The wind off Carmel drew the last moisture from the mouth and died away in the ears with a mournful whistle. Four hundred and fifty throats screamed in frenzy, four hundred and fifty men flailed around their altars — and nothing. Only the wind drove the emptiness of the offering bowls from place to place.
Elijah was failing under the weight of the stones, under the heaviness of the water he had hauled all that endless day, under the burden of his own cry: “Answer me, O LORD!”
And then stillness crashed down, and within it — the consuming fire, torn out of the very stones, out of the drenched wood, out of air steeped in mockery. It was ravenous, final, the one absolute truth.
The people fell on their faces and cried out in fear: “The LORD, He is God!“1 A victory bitter as ash. That ash lay on his tongue when the flight began.
He fled from Jezebel. From the smell of the blood of the prophets of Baal, blood he himself had shed at the brook Kishon. From the rapture in the eyes of a people who only yesterday had wanted to tear him to pieces and today were ready to carry him on their shoulders.
He ran, ran into the void. Ran inward, into himself, where fire had just been raging and now only scorched earth remained.
Beneath a broom tree he collapsed, because he was mortally tired, and fell asleep at once, dropping into his own echoing void. And from there, from the very depths, something or someone touched him.
The chapter goes on in the book.