The Quest

When Eve bit the apple, a catastrophe occurred. Gone was the world she had always known. It was like an atomic fall-out like Hiroshima all over again. It was like taking Jimson weed, magic mushrooms and peyote. These are hallucinogenic or psychotropic plants used by Carlos Castaneda, a writer from California, who recorded his experiences with these drugs. It felt like she had eaten similar mushrooms and was now living in some parallel but bizarre world, in a disassociated reality; like she had undergone some sort of hallucinatory degenerative transformation. She had weird feelings she never had before like envy, jealousy, hate, lust, anger and shame. Even the landscape looked and felt different. Everything about it had changed. It was like a nuclear bomb had gone off, and the tropical paradise was now a vast desert wilderness subject to unpredictable weather and dangerous wildlife. They were aliens in a strange land-a hostile and aggressive patch of grass, desert sand and dirt. That is how unfriendly the land looked to Eve and her husband, Adam. They began to feel as if they were the victims of a cruel joke and any minute someone was going to say, "Oh, we were just playing a trick on you." Three stories tell the extraordinary lives of those left behind who have battled their way out of the playground of evil and surmounted the obstacles to come out over on the other side to live their lives in peace and happiness.