The lake’s still surface was a golden quilt. The churches which amassed along the shore over the centuries now had their fossilized features balanced between day and night. A most sacred moment. The eyestalks, V-shaped like the chalice from which the Savior had drunk her poison, framed the setting sun, the tails like the scepters with which she’d been prodded to trial facing the rising moon.
One intake of breath, the sun dipped down, pulling the moon up, and the alignment was broken.
The podvodnya sank; my ears popped as we
descended, and looking out the thick, round window it seemed as if the
lake’s waters darkened in hue with each blink of the eye. When we neared
the bottom some hours later, all was pitch black. The vessel’s
searchlight turned on to sweep below us.
Corroded broken pipes lay in the sediment,
barnacled and covered with algae. Our podvodnya crawled the lake’s
bottom, much like benthic creatures of the past must have when they
sought the source of God, tentacles sifting through silt, clawing at
mud, chasing away eels which sparkled in the dark.
We could see only within that circle of pale light: our window to His underwater Kingdom.
