The Quest for Paradise

Not sure it would do me any good I mouthed out, "Thank you."

He gave no indication that he'd seen the acknowledgment of me thanking him though and abruptly he turned away. I was pushed forward even as the straps of my pack were sliced and the pack itself thrown off to the side.

I hesitated to move forward as I took in the sight of my carefully prepared pack laying discarded to the wayside as if but so much trash. I was rewarded for my hesitancy by being pushed harshly forward by the muzzle of a gun barrel pressed into my back.

I got the picture of things pretty quick. Keep moving or get bruised.

*****

I leaned my head against the tree trunk before me. It was hard to say what time it was as it seemed that time was forever the same down here as there appeared to be no change in the orangish glow of the clouds hovering overhead.

One look however at the surrounding soldiers confirmed that at least for them it was time to sleep. I was tired, but my clock had me thinking it to be midafternoon on the surface and so sleep evaded me now.

I kept my gaze focused on the waves of the sea I could see crashing in the distance. We were a good distance off and far higher in elevation, but it seemed that if I listened hard enough I could hear the steady crash of water on rock. In fact the repercussion of the waves' constant action upon the shoreline seemed to echo through the ground that my bottom was sitting on.

I shook my head to distill the imaginations of a tired mind, as logically there was no way that I would ever be able to feel the action of the waves from so great a distance. I shook futilely at my cuffs. There was no escape from them or the tree they had my arms looped around.

Things were only made marginally better by the fact that my arms were at least held in front of my body now instead of having been secured behind my back. It had been hard walking for hours on end like that.

I'm not a vain creature, but something inside of me cringed at the sight of the messed up skin of my wrists, which had bled quite a bit and now looked scabbed and awful to behold. Any mercy I had at first attributed to the Israeli half of this contingent had undoubtedly been misplaced.

It was very clear to me that to them I was something less than human in terms of value. Even the women looked at me with hard eyes and when I had fallen at times earlier in the day they along with the men had been right in there pushing and shoving at me to get me back up on my feet.