The Tale of Séolane: A Creation Story

by Debbie Robertson


There is a remote valley in the Southern Alps in France, formed long ago by a river named the Ubaye. Dominating its circle of crests is one particular mountain christened La Grande Séolane. An upside-down mountain, geologists tell us, for even longer ago, tectonic plate movements flipped the bottom to the top, creating a most unusual summit: a mountaintop in the shaped of a giant whale.

That’s one explanation, all scientifically valid.  Nevertheless, shouldn’t grand and glorious things also have another?

I live in the shadow of the mountain.  But I have also known its namesake, someone equally grand and glorious.  Her name? Seola. She, too, has roots in this mountain.



She had not always been this way.

Or perhaps she ever had.

You can decide.  This is her story.

Long, long ago, there was once a sea, a grand sea, a great sea, that swirled and roiled its mighty waves over a land of which it would be the maker.

The sea was deep and full of life, not exactly as we know of it now, but there were fish, and indeed, there was one fish especially, the fish of this story.

She was grayish-silver and quick, of a size safe from danger, and strong.  Her eyes were a gentle black, and they held the wisdom gathered from her years.  With three flaps of her tail, from the darkest depths to the surface, clear and light, she would glide, and there she would bring her eyes to the sky.

She would gaze upon it long and long, forming questions filled with wonder at what she saw.

For the sky was the sea, but made of light, blue as the sea, giving blue to the sea, for the waters of the sea held the sky.

The glinting sparkles dancing on the water in the daytime became the glistening stars in the night above.

It was a beautiful circle: the sea, the sky, the water--so full of marvel, so full of life.

But most marvelous of all was the first light of night, the reddish silver prick of light just before the rising of the moon, the herald of the moon, the mistress of the moon, alive with mysteries, and on this fish would dream.

Each night, she would fix her eyes upon this light, watching the interplay of it and the moon.  The two were ever constant, ever faithful, and in the world in which the fish lived, this was her comfort, her enduring hope.

For below her and around her, things were changing, changing in a way she knew she could not.  Things that once were, were disappearing.  Others like her were leaving for places she knew not.  The sea was shrinking, and what was once below the sea now rose above it.

----

As the years passed, transforming the sea and the land, only the sky, with its first light of night and the moon, stayed the same.

And the fish, ancient now, noted all that had changed and just waited.  In her body, she felt the time of leaving, but in her heart, she felt the wish of staying forever.

And more and more, especially at night, she came to the surface of the sea, and watched the sky.

One day, a great storm arrived on the sea, and for seven days the clouds hid the sky.  Day and night. Night and day.  Darkness, darkness, everywhere.  Not a bit of light.

The fish was sorrowfully alone, sorrowfully afraid.  What if she should never see her beloved sky again?

On the seventh night of darkness and rain, her heart beyond reason and despair, she surfaced once more.

And there, beyond reason and hope, from behind a cloud, emerged the light and the moon.

In the blackness, their light was brilliant.  In the blackness, their light shimmered and gleamed on the surface of the sea and on our fish.

In the blackness, all lights were one….

----

Something happened at that moment.  What it was we do not know for certain.

But what is certain is this:

In the days that followed, on the lands then emerging, walked a new creature, with long limbs that carried her far and wide. Her hair of golden tresses, her eyes the color of the sky and the sea.

Wherever her feet touched sprang flowers.  Wherever she slept, forests of trees arose to shade her slumber.  Her voice gave birth to the music of the world.

For many moons she walked the earth, her life bringing life to it all. 

She nourished the land with her beauty and remembered the sea with her heart.

She was goodness.  She was light.

And on her journeys, she came upon a mountain, a mountain that she strangely remembered. 

It was a mountain shaped like a fish, grayish-silver, with an eye of gentle black.

She christened it Séolane, on the land, but of the sea.

And to this day, she is sea and land: Séolane.

And this is her story.


* * * * *

Debbie Robertson divides her year between the United States and France, loving the summer and winter skyline sunrises of Houston, Texas, and reveling in mountain sunsets in the Alpes de Haute Provence.  Her works have appeared most recently in Toute la Vallée, a French journal. She has written plays and “operas” for children’s theatre, and parallel text (English-French) short stories.