First came the sound — a low visceral rumble, as though at the core of the world a string had snapped, a string strung taut at the first breath. The sound vibrated in the teeth, in the joints, in the ribs.
Then came a smell, layered and intricate: the sweetish, rotting smoke of thousands of altars on which firstborn sons or enemies burned; the acrid stench of sweat steeped in fear and fury; and beneath it all, deep down, the dull, earthen reek of flesh devouring itself, unable to be sated by anything else. The sickness that had made violence a way of breathing, and another’s pain the only food, was seeping from the pores of the earth.
Cain was gone. But his principle — to take what you desire by force — remained. It mutated, multiplied, filled everything. This was *ḥamas*1 — the total infection of the species, the logical continuation of the road begun at the cypress.
Noah felt like a leper. His soul, stripped of the protective covering of indifference, flinched at every encounter with unprovoked cruelty. It did not know how to shut out the noise of the world, and it suffered without ceasing from that rumble. He was a living nerve in a body that had lost all feeling.
The Voice sounded like a sentence:
“The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with *ḥamas* through them. Make yourself an ark2.”
The world was sick and needed healing. The ark made it possible to save the little that *ḥamas* had not touched.
For a hundred and twenty years there sounded the knock of the chisel, the crack of timber, the hiss of pitch — and all of it to an accompaniment of hoarse mockery. Every blow upon the wood was an answer to another murder in the valley. Every breath of resinous vapor was a cleansing from the sweet fumes of human sacrifice.
The chapter goes on in the book.