“The ark is still there on the top of the mountain.” She spoke slowly and solemnly. “God keeps it there to make the people good. No one can see it, but it is there. When the moon shines on the mountain or the sun on certain days, there is its great shadow.”
“Oh, but, Mary Christmas! Still there, after all those thousands of years?”
“I tell you the truth,” said Mary Christmas. There was finality in her tone. “There is its shadow on the mountain-side.”
“Have you seen its shadow, Mary Christmas—you—yourself?”
“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. And then she did a strange thing. Raising her right hand to her head, she touched her forehead lightly with her fingers, then her breast, and then her shoulders from left to right, closing her eyes as she did so. Her still face awed the children. They had never seen that sign before.
“But what if anyone should climb the mountain to its very top?” they persisted, breaking the silence once she had opened her eyes. “Couldn’t they see it if it is there?”
“No,” said Mary Christmas. “Only someone holy could see it—someone very, very good. The Virgin Mary—or, perhaps, your father.”
Years afterward they were to laugh at the remembrance of Mary Christmas’ words and at the picture of Father Wescott toiling up Ararat with all the zeal which he had ever shown on the eve of a Republican victory. But now they were impressed only by the reverence in her voice. Good and wise as they had always known their father to be, they had never thought him fit for such celestial company.
“Once a saint, a holy man, tried to climb the mountain to see the ark,” continued Mary Christmas. “That was hundreds of years ago. His name was Saint Jacob. For three days he went up and up through the snow and ice. But each morning, when he woke from sleep, he found himself back at the same place where he had started the day before. Then an angel came to him with a great plank of wood. The angel told Saint Jacob that God would let no one walk on the top of the mountain, for it was sacred; but that He had sent the saint a piece of the ark as a reward for his patience. And now that wood is in the great church at Etchmiadzin.”
“Say it again, Mary Christmas,” they begged, forgetting Saint Jacob and the ark in this unfamiliar, ringing word. “Say it again—please!”