other was thinking intensely about what they had seen. Now and then a frightened
bird would start up, and a couple of times they heard the hooting of an owl.
As soon as they reached the tent, they crawled into their bedrolls. Joanna
refused to have the mirror inside the tent. Before they fell asleep, they agreed that it
was scary enough, knowing it was just outside the tent flap. Sophie had also taken the
postcards and put them in one of the pockets of her backpack.
They woke early next morning. Sophie was up first. She put her boots on and
went outside the tent. There lay the large mirror in the grass, covered with dew.
Sophie wiped the dew off with her sweater and gazed down at her own
reflection. It was as if she was looking down and up at herself at the same time.
Luckily she found no early morning postcard from Lebanon.
Above the broad clearing behind the tent a ragged morning mist was drifting
slowly into little wads of cotton. Small birds were chirping energetically but Sophie
could neither see nor hear any grouse.
The girls put on extra sweaters and ate their breakfast outside the tent. Their
conversation soon turned to the major’s cabin and the mysterious cards.
After breakfast they folded up the tent and set off for home. Sophie carried the
large mirror under her arm. From time to time she had to rest—Joanna refused to
touch it.
As they approached the outskirts of the town they heard a few sporadic shots.
Sophie recalled what Hilde’s father had written about war-torn Lebanon, and she re-
alized how lucky she was to have been born in a peaceful country. The “shots” they
heard came from innocent fireworks celebrating the national holiday.
Sophie invited Joanna in for a cup of hot chocolate. Her mother was very
curious to know where they had found the mirror. Sophie told her they had found it
outside the major’s cabin, and her mother repeated the story about nobody having
lived there for many years.
When Joanna had gone, Sophie put on a red dress. The rest of the Norwegian
national day passed quite normally. In the evening, the TV news had a feature on how
the Norwegian UN battalion had celebrated the day in Lebanon. Sophie’s eyes were
glued to the screen. One of the men she was seeing could be Hilde’s father.
The last thing Sophie did on May 17 was to hang the large mirror on the wall in
her room. The following morning there was a new brown envelope in the den. She
tore it open at once and began to read.
Two Cultures
... the only way to avoid floating in a vacuum …
It won’t be long now before we meet, my dear Sophie. I thought you
would return to the major’s cabin—that’s why I left all the cards from Hilde’s
father there. That was the only way they could be delivered to her. Don’t worry
about how she will get them. A lot can happen before June 15.
We have seen how the Hellenistic philosophers recycled the ideas of
earlier philosophers. Some even attempted to turn their predecessors into
religious prophets. Plotinus came close to acclaiming Plato as the savior of
humanity.
But as we know, another savior was born during the period we have just
been discussing—and that happened outside the Greco-Roman area. I refer
to Jesus of Nazareth. In this chapter we will see how Christianity gradually
began to permeate the Greco-Roman world—more or less the same way that