Wonders of a Godless World by Andrew McGahan

while lying in that hospital, an ignorant man. When I had looked up on that terrible night and seen the face of the mountain fracture and fall, I had felt fear, yes, and anger, but the root of those emotions was confusion. I had not understood what was happening. I was too ignorant. The processes of the earth—even though I’d spent all my short life living upon it, a peasant familiar with the soil—were a mystery to me.
    A frightening mystery, as my nightmares attested. Physically I was recovering, but mentally I was still bleeding and broken, scarcely able to sleep for cold sweats and fits of screaming. Paranoias haunted me—that another earthquake was going to strike, that a tremendous flood was on its way, that the ground, if I ever dared venture outside again, would open up and swallow me.
    In short, I no longer trusted the earth. I suspected, almost, a conscious malice in it towards my person. And no man can live like that. So I decided I would spend my new life studying the very thing I feared. I would devote myself to understanding the workings of the world. I would learn why the earthquake had struck my valley that day, and why it was that all my friends and family had died.
    But more—I would learn about floods too, and volcanoes, and storms. Can you see what I wanted to do? It was the violence of the world that I sought to comprehend. I had to somehow fathom thosemoments when the natural forces turn on man and destroy him so casually—because if I could understand what caused those events, then I could strip them of their mystery. And if I could strip them of their mystery, then I could strip them of their terror and their power over me. And end my nightmares.
    Ah yes…a grand plan.
    Of course, I’m sure I didn’t think in those terms while I lay in hospital. I was just a goatherd who could barely read or write. All I really knew was that I never wanted to feel so stupid and afraid as I had the day the mountain fell on me.
    So I set out to get an education.
    It wasn’t easy for someone like me, penniless and homeless. But there were jobs in the cities, and schools and libraries too, so to the cities I went. I worked all day in factories or dockyards—and struggled by night over my books, learning to read and write properly. I hired tutors with my meagre wages. And then, when I was reasonably literate, I spent my evenings in the libraries. And hired more tutors. And passed the basic school exams. And then began to prowl the corridors of universities.
    I made note of the fields I would need to study. Geology. Hydrology. Meteorology. Oceanography. Chemistry. Physics. All just words to me then, many of them disciplines in their merest infancy. And all out of reach for a poor man anyway. But then, only three years after the landslide, a great war broke out across much of the world. It lasted four years, and not only did millions die, but revolutions came, and whole societies were turned upside down, including my own. Me—well, all that matters is, again, I managed to survive. And afterwards, all the education that had been denied to me by poverty was suddenly made available, if I had the desire and the intellect to seize it.
    I had the desire and the intellect.
    So I went to university, and my long study began. And for ninety-two years, it has gone on. Oh, not always as a humble student, no—but the tales of my many careers and fortunes and failures can wait for the moment. All you need know for now, my orphan, is that in one way or another, ever since that landslide, I have been examining this world. And I can safely say that my understanding of the earth is now unequalled. No one else knows nearly as much about this planet as I do. No one else can read its signs or appreciate its subtleties or untangle its complexities as well as I.
    And yet for all that, I’m nothing—compared to you.
    I sensed it, even as they wheeled me into this place. My sleep was disturbed by a presence. There was someone close by,