The Lights Come Up

A British general walked through the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem on the afternoon of the eleventh of December 1917.

He walked. He did not ride. His name was Edmund Allenby, and he had been instructed from London that when he entered the holy city he was to do so on foot, out of respect for the city, the prophets, and the Person to whom the city belonged. Allenby honoured the instruction. He dismounted at the gate, took off his hat, and walked into the Old City beside his officers as quietly as a man enters a sanctuary. The Ottoman troops had abandoned the city in the night of 8 to 9 December. At half past eight that morning the mayor came to the British outposts with a white flag, and at half past twelve the city was formally surrendered.

For the first time since the Ottoman conquest of 1516/17 — and, the crusader period aside, for the first time since the Arab capture of 637/638 — Jerusalem was no longer under Muslim rule.

That second formulation calls for precision, and it gets it here, because a number circulates in the literature that does not hold. One often reads that Jerusalem was in Muslim hands for twelve hundred and seventy-nine unbroken years — 638 to 1917. Unbroken it was not. In 1099 the crusaders took the city; for eighty-eight years, until Saladin's reconquest in 1187, Jerusalem was a Christian kingdom, and after a treaty in 1229 the city stood under Frankish administration for another fifteen years, until 1244. Chapter ten tells that episode; this chapter may not calculate it away to smooth out a number. What is true: from 637/638 to 1917 lie 1279 or 1280 years, of which well over a century was not Muslim rule. Whoever presents the 1279 as one unbroken block is counting away a century of crusaders that really existed.

The day was the twenty-sixth of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar — the second day of Hanukkah. The festival opens on 25 Kislev, in 1917 the tenth of December; Allenby walked in the following morning. Hanukkah celebrates the rededication of the second temple after its profanation by Antiochus Epiphanes. Allenby had no special interest in Hebrew chronology. He had not chosen the date. The German-aligned Ottoman command had made tactical decisions that left Jerusalem in his hands when his army arrived; the calendar lined up because the calendar was lining up underneath the campaign. By the time Allenby's foot crossed the threshold of the Jaffa Gate, four clocks Our Father of Exodus 34 had been running for thousands of years had all landed within weeks of each other on the same small ridge.

This chapter is about what those four clocks were, and what happened over the following half century when their landings detonated, one after another, into the most extraordinary national resurrection in human history.

The long afternoon was over. The morning of the autumn was beginning.

The first clock: Nebuchadnezzar's deportation

Open the prophet Jeremiah at chapter twenty-five. It came up briefly in chapter five. Jeremiah is announcing the seventy-year captivity. He is naming the kings who will fall to Babylon. He is dating the prophecy in his opening sentence:

The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah (which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon) [...] (Jeremiah 25:1)

The fourth year of Jehoiakim. The first year of Nebuchadnezzar. The historical chronologists Edwin Thiele and Kenneth Kitchen have anchored this date with care. It is 605 BC. In that year the young crown prince Nebuchadnezzar — not yet sole ruler — defeated Pharaoh Necho at the battle of Carchemish, broke the back of Egyptian power in the Levant, and swept down through Judah on his way home to Babylon. He took hostages. The hostages were the cream of the Jewish nobility — handsome young men of the royal family and of noble birth, gifted in all wisdom, in Daniel 1:4's description. One of them was a young aristocrat named Daniel, perhaps fifteen years old, dragged east in chains.

That was the start of the long captivity of the gentile age. The first deportation. The first time the holy city had been put under foreign occupation since the entrance of Joshua eight centuries earlier.

The book of Leviticus, anticipating the day, had warned Israel about what the discipline would look like. Leviticus 26 lists a sequence of escalating consequences for covenant-breaking, and at each step Our Father uses the same haunting refrain: I will punish you seven times more for your sins (Leviticus 26:18, 21, 24, 28). Four times the warning. Each time, the multiplier of seven.

Here the number weighed in chapter six returns — and on exactly the same terms. Seven times in Leviticus 26 is an adverb: it says how severe the discipline becomes, not how long it lasts. Whoever reads a dial into it is putting something in. But Leviticus 26 is a judicial chastisement of Israel, and it is precisely in such a context — and only there — that Scripture anchors the year-for-day key (Numbers 14:34; Ezekiel 4:6). That is why the second layer may be named as a layer: seven times of three hundred and sixty, two thousand five hundred and twenty. As a layer, not as a reading that replaces the intensification. It is the same number that in chapter six spans the gentile age — from the block line AM 3480 to the close at AM 6000, a measure on the dial and not a clock started by the Sitnah or by any other event — and that in chapter two formed the boundary of the first block.

Take the first deportation in 605 BC. Add 2520 years. Account for the absent year zero. The arithmetic lands on 1916 or 1917 — the year Allenby walked through the gate of Jerusalem.

And then immediately the reverse side, because it belongs in this paragraph and nowhere else. This sum is neither ancient nor Jewish: it begins with John Aquila Brown in 1823, and it was Guinness who pointed to 1917. The same Guinness pointed three times over to 1889 as the year of Jerusalem's liberation — that year brought nothing, and the prediction was quietly deleted from the 1917 reissue. His 1923 failed. His 1934 failed. Miller's 1843/44 failed. Elliott's 1914 did not bring what was expected of it. A system that fires off a dozen dates will statistically hit one. The 1917 hit therefore stands here as an interpretation after the fact — interpreted, with the pedigree and the miscalculations alongside it — and it carries no independent weight in any weighing in this book.

The second clock: the four hundred years of Genesis 15

In Genesis chapter fifteen Our Father had spoken to Abraham about a long captivity ahead:

Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. (Genesis 15:13)

The historical fulfilment was laid down in chapter three, and this chapter repeats it as it stands there and not as loose everyday speech usually renders it. The four hundred years of Genesis 15:13 do not run from the covenant, and they are not four hundred years of Egyptian slavery; they run from the persecution of the seed — the feast at which Ishmael mocked Isaac, AM 2120 — to the Exodus. The four hundred and thirty of Exodus 12:40 and Galatians 3:17 run from the covenant itself, AM 2090. Two counts, two starting points, one end point. What characterises the number 400 in the Hebrew reckoning is therefore not the duration of a sojourn but the duration of a discipline: the span Our Father measures out when He puts His people under the hand of the nations.

The number reappears in the long afternoon.

In the winter of 1516/17 the Ottoman Sultan Selim I conquered Jerusalem from the Mamluks and brought the city into the Turkish Empire. From that year onward, the Holy Land would be administered from Istanbul. Selim was succeeded by Suleiman the Magnificent, under whom the Eastern Gate, which had been shut for centuries, was completed in stone — possibly in 1541; chapter ten examined that. The Ottomans held the city for the next four centuries; from late 1831 to November 1840 Muhammad Ali of Egypt and his son Ibrahim Pasha governed it, formally as an Ottoman vassal.

Take 1517. Add four hundred. The arithmetic lands on 1917.

The two dates are DOCUMENTED: the taking by Selim's army in the winter of 1516/17, the surrender to the British in December 1917. The difference is CALCULATED: 400 full years, not exactly 400. To the day — from the surrender to Selim's army (no later than 11 December 1516) to that to the British (9 December 1917) — it is almost 401 years. There is no day-precision to be had here and this book will suggest none. The base rate: among the 45 changes of authority over Jerusalem since 600 there lie, counted in Tishri years, 11 pairs a biblical number apart, and chance gives 11 (CALCULATED). That the four hundred of Genesis 15 should repeat itself here — that the Ottoman centuries are a second discipline of the same measured length — is INTERPRETED. The text of Genesis 15 does not say it; the reader sees it, and it has no falsifier.

With that mark on it, one may admire the shape. A second count had been running, quietly, underneath the first: the four hundred of Egypt and the four hundred of Istanbul, and both close in the year the British general walked through the Jaffa Gate.

The third clock: Haggai 2:18

Open the prophet Haggai at chapter two, verse eighteen. Haggai is speaking to the returned exiles in 520 BC, urging them to resume the construction of the second temple. He gives them a date — the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month — and a prophecy:

Consider now from this day forward, from the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, from the day that the foundation of the LORD's temple was laid — consider it: is the seed still in the barn? As yet the vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate tree, and the olive tree have not yielded fruit. But from this day I will bless you. (Haggai 2:18–19)

The twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, in the Hebrew calendar, is the twenty-fourth of Kislev — Hanukkah eve. From that day forward Our Father announces blessing.

Hanukkah is a moveable feast on the Gregorian calendar because the Hebrew calendar does not align with the solar year in a fixed way. In 1917, 24 Kislev fell on the ninth of December, 25 Kislev — the first day of Hanukkah — on the tenth, and 26 Kislev on the eleventh of December. On that eleventh of December, the second day of Hanukkah, Edmund Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate. Two days after Haggai's date. The city itself had surrendered on that date, on Sunday the ninth of December.

The Hebrew prophecy that had foretold a day from which Our Father would bless His people therefore fell on the day on which Jerusalem surrendered; the entrance followed two days later. The fact: Sunday 9 December 1917 was 24 Kislev 5678, and the city was surrendered that day in daylight: all the transmitted moments of the surrender lie before sunset, and so on 24 Kislev itself. The date and the daylight are DOCUMENTED, the Hebrew day is CALCULATED. The base rate: about 15% of all days carry a biblical date; in a blind list of 192 dated events around Jerusalem and Baghdad, 15% fell on such a day (CALCULATED). The content: that Haggai 2:18 looks at December 1917 is INTERPRETED: Haggai is speaking about the founding of the second temple in his own days, the text names no second fulfilment, and it has no falsifier. The coincidence is remarkable. It is not an exhibit.

The fourth clock: Balfour

In London, on the second of November 1917 — five and a half weeks before Allenby reached Jerusalem — the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour signed a letter addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild. It was one paragraph long. It read:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object [...]

The letter became known as the Balfour Declaration. It was the first formal commitment by a major Western power to the restoration of a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land. It was published in The Times on the ninth of November 1917 — 24 Cheshvan; the month of Kislev began a week later, on the sixteenth of November. Five weeks after the publication the British general walked into Jerusalem.

Two events. One political, one military. Inside a window of forty days. After a Jewish dispersion of nineteen centuries.

Stop on what has just happened — and stop on it with the marks attached, because this chapter is the least secured in the book and it knows that about itself.

The first deportation in 605 BC plus 2520 lands in 1916 or 1917, depending on whether one counts the missing year zero. The Ottoman dominion from 1516/17 lasted 400 full years, until 1917. Haggai's day — 24 Kislev — is in 1917 the day of the surrender, two days before Allenby's entrance. The Balfour Declaration falls in the same November.

The dates themselves are DOCUMENTED. The sums are CALCULATED and they are correct. But that these four anchors are prophetic clocks — that Our Father aimed them at 1917 — is in all four cases INTERPRETED, and the previous sections have each said separately why: the 2520 count is nineteenth-century historicism with a trail of failed dates behind it; the 400 is a year-hit without day-precision; the Haggai application is a second fulfilment the text does not ask for; and the Balfour Declaration is a political document that closes no prophetic count.

Four clocks, one window — that is how this book reads it. But whoever looks for a proof in this convergence must know that four interpretations converging on the same year are still four interpretations. They illustrate the dial. They do not carry it. The foundation of this book lies in chapters three through seven, on anchors a historian can overturn — and that is precisely what distinguishes a foundation from a layer.

With that said: the morning of the autumn had begun.

The fig tree budding

Allenby's entrance was the green light. The Balfour Declaration was the legal warrant. But the actual founding of a Jewish state took thirty more years.

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine — the aliyah movements — rebuilding villages, draining swamps, reviving the Hebrew language. The 1930s brought the rise of Nazi Germany and the slow, then catastrophic, persecution that culminated in the Holocaust. Six million Jews murdered. The world's conscience, broken by the discovery of what had been done in the camps, finally moved to grant the Jewish people a home of their own. On the twenty-ninth of November 1947 the United Nations passed Resolution 181, partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leaders accepted; the Arab states refused.

On the fifth of Iyar in the year 5708 — the fourteenth of May 1948 on the Gregorian calendar, the day the British Mandate expired — David Ben-Gurion stood in front of a microphone in Tel Aviv and read the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel.

The first words of the declaration spoke of Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, the birthplace of the Jewish people. Within hours the surrounding Arab states declared war. The newborn state survived its first year by narrow margins — narrower than most Western analysts had thought possible. What a believer sees in that, he sees; it is a reading of a military outcome, not a proof drawn from one. Our Father, who had dispersed the family through the long afternoon, had brought them home to defend a country few had thought they could hold.

That morning was the morning of the fig tree.

Yeshua had used the image. Sitting on the Mount of Olives in the spring of 31 AD, looking across at the temple His Father had been planning to leave again, He gave His disciples a parable:

Now learn this parable from the fig tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near — at the doors. Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place. (Matthew 24:32–34)

The fig tree, in the prophets, is Israel. I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers as the firstfruits on the fig tree in its first season (Hosea 9:10). When the fig tree puts out leaves — when the nation, dead for nineteen centuries, comes back into the geopolitical world — summer is near. The harvest is at the door.

The leaves came back in May 1948. The generation that saw the leaves return would, in the words of Yeshua, see all these things take place.

Now ask the question every careful reader is going to ask. How long is a generation?

Read Psalm 90. Moses, late in his life, prayed:

The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. (Psalm 90:10)

A generation, in the most precise biblical reckoning, is seventy or eighty years. Take 1948. Add seventy. The arithmetic lands on 2018. Add eighty. The arithmetic lands on 2028.

What happened in 2018?

The seventy-year mark

On the sixth of December 2017 the President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed a presidential proclamation recognising Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel. On the fourteenth of May 2018 — seventy years to the day after Ben-Gurion's declaration — the United States Embassy was relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

One honest footnote to that sentence, because otherwise it promises more than it delivers: the hit is Gregorian. On the Hebrew calendar, Ben-Gurion's 5 Iyar 5708 fell in 2018 not on 14 May but on 20 April. The seventy years are therefore seventy solar years to the day — DOCUMENTED — and not seventy Hebrew years to the day. That is still remarkable. It is not what it is sometimes called.

For the first time since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a major world power had formally recognised Jewish sovereignty over the holy city. The recognition came on the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state.

Read Psalm 90's seventy-year boundary alongside it. The first generation of Israel-restored had reached the threshold. The fig tree had pushed out leaves for seven decades. And on the day the seven decades closed, the first major Western embassy moved to the city.

Sceptics noted the symbolism and dismissed it. Believers noted the mathematics and slowed down. The eighty-year boundary, if Psalm 90's stronger reckoning applies, lies in 2028 — three years before the projected midpoint of the seventieth week, six years before the projected close of the dial. The fig-tree generation, by Our Father's own calendar, is in its closing decade.

That is sobering. It is also clarifying. The Bridegroom said the generation that saw the leaves return would not pass before all these things were fulfilled. The leaves returned in 1948. The generation that was alive on the day the leaves came back has, by the longer Psalm 90 reckoning, no more than another decade. The window that closed is closing.

The date will not be pressed. Our Father reserves the day and the hour. But the generation has been named, and the generation is in its closing years.

The third hinge: 1967

Between 1948 and 2018 lies a third hinge that the long arithmetic of the master clock has been pointing at since the seventh century.

In June 1967 — between the fifth and the tenth of the month — the State of Israel fought a war on three fronts against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. It was, by every military analyst's expectation, a war Israel could not win. Six days later it had won decisively. Egyptian armour was destroyed in the Sinai. The Golan Heights were taken from Syria. Jordan had been pushed back across the Jordan river.

And on the seventh of June, in the early afternoon, the paratroopers of Mordechai Gur reached the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.

For the first time in eighteen hundred and ninety-seven years — since the Roman general Titus had broken through the walls of Jerusalem in AD 70 — Jewish soldiers stood on the Temple Mount of their own city.

It is one of the most extraordinary single moments in the long span of the master clock. From the destruction of the second temple to the recapture of the mount runs almost exactly nineteen centuries. The mount Our Father had walked off in four reluctant stages in chapter four was now, after nineteen centuries, in the hands of His covenant people again. The east Our Father had departed by was, finally, accessible from the inside.

But what happened next is one of the most theologically loaded acts of the entire master clock.

The Israeli defence minister, Moshe Dayan, arrived at the Temple Mount within hours of its capture. He looked at the Dome of the Rock. He looked at the al-Aqsa mosque. He thought about the political consequences of leaving the Mount in Jewish hands. And 10 days later, on Saturday 17 June, he made a decision that has shaped the geography of Jerusalem ever since: he handed the daily administration of the Temple Mount back to the Islamic Waqf — the same religious authority that had administered the Mount under Ottoman rule.

The Mount belonged to Israel. The Mount was administered by the Waqf. The two facts coexisted on the same square of stone. Israeli sovereignty extended over the courtyard. Islamic religious control extended over the buildings.

Read Revelation 11:1–2 with the Six-Day War in mind:

Then I was given a reed like a measuring rod [...] saying, "Rise and measure the temple of God, the altar, and those who worship there. But leave out the court which is outside the temple, and do not measure it, for it has been given to the Gentiles. And they will tread the holy city underfoot for forty-two months." (Revelation 11:1–2)

The temple proper is measured. The outer court is not. The outer court is given to the gentiles. The holy city is trampled by gentiles for forty-two months.

That Israel took the Mount on 7 June 1967 (28 Iyar) and that Dayan left the administration to the Islamic authorities on Saturday 17 June (9 Sivan) is DOCUMENTED (Dayan, Story of My Life, 1976); the day of the handover is CALCULATED from his own "the first Saturday after the war." The division itself is older. It began on 11 December 1917, when Allenby placed the area around the Dome of the Rock "under Moslem control" while a non-Islamic power held the city [DOCUMENTED]. Since 1948 Israel has been in the land; from 1948 to 1967 Jordan held the Old City with the Mount, and in 1967 the Mount itself came under Israeli sovereignty. That this division is the configuration John saw around AD 95 is INTERPRETED. Revelation 11 speaks of a measured temple and an unmeasured court; there is no temple today to measure, and the likeness therefore runs on one leg. This book names it nonetheless, because the shape strikes: the Mount itself under Jewish sovereignty, the outer ring under foreign religious administration, the holy city trampled even after its recapture in the parts that matter most to the prophet's image. Whoever reads more into this than a striking shape is reading more than is there.

The forty-two months of Revelation 11 are the same forty-two months that return in the seventieth week itself — the closing three and a half years of the master clock. They begin around the midpoint of the seventieth week, between the abomination at Purim 2031 and Passover 2031, and run until early Elul 2034. Revelation counts the authority of the beast and the trampling of the city in months (11:2; 13:5), the witnesses and the woman in days (11:3; 12:6); the day-counts are the more precise measure. Since 1917, and since the Six-Day War of 1967 under Jewish sovereignty, the temple court has been under preparation for the trampling that will occupy its outer ring during the closing three and a half years. The geography fell into place between 1917 and 1967. The clock has been waiting since.

A man who understands what happened in June 1967 understands one of the strangest paradoxes of the entire prophetic calendar. The Mount was taken on 7 June. The administration was handed over 10 days later. The two acts together fulfilled the prophecy. The temple proper was — and is — in Jewish hands; the outer court was — and is — in gentile hands. The configuration John saw is the configuration that has been on the Mount since 1917, and since the Six-Day War under Jewish sovereignty. The page is set.

The lights of the autumn

Stand back from the four hinges and watch the shape they have built.

In 1917 the Ottoman empire ended its hold on Jerusalem after four hundred years, and four prophetic clocks landed within a single window. In 1948 the State of Israel was founded after nineteen centuries of dispersion, and the fig tree of Matthew 24 budded on a hillside Yeshua had pointed to from the Mount of Olives. In 1967 the Temple Mount returned to Jewish sovereignty after another nineteen centuries, and the configuration of Revelation 11, which had existed since 1917, remained standing under that sovereignty. In 2018 the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state coincided with the first major Western embassy to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The four hinges do not fall evenly, and it does not pay to pretend they do. From 1917 to 1948 is thirty-one years. From 1948 to 1967 is nineteen. From 1967 to 2018 is fifty-one. From 2018 to 2034 is sixteen. One does read that those fifty-one are really a Jubilee cycle of fifty, with a correction year for the calendar offset; that is an explanation after the fact, and this book does not advance it. Fifty-one is fifty-one. What remains is the shape of the arc: from the start of the Allenby campaign to the projected close of the master clock runs one hundred and seventeen years. The lights have been coming up for more than a century.

Year	Hinge	To the next
1917	the end of the Ottoman hold on Jerusalem	31 years
1948	the founding of the State of Israel	19 years
1967	the Temple Mount under Jewish sovereignty	51 years
2018	the 70th anniversary of the state; the first major Western embassy in Jerusalem	16 years
2034	the projected close of the master clock	—
1917–2034	the whole arc	117 years

The Bridegroom said summer was near when the fig tree leafed. He did not say summer was here. He gave the household a generation of warning. We have lived through most of the warning. The household that takes the leaves seriously and prepares accordingly is the household that will not be caught off guard when the next page turns.

The next page is the seventieth week.

A field that turned green

Let me close this chapter where I want to close every chapter — with what the awakening means for the reader on the page.

Most of us were taught, at some level, that the long story of Israel ended in AD 70. The temple was burned. The people were scattered. The covenant, in the version of Christian theology many of us inherited, was transferred to the church and the Jewish nation passed off the page of biblical history.

The page disagreed.

Through nineteen centuries of dispersion, persecution, ghetto, exile, and Holocaust, Our Father preserved a family no human design could have preserved. The genealogies of Genesis 5, the ten patriarchs, the line of Abraham, the line of David, the seventy children of Israel who went down into Egypt, the twelve tribes who came out, the small remnant who returned from Babylon, the small remnant who survived AD 70 — all of it ran underground through the long afternoon and surfaced again, in our own century, on the same hillside Our Father had given to Abraham forty centuries earlier. The fig tree leafed. The lights of the autumn came up.

That should change how you read your own century. The decades you have been alive in have not been the late evening of a story that ended in the first century. The decades you have been alive in have been the morning — the strange, mixed, often turbulent morning — of the autumn cluster. The leaves have been on the tree the whole time you have been reading the news. Our Father has been bringing in the harvest in front of your eyes.

That should also change how you read the headlines. Most of what is reported about Israel and the Middle East and Jerusalem reaches the modern reader through a cynical filter. The conflicts look intractable. The geopolitics looks chaotic. The forecasts look grim. From inside the cynical filter, the Jewish state is a small, troubled, contested little republic that nobody can quite see how to manage. From inside the prophetic filter, the same Jewish state is the fig tree leafing — Our Father's own announcement, in real-time geography, that the autumn cluster is opening. The same data, two different filters, two very different worlds.

Our Father has not been silent during your lifetime. He has been talking out loud, on a hillside, in the headlines, on the calendar. The four convergent clocks of 1917 were His way of saying the morning has begun. The fig tree of 1948 was His way of saying summer is near. The Temple Mount of 1967 was His way of saying the geography is in place. The embassy of 2018 was His way of saying the seventy-year boundary is here. He has been speaking. The household that listens hears.

The chapter ahead steps onto the closing road. The journey has run from Adam at year zero to the founding of the State of Israel in year 5913 of the master clock. The four hinges of the modern awakening have been examined. The dial has, at the time of this writing, only one short stretch left to run. The seventieth week — the seven-year closing chapter the Architect reserved for its physical execution at the closing of the dial, prophesied in Daniel 9:27 against the Coming Prince — opens, by the projection of the master clock, in the autumn of 2027. The autumn closes the dial in the autumn of 2034.

Seven years from one autumn to the other. That is the country the next chapter steps into.

The Bridegroom is on the road. The signal from Our Father may have already been given. The midnight cry, by the calendar of the master clock, is one short window away.

The chapter ahead is the closing week itself.