The dance that instructs

The dance that instructs.

Learning is not just from books.

Chapter 1

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Very few people managed to see this nightly event because of the secrecy surrounding the area where it is normal. The government had ordered the area to be a military training zone and public access was very limited, even in daylight, at night it was total banned because of the use of live ammunition in night training exercises. To the soldiers they were normal, the official secrets act forbids them from talking about what they saw, but to be honest they had become so accustomed to the event that they did not consider it worth talking about. Being the military, each night was reported in the dry jargon of all military routine report. Each purple cloud was counted, along the length, in time, of the dance. Each morning this report was logged and filed and forgotten about. Some soldiers had even tried to join in the dance but the moment they stepped into the valley; the purple clouds moved away from the intruders. No sound was ever heard and not one human ever felt threatened.

A new Commanding Officer was appointed to the training area following the sudden death, due to a heart attack, of his predecessor. It was not until the second week of his new command that he witnessed the nightly dance. As an experienced officer he had long since learnt to never show shock or amazement, he returned to his office and asked the sergeant, who presided over the office administration, for the nightly records. These were available on the ultra-secure computer system but only went back ten years since that was the date the system was introduced. The sergeant then showed his CO the triple locked, file storage room where all the paper records were kept. One section was headed “nightly weather report.” The C.O. started to read the dates on the binders and found these reports went back over seventy years. Add the ten years on the computer and these first paper records were eighty years old. He took down the oldest binder and looked at the first sheet. It said that the usual night show was observed in Valley coordinates 12234 by 6789. The CO asked about previous records, those more that eighty years old, but the sergeant could not help, there was a large box of manuscripts that dated from when the army officially took over the area, but no one had sorted them out or made any attempt to put them in any sort of order. The C O looked up the MOD records and found it was almost 80 years ago that the area was declared a training ground and public entry was stopped. He checked the computerised records and soon gave this up as every night the record was the same, ten purple clouds danced for ten minutes commencing at 00.00 hours. He picked out a few of the written records at random and found exactly the same report in every one of them. He checked, as every good officer does, how his superiors had dealt with this information, it seems they had ignored it or never noticed it, but then one of his randomly selected paper records, on the “nightly weather report,” contained a handwritten note in the margin. Order from above, General Mcintosh, stop sending this report out. Single copy for local records only. This was dated seventy-five years ago.

He looked up the history of General Mcintosh and found he had not only been the senior army general of his day, but also chief of the whole defence organisation, land sea and air. He also found that earlier in his illustrious career, General Mcintosh had been CO at this training establishment. In fact, he was the first CO of the camp, responsible for setting it up and getting all organised. Beyond that there was little of note, the public records showed the general had retired but had not followed the usual route of being appointed as Lord Lieutenant of a selected home county but had emigrated to The USA . There he had disappeared from public office, his last address was noted as Dallas, Texas but no further military records existed. Further searches showed that the general died fifteen years after arriving in Texas and left no descendants. There was no will on record, nor any mention of his ever being married. Quite why he went to the states and what he did there, were hidden. Nor was there even a hint of an explanation about why he ordered the reports on the purple clouds to be “base only.” One thing a training base Commanding Officer had was time, the sergeants ran the place, orders arrived about which group were to be trained and how intensive that training was to be, the sergeants took over and saw all was complied with and records sent to the correct places. The CO signed off the reports but had little to do with their content. As much for the relieving of boredom as for anything else the CO made a study of the purple clouds and the illustrious general Mcintosh. He went each night at midnight and observed the arrival of the purple clouds, the air stilled in the valley about five minutes before they materialised the local portion of the sky above, brightened and glowed a pale pinkish red, then once all was calm, the purple clouds appeared and swayed back and forward, a gentle dance, no sound could be heard, the air was still not a breath of wind. The purple clouds were not dense by not fully translucent, they swayed in perfect unison in a steady rhythm, after five minutes the sky started to gradually fade back to normal, as this occurred the density of the clouds reduced and the speed of their dance increased. Then they were gone, the wind blew, the sounds of the night returned. The CO examined the ground in great detail, even took temperatures, but nothing at all unusual, not a trace, if he had not seen the dance, he would not have believed it happened. He tried to film and photograph the scene, but nothing showed up on the developed film.

By day the CO continued his research into the general, but had very little success, he then started to examine the history of the period the general was at the training camp. The nearest town had a newspaper of its own in those times and although this had closed, swallowed up by the expansion of a regional publication, the local council office had a historical archive. A study of this showed that there were mix feelings about the army takeover of the training area, most welcomed it as the area was wild, deserted and no use as farmland, so bringing business to supply companies was welcomed, there was some opposition from a very few who claimed that the ancient rights of way were being lost. One small paragraph caught his attention, A historian of the very ancient people who had once inhabited the area, was warning that there were artefacts and even buildings that had been there for over a thousand years, were now at risk of total destruction. The editorial of the time commented that no one had ever seen such buildings or artifacts and that folk tales about ghosts and dancing witches with no human shape, had long been dismissed as alcohol fuelled mischief. One other report stood out; it was in the paper dated a week after the general had ordered the reports to remain base only. It seemed that a local vicar was involved in an argument with the military over the banning of civilians having even the slightest access to the area at night, The vicar claimed that the military were allowing soldiers to conduct unchristian rituals and he wanted this stopped and wanted the right to visually check they had stopped. The CO of the time, later to be general Mcintosh, refused such access and repudiated all the claims. He even warned that any attempt to visit the area at night would result in death, due to live ammunition exercises. So Mcintosh must have had some overriding b reason for keeping the dancing clouds out of public examination, it was apparent that since he was first base commander he had set up the official secrets cover and ensured the public could never observe the nightly event. What was it that he knew? And why disappear to America?

The weeks passed with very little change, the nightly dance continued, whatever the weather in the rest of the area, in the valley for that first ten minutes of each new day, all was the same as every over day. In a fit of boredom, the CO ventured into the room where the paper records were kept and found a box almost buried under other dust laden crates, this box was hand labelled “personal notes Mcintosh.” The CO took this to his office dusted it all off and started to read through a jumble of handwritten notebooks. Some entries had dates and even times, but most had nothing with which a timeline could be established. Why had this box been left when the general had been promoted to the war office and started the climb to become the general in charge of everything? Surely it would have been part of personal belongings. But what ever the reason it had stayed here undisturbed until now. Gradually a pattern emerged, some sense of progression, The notes had been McIntosh’s pre-report memos to himself. In the days before computers and even tape recorders he had scribbled down notes to himself, that would be used later in official records and reports, or left out of them at his own discretion. The first notes were about his observations of the whole area when he originally arrived with orders to set up the training ground. There were rough sketched maps to indicate where he thought certain aspects of battle ground training could be held, These initial notes filled two notepads then in the third one was the first mention of night training and then a note of his witnessing the purple clouds, he had first noticed the sky changing colour then the appearance of the dancers. His personal notes revealed that his first thoughts were that they were some sort of “Northern lights” then realised this could not be. He mused to himself about what would follow if he reported his observations. His line commander would probably think he had cracked up and get him discharged from the army, certainly having publicity and reporters and tourists charging about over his training camp was not to be tolerated and so he issued a blanket top-secret order and took steps to ensure no civilians and indeed very few service personal were aware of the things he observed. Then the notes were about routine things before another book showed he had researched very thoroughly, the whole phenomena. His spat with the local vicar had set him thinking about the occult and ancient religion, ones from before recorded history. As part of his study he had positioned himself in the valley ten minutes before midnight and sat down in the area where the dance took place, The CO realised that this is something he could have done himself but had not thought of it. When Mcintosh had sat in the dark and experienced the changes to the sky and then the dancers had manifest all about him they seemed to ignore his presence but he felt changed by them, he recorded the most amazing tranquillity he had ever experienced, he felt light and yet still human, he felt his mind open to the sky and felt the inrush of knowledge, ancient knowledge yet somehow more advanced than modern understanding. He felt unreal and yet more alive in his body. Then as the sky faded and the dancers quicken their pace he returned to his normal self. The notes showed he revisited the valley and subjected himself to the experience many times yet not one official record was made. He began to see the dancers as friends and teachers, he came to understand the changed sky was the key to a universal understanding that only descended while the dancers danced. The notebooks showed he decided to keep all this to himself and made a conscious decision to use his new wisdom to further his military career and not seek a wider understanding until he retired, it seems one of his understandings was that there was another such dance valley in America, in Texas.