The Paradise War by Stephen R. Lawhead

someplace, right?” I looked at the odd structure. “And here it is. Now we’ve seen it. Let’s go before someone comes.” I expected the man with the dogs to appear any moment.
    Simon ignored me and walked closer.
    A clump of holly grew on the north side of the cairn, and a thicket of something else on the south side. The exterior was covered with short grass. The air in the glen smelled of moldy leaves and wet earth. In the near distance I heard a dog bark.
    “I don’t want to be caught trespassing,” I told Simon. He didn’t answer but continued his inspection.
    “What’s the deal with these cairns?” he asked, after walking slowly around the odd structure.
    “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing whatsoever.”
    “Be a sport. I really want to know.”
    I took a deep breath and sat down on a rock while Simon undertook a second circumnavigation of the cairn. “Well,” I began, “nobody knows for certain, but apparently people used to heap up stones and such into shapes like this to mark things.”
    “What sort of things?”
    “Any old thing—a crossroads, a well or spring, the spot where something important happened.”
    “Like what?”
    From the hilltop above the glen I heard a dog bark; I turned toward the sound and thought I saw a glimmer of white through the trees. “What do you mean—like what?”
    “What important happenings did they want to mark?”
    “Who knows? Maybe the place where somebody struck gold, somebody killed a giant, somebody carried off somebody’s wife, somebody found religion—who knows? It’s all conjecture, anyway. Maybe they just wanted to tidy up the landscape, so they tossed all the rocks into a pile.”
    “Then these cairns aren’t hollow,” Simon concluded, continuing his slow pacing around the turf-covered mound.
    “Some of them are,” I allowed. “What difference does it make?” I heard the crack of a broken branch from somewhere behind me. I whirled toward the sound and saw a brief flash of white flicker between the dark boles of close-grown trees. “I think someone’s coming. We’d better get out of here.”
    “The hollow ones,” he said, “what’s in them?”
    “There’s no buried treasure, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I watched him for a few moments. He seemed so intent on understanding this ancient monument, I had to ask, “What’s got into you, Simon?”
    He paused in his third circuit of the mound. “What do you mean?”
    “Don’t give me that.”
    “Give you what, dear boy?” He peered at me blandly.
    “Don’t ‘dear boy’ me. Why this sudden interest in all this Celtic stuff ? What’s going on?”
    “ You’re the one who asked about the cairn, not me.”
    “Yeah, we already established that.”
    “You’re as intrigued as I am,” Simon concluded. “The difference is that I own up to it, and you, my friend, do not.”
    “Come off it, Simon. Don’t play innocent with me. What’s really going on? What do you know?”
    He had disappeared from my line of sight around the back of the mound. I waited, and he didn’t appear. “Simon?” My voice sounded muffled in heavy wool.
    I got up from my rock and walked to the other side of the cairn. Simon was on his knees, fighting into the thicket at the base of the structure. “What are you doing now?”
    “I think this one is hollow.”
    “Could be.”
    “I want to see inside.”
    “Do we have to do this? Why can’t we just say we saw it and go home like you promised?”
    “Just let me get a look inside; then we’ll go.”
    I shook my head hopelessly. “All right. Have your look.”
    Breaking branches with his hands and wriggling like a snake, Simon pulled himself further into the thicket. I stood looking on and saw what he had seen—a small, dark opening at the base of the cairn, all but hidden by the undergrowth. Simon succeeded in pulling his head and shoulders into the mouth of the opening and then backed out.
    “Satisfied?” I asked. More fool I.
    “I need a