A Cleansing of Souls Read Online Free Page A

any attention on that which streamed by outside. Now, on this beautiful morning, he gazed in awe and let his soul take hold.
     
    Those fields are incredible. If any proof were required of man’s complete inferiority to nature, you need only look out of the window of a screaming train as it rips through the countryside - crops standing tall, spiky, coarse and bristling, soft purple heather spreading out in a deep, rich ocean of decadence. Fields replete with stacks of pure sustenance, bubbling under the surface with life and virility. The hedges and the stone walls, walls put together stone by stone by stone, a contribution of man almost on a par with the natural, ragged perfection that surrounds them. The brick farmhouses stand there cowering, sterile and lonely amidst all that rampant beauty. And the sheep and the cows and the horses that have surely stood in that very place forever as if they too were the products of the very soil beneath them.
     
    There is life.
     
    Man had once lived by the land, nurturing it, working with it, reaping its good and suffering its failures. It had been a vast and wondrous task.
     
    As Tom stared out of the train window, he tried to imagine how the land had once looked, free from all the blemishes of progress that were becoming more and more prevalent the closer the train got to Big Town. With each scene that passed, he consciously removed the steel pylons, the telegraph poles and the golf courses. He discarded the aircraft that flew so slowly overhead, the black smoke that billowed from all around and those strange, squat buildings with the barbed wire and the ‘Keep Out’ signs.
     
    And there before him lay a sight profound. Stretches of unbroken forest, dark and green, strolling majestically into the distance; people in the field, writhing with the earth until sweat stung their eyes; and sheafs of corn in giant, endless rows, marching in time to empty stomachs and blistered skin.
     
    Tom was sure that man had once sought merely to live - to eat, to live, to survive. Just to live. He had sought not to conquer nature but to exist with it, respecting it, fearing it even. But little by little, this basic simplicity had been stripped away to reveal burns and scars and scorched hearts. One insistent word had precipitated the fall to enrichment. And that word was ‘more’. This unbridled yearning had ensured that with each improvement in productivity, in economic management and in streamlined efficiency, so there would be born upon this earth a new generation of the deprived.
     
    So as this young man's agrarian vision began to fade so the scenes before him became infiltrated by dirty grey buildings with jagged windows and factories left to rot beside rivers and streams that had themselves turned green and black with the grimy power of failure. Foliage crawled over the rusty corrugated roofs, forcing its way into the bleak interior. Rows of houses like rabbit hutches filled the train window, each back garden separated from the other by a rickety wooden fence to which was attached what seemed to be one continuous washing line from which damp clothes hung limply. No sun ever dried these clothes, not even on the hottest of days. That task was left to the rattling wind that tormented these dwellings day and night. Each garden contained more stone than grass, more shadow than light.
     
    And the train roared on.
     
    Tom became shocked by the squalor and the coldness of all he saw as he approached Big Town. He as much as passed judgement on the people, with one fleeting thought condemning them; for he had to protect himself. But in that instant, he learned his first lesson. For as the train edged into the final tunnel on its approach to the station, it was his own face that he saw reflected in the black window, his own face. And in that face fluttered an expression of aloofness and subdued contempt. And as the train came out of the tunnel and eased into the station, Tom felt ashamed. The