Two men. Two sticks.And a city that could not shout them down.

The great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt. Every proud age at once, gathered into one skyline — stepped stone stacked on colonnade, temple flags of a dozen cults snapping over gilded roofs, monuments elbowing monuments for room. Down in the streets the market is at full roar. Up in the square the fountains are playing and a festival platform is half-built, banners going up. It is humanity's noise collected into one place, and it is about to be preached at. Revelation 11 : 8

I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy one thousand two hundred sixty days, clothed in sackcloth. The crowd falters. A seam opens in it, and two men in rough sackcloth walk through — one tall and spare with a shepherd's staff, one compact and fierce with hair like a storm that lost its comb. They walk like weather fronts, unhurried and inevitable, and the market noise dies around them in a widening circle. At the centre of the square they stop and plant their staffs on the flagstones. Two poor men, claiming the middle of the world with two sticks and total certainty. Revelation 11 : 3

These are the two olive trees and the two lamp stands, standing before the Lord of the earth. They preach as a duet — the tall one's long arm sweeping slow horizons, the fierce one coiled forward with his hawk-brows alight — and as they speak, small flames kindle in the air about their shoulders and drift, one flaring at a raised fist, one tracing an open palm. The front rank stands lit by it: a porter's mouth open, a jewelled woman's fan stopped halfway. Then the rain comes, hard enough to empty a street, and they preach on in the open wet with their little flames hissing and refusing to go out. Under the dripping awnings the crowd is larger than it was yesterday. Somebody edges his awning-pole two feet forward — not to leave. To hear better. Revelation 11 : 4

Three and a half years is a long time to be right in public. The city learns the shape of them. A festival at full roar loses its audience to two men in work clothes — pipes shrilling, drums rattling, a juggler pitching higher and faster to backs — and among the listeners some jeer between phrases while a few, an old porter, a young mother, listen with shining eyes and quietly weep. And every morning the two turn up for the humblest shift there is, preaching at dawn to an audience of brooms and bread-trays, while the sweepers sweep closer than they need to. High up a narrow housefront there is one small lamp in a window. Lit already. Lit before they came. Lit every morning now, waiting for them. Revelation 11 : 3

If anyone desires to harm them, fire proceeds out of their mouth and devours their enemies. At dusk the crowd parts the wrong way, and men with clubs come shouldering through in the practised fan of people who have done this before. The two do not step back. The tall one simply moves the fierce one a half-step behind his staff-arm — an old habit of shepherds. Then fire answers, sudden as a word: a ring of white-gold flame leaping from the stones, roaring outward exactly one body-length and stopping. When the white thins there is a perfect circle of scorched cobbles smoking in fine threads, the clubs lying dropped where they fell, one still rocking — and two men standing exactly where they stood, the fierce one finishing his sentence to an empty square on principle. Nobody ever tried it twice. Revelation 11 : 5

These have the power to shut up the sky, that it may not rain during the days of their prophecy. They have power over the waters, to turn them into blood. The drought is not weather. It is a lid — a cloudless brass sky, weeks deep, heat shimmering off the proud towers, cracked earth where the flowerbeds were, dust where the mud should be. At the public cistern the citizens queue with clay jars, patient and rationed, one vessel at a time under a thin ladle-stream. And in the great square the tall one speaks a word over the fountain, and the jetting plume dims and darkens and the basin clouds — and the whole market goes silent around it. A city, discovering that its water answers to somebody's God. Revelation 11 : 6

When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up out of the abyss will make war with them. The flagstones crack. A black seam opens across the square with a sound like the city clearing its throat, and out of the smoke of the pit rises a horned mountain of darkness — city-block scale, pure silhouette, lit from behind like a furnace, filling the street's end like a second night. Its shadow arrives before it does. The two small men at the square's heart do not run: the tall one sets his feet the way he has set them for three years of sermons, and the fierce one lifts his chin and takes one small step forward. That is the whole picture. A mountain of dark, and two lamps burning exactly where they were put — and not one heartbeat before the work is done. Revelation 11 : 7

Those who dwell on the earth rejoice over them, and they will be glad. They will give gifts to one another. It happens out of sight. One terrible sound rolls up out of the city's heart — felt in the roof tiles rather than seen — and every bird on every rooftop bursts upward at once, thousands of wings wheeling in panicked constellations over the whole skyline. The wingbeats fade. A beat of nothing. Then horns, tentative, then confident; then cheering, applause, festival drums stumbling back to life. Down at the square's heart the two lie still, side by side, faces peaceful, staffs laid where they stood, two thin threads of smoke rising where their flames were. Ribbons come down off the balconies. Neighbours pass gift-baskets across the street. A barrow does brisk trade in little clay figurines of the two prophets, two for a coin. And nobody steps inside the circle. Revelation 11 : 10

After the three and a half days, the breath of life from God entered into them, and they stood on their feet. The bunting has faded; the party is thinner but stubborn. A juggler is back at his pitch with five painted pins in the air. And across the flagstones behind him, a hand lying open on the stone curls its fingers, slow as a fern waking. He sees it in his audience first — every face going past him at once, jaws going down — and then pin after pin hits the ground. High over the square the gold gathers, and breath pours down in two broad ribbons of shining air, unhurried and aimed. It reaches the two still forms and enters them, and both chests rise together in one great shared inhale. Eden's oldest gift, given a second time, in front of everybody. Revelation 11 : 11

After the three and a half days, the breath of life from God entered into them, and they stood on their feet. They get up the way you get up from a good night's sleep — knees, then height, then full height, with a small workmanlike tug at the sackcloth to straighten it. And then the sackcloth begins to shine. It kindles from the hem upward, rough grey cloth turning white — not burning: becoming — until two figures of blazing white stand where two still forms lay. The square empties in a single shout. Awnings are left flapping, cups go over rolling, and the souvenir stall tips its little clay prophets face-up across the flagstones. And the two, alone in all that empty, look at each other — the fierce one grinning, the tall one calm. Nothing is thrown back at the city. There is no answering blow anywhere in it. Only life, standing up in broad daylight. Revelation 11 : 11

I heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, "Come up here!" They went up into heaven in the cloud, and their enemies saw them. Their feet leave the stones together. A cloud gathers under them like weather with a plan, and up they go — unhurried, escorted, royal, the way Elijah went. The windows fill with the same faces that cheered three days ago, pressed white and round to the openings, watching their finished business ascend; under the colonnade a magistrate holds on to a pillar with both hands. High up in the little window, the keeper of the morning lamp puts her hands over her mouth in pure joy. Then the ground rolls. A wave crosses the city, flagstones rippling like a shaken rug, awnings folding, dust jumping off every ledge — and one proud tower leans, groans, and bows down into a long slow bloom of dust. A tenth of the city, kneeling. And when the dust drifts off, the ones left standing in it do the last thing anybody expected of this city: they gave glory to the God of heaven. Revelation 11 : 12-13

The seventh angel sounded, and great voices in heaven followed, saying, "The kingdom of the world has become the Kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ. He will reign forever and ever!" On the rampart of heaven the last of the trumpet angels steps to the edge, alone, and raises the silver bell — the slowest raising in the whole book — and blows. This note does not roll down toward the world like the six before it. It goes out, and up, and everywhere at once, brightening whatever it passes through, and it has no far side. Rank after rank catches it and answers until all of heaven is one voice. And in the ring before the radiance the elders do not kneel this time. They go all the way down — full length on the star-glass, arms stretched out ahead of them, and their hands are empty. The crowns went long ago; they are still lying at the foot of the throne. So the empty hands open wider and give the only thing left to give: the giving itself. The last warning in the book turns out to be the first fanfare. Revelation 11 : 15-16

God's temple that is in heaven was opened, and the ark of the Lord's covenant was seen in his temple. Behind the throne room there are doors — vast paired gates of woven light, one set behind another behind another, receding further than the eye wants to follow. They open in sequence, rank after rank swinging wide, until the whole length of it stands unlocked. And at the end, in pillared light with thunder pacing overhead, is the old chest of promise: acacia and gold, two golden wings arched over the mercy seat, small and ancient and perfect. Kept. All along. Never lost, never captured, never traded away — the covenant, safe at the centre of everything, waiting for the morning somebody opened the doors. Revelation 11 : 19