Tarnished Hairpin

John Smalldridge

Description

A thrilling debut novel from John Smalldridge.The Tarnished Hairpin is the story of Adam and Eve and their excursion into the unknown world outside of the Garden of Eden. A mixture of characters, views,religion,trials and tribulations, love and war make this book a compelling read.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 03 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849893596
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
THE TARNISHED HAIRPIN







By
John Smalldridge

1st Book in the Tarnished Series


Publisher Information

The Tarnished Hairpin published in 2010 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

Copyright © John Smalldridge

The right of John Smalldridge to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.





In The Beginning


In the beginning. Well I’m not sure if that is the right way to begin this book or not. Trying to begin this story with “In the beginning” brings up two questions that man has wrestled with since “the beginning”. The first of these has to do with the origin of God and the second one has to do with the origin of man.
In the first, we are told that God had no beginning and will have no end. Having no end we can understand and accept, after all, we’re all here now and we all live like we will live forever. Right? The mountains and the rivers and the oceans and even our very lives are here now. They haven’t ended. That’s enough. But the idea of God or anything for that matter, having no beginning is impossible for us to grasp. How can it be that something or someone just always was? Everything that we know had a beginning, even the earth and the rest of the universe. In answer to the first question, “how can it be that God had no beginning?” I don’t know. I don’t know nor do I understand it. But I do know that this story is not about God directly. It’s about the first people to inhabit the earth and so I guess the words, “in the beginning”, are appropriate. At least that beginning to this story would be better than “Once upon a time”.
Having that settled, however, opens the door for the second question. You know the one about the origin of man. If it happened “in the beginning” as the original account recounts it, my question is why. Not so much the why as in, “why did God create man?” but the why as in, “why did He create man then?” If God had existed forever and never had a beginning Himself, why somewhere in His infinite past did He decide to create man. What great event all of a sudden caused Him to desire to have man around?
Did the angels talk Him into it? And why did He create the angles? And when did He create them? And who then talked Him into creating the angels in the first place? This brings us right back to our questions about man and his origins. Or maybe it was His Son and the Holy Spirit who talked Him into it. When He said “let us” and “our”, He seemed to be talking to someone on a higher elevated stratum than the angels.
And then, perhaps it had nothing to do with a decision based on some need He had for us. Maybe we are an experiment. And if we are just an experiment, are we the only such experiment. What if there were many Adams on many planets revolving around many suns in many galaxies. Maybe, at this very moment, while you are reading these words, God is forming another Adam in another garden somewhere in this vast universe.
And if we are just an experiment, what happens if that experiment fails? I can’t answer these questions. Just thinking about them gives me a headache. All I can do is ask the questions. I think that it would take someone with far more intelligence than I possess to give us answers. And then, I’m not sure I would understand them.
It is from this arena where the cosmic and causality collide that my story erupts. It is truly a story of fiction, with a thread of truth running through it. The truth is accepted throughout the western world and the fiction can be neither proven nor disputed. There are many “what ifs” floating around about the creation of the world in general and man in specific, and this is just another one. So here is my own “what if”.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The universe was a huge endless void. Or so it seemed. Throughout all of this limitless space were tiny particles. These particles were small, almost invisible, but there none the less. God took a handful of these particles and molded them into a tight ball that was so tight and dense that it became a magnet to the rest of the particles in the universe. He threw this ball into the center of the universe, if the universe can be said to have a center, and it immediately began to grow. As it drew the other smaller particles to it, it grew even faster. With the growth of the ball also came heat. The energy of each small particle was combined with that of every other particle until it began to glow with the heat. The more it grew the denser it became and the harder it pulled on all the other particles until, eons later, all the particles were combined into one huge white hot ball of super dense, super hot matter.
With all the matter and energy combined into one place, the power was too great to continue holding it together. The result was one gigantic explosion that hurled parts of the single mass in every direction.
God reached in again and arranged the chaos into order. He created relationships between the masses that formed the spinning galaxies. He formed the larger, hotter masses into stars and set the smaller ones in motion around these stars. These were to be the planets. He even set the yet smaller ones spinning and revolving around the planets to form moons.
He made the relationships between these masses so perfect that they were all held together in a perpetual system of checks and balances.
These movements, that he created, were so precise that the temperature on each revolving orb could be controlled to His desire. It was this temperature control that formed the water out of the steam generated by the intense heat of each sphere. The water first appeared as clouds and then later as water on the face of the planets as it cooled still further.
Reaching out His hand, God caused great movements to take place in the crusted cooling planets. This movement folded the surfaces and made the water flow to the lowest levels on each surface. All of this was accomplished with what was already there.
It was at this point that He really created. He made the world of vegetation. He created living things. First simple forms and then more complex. From algae to grass. From grass to flowers. From seaweed to tall towering trees. Soon the entire world was covered with a myriad of lush green plants, with each plant containing life that God took from His own being.
Again He intervened and created animal life. He started with the fish forms in the oceans. From there He went to animal life on the land, until there were many differing forms of animal life covering the globe. Some swam in the oceans and rivers. Some flew in the sky overhead and nested high in the treetops. Others lived and reproduced on the land. Some ate the lush vegetable life all around them, while others ate those that ate the vegetation. From the insects on the land and the microforms of the ocean to the large carnivorous fish and the thick-skinned mammals that walked the dry ground, they all had their purposes in God’s creation. And here again each living animal contained life that came from the Creator directly.
And God created the heavens and the earth, in its entire splendor, but He wasn’t through yet. He still had His primary purpose to bring about. He still had to create man.
He first had to choose the perfect spot for this, the crown on His creation. There was no spot on the earth that was found to be good enough, so He created the perfect spot. He, with the wave of His hand, grew a garden. This garden was the perfect spot. It was safe. It was isolated. It was protected. It contained springs of water that fed the abundant plant life. It was perfect. It was entirely different from any other spot on the earth. He called this special spot Eden.
Not only did He want to create the perfect spot, but also He wanted to have the perfect climate. He had been planning ahead for that. He had created a world where it never rained. There was a protective, layer several yards thick that protected the entire earth from the harmful rays of the sun. This layer was composed of minute ice crystals and surrounded the entire earth. Not only did this layer of ice crystals keep the suns rays out, it held the heat of the earth in. The entire earth was nearly the same temperature from pole to pole, varying only a few degrees.
This protective layer meant that the temperature change from day to night was minimal. Thus there were never the radical atmospheric changes that would later in the history of man bring about rain and snow and many other weather phenomena. For now, the earth was watered by heavy dew that covered everything every night. The two or three degrees of change that night brought were enough to bring the dew but not enough to make it rain. Every creek, stream, river, pond, lake, spring and even the vast oceans were made from these tiny drops of nightly dew.
One of the results of this ice crystal layer was that it created a thick cloud cover. This cloud cover further held the earth’s heat in and shielded the earth from the sun’s harmful rays. These clouds held enough water that if it were ever allowed to drop most of its moisture, the entire earth would be flooded. This could only happen if something were t