My First Novel: Chapter 7

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7

At first it was fun but soon I grew tired and bored. I stood up and brushed the grass blades off my back and trousers and headed towards the moonlight-bathed tree. I sat under it resting my back against the trunk. The moonlight was filtering through the leaves above and small round fragments of moonlight fell on the ground beneath. I looked at the milky patches on the ground for sometime absent-mindedly.

Then I looked up towards the sky and took up the impossible task of counting the stars. When I just finished counting eighty-three stars I heard a distant noise - somewhat like the sound of bicycle wheels on the grass. I turned my eyes from the sky to my fore. I saw nothing, only the intensity of the sound increased. Then the bicycle and the rider came in view. At first I was not able to distinguish the face of the rider with the darkish sky in the background. But as the cycle came nearer I was able to recognize the cyclist as a girl who seemed to be of my own age.

She drove to the middle of the hill. She got down from the cycle and put down the stand and rested the blue bike on it. She began walking up to the tree under which I was sitting.

She was wearing a white top and a blue skirt, which was flapping a little. As she neared, her face became slowly and slowly clear. Suddenly she noticed me and stopped dead on her tracks. I was also taken aback by her sudden reaction and sat there, unable to move.

The moonlight illuminated her face. She was fair, just like the moon above. Her straight, shoulder-long, brown hair was dancing on her shoulder to the light, cool summer breeze and unveiled her ears a little, which were adorned by a pair of tiny sparkling earrings. Her lips dropped open a little but were pulled up immediately. Her deep blue eyes were fixed at my black eyes. I had a feeling of drowning in her eyes. I was unable to move my eyes away from hers. She had an enchanting stare! She kept looking at me. And I at her.

The twinkling stars behind her, above us, behind me and all around blinked at us and wondered at the sudden silence of the surroundings. It seemed as if the water had controlled itself from falling over the precipice; the river had suddenly stopped running and was standing still. It seemed as if the stars, the moon, the waterfall, the river, the valley, the hills, the mountains, the grass; everything around us was looking at us, at our silence, in astonishment. The world seemed to have stopped. And we, the only two living things on earth, had been made motionless by some ancient, incurable, eternal charm!

The breeze was the first to recover from nature’s sudden amazement; it blew her hair over her face, covering her eyes, ripping the strange ‘eye-bond’ apart. That is when the waterfall again lost balance and fell off the cliff; the river again began to run, tumbling on itself again and again. The world was back to normal; the magic was broken.

She brushed her hair off her face and then resumed walking towards me, though at a slower speed, and sat down beside me resting against the trunk. She kept quiet and looked up at the sky. I also resumed counting the stars (I had to start all over again).

Next: Chapter 8