I was only waiting for dawn.
— To be continued, Chapter Two