Anirman SKY CLOUD MOUNTAIN

It was spring, 1959, between midnight and dawn. I was copiloting a flight from Cuba to Puerto Rico. The pilot was aft, asleep in a bunk, and the flight engineer, beside me in the cockpit, dozed away a long day of delays. Four engines rumbled methodically. All through the cockpit, the instrument lights were turned low, so only a dim red haze marked the face of each, while beyond the aircraft, the stars and a slice of waning moon shone more brightly. Sixty miles north of the Dominican highlands we entered an area of tropical thunderstorms. Immense cumulonimbus, many miles in diameter, built upward to 50,000 feet -- three times the altitude of the aircraft. I moved us as a snake through the clear air among them, skirting the edge of a towering rampart, or sliding beneath the blown turban of an anvilled top. The storms were alive with electricity. Lightning sliced through their vitals, branching into a hundred jagged streaks that turned the churning cloud incandescent with fire. From every quarter the storms flashed noislessly, and the sky twinkled like a garden hung with paper lanterns. Suddenly, I was pulled from the aircraft and joined to the dancing energies beyond it. I seemed to hover above the night itself, for great storm cells stood tall beneath me, and the airplane, like a tiny silver gnat at my knee, flew between them.

My mind blinked like a strobe. I was simultaneously in the cockpit and far above it. The magic of the night sucked me into itself, and my heart pumped a fountain of luminescence. Lightning spewed from my nowhere-existing, all-seeing eyes, and reached like slow-growing roots for the grounding sea below. The sky was tangibly alive, wise with wordless intelligence and traces of forgotten sentience. Everywhere I looked, it was beyond and below me, above and within me, for I was the field of night resplendent with jewels.

Back in the aircraft, I felt the field contract and reverse itself, until I was again contained in my body looking out at what I had just been. Strange energies pulsed from my stomach and surged though my chest, until I was awash with sensuous joys, throbbing with astonishments. I was panting slightly. My forehead was damp. My eyes stared at my hands that in the shadows, seemed to be staring back...