There is the ridge!
The fact that he can’t see the path he descended earlier in the day doesn’t concern him in the least, because the ridge’s side isn’t steep and is easy to force, even in the dark. And on the other side will be the plain. Once he gets there, he’ll be able to find his way to town as easily as anything.
But when, a quarter of an hour later, he halts at the summit, it’s only to discover that instead of sloping down into the plain as he’d imagined, it plunges straight into a ravine, from which another mountainside rises.
This can only mean that he’s on the other side of the valley. That the entire forest is between him and the plain.
This time he can’t hold back the tears. A sob racks him, and the stream of feelings that follow no longer meets any resistance but wells up unchecked inside him, until it fills him entirely and he throws himself weeping to the ground. His thoughts, too, dissolve and merge into the spasms. He lies there without noticing anything apart from his own despair, locked within his own darkness, and where no time exists, for when his tears subside and his breathing at last returns to its normal rhythm, he has no idea how long he’s been gone.
It’s as if he’s slept, he thinks, and then woken up in a different place.
Totally relaxed in body, he sits up and dries his eyes on his sleeve. At least he’s gotten out of the forest! The treeless darkness up here seems purer somehow, he thinks, and decides to endure whatever lies in store for him.
The first thing he must do is find a safe place to sleep.
He gets to his feet and begins to walk along the ridge while inspecting the terrain in front of him. After a few minutes he catches sight of a ledge protruding a little way down the mountainside. When he clambers down to it, he finds to his joy that it forms the roof of a deep, narrow cave, which actually widens out at the back, where it almost becomes like a small room. Here he can sleep securely. But not comfortably: the ground is hard and uneven, and after trying various positions, he crawls out again to collect some conifer branches from the trees he saw growing on the mountainside below the mouth of the cave.
It is then he makes the discovery. Some five hundred yards farther down, at the end of the ravine, a small prick of light floats in the darkness. His first impulse is to hurry toward it, and he actually begins to clamber downward, but stops after only a few yards, for who could be out at this time of night? It might be shepherds, but it could also be bandits. .
Or perhaps it’s people from the town searching for him?
There is only one thing children find harder to hold back than tears, and that is joy. Antinous is no exception. The odds against anyone searching for him just here isn’t something that crosses his mind. Nor yet the unreasonableness of doing so in such utter darkness as this. One does not argue with joy, one surrenders to it, and after his first instant of doubt, he begins the steep descent into the ravine. If he were certain they were well-disposed, he might have called down to them, but this he doesn’t do; on the contrary, he’s careful to make as little noise as possible. Whenever he dislodges a stone and it begins to roll down, he stays still for a while before continuing.
The upper reaches of the slope are steep, in several places he has to search for hand- or footholds on the mountain, but on the last bit the gradient relents, and soon he’s standing down by the riverbank, surrounded by the noise of the waterfall, whose white curtains he can just glimpse in the darkness to his right. To the left the river cuts in behind a shoulder of rock. It is perhaps fifty feet high and hides the light completely. As he doesn’t know what awaits him there, he decides to go up the slope a bit again, so as to close in on them as unnoticed as possible, whoever they are.
Although the light is hidden behind the projection, the darkness up toward the top of it is less intense, like the sky the moment before the sun peeps over the horizon, and he can see the outline of each tree in the stunted forest around him. He thinks that perhaps his father is sitting on the far side along with other men from the town. A pulse of joy courses through him as he imagines how happy they will be when he walks down to them from out of nowhere. But if it is them, he thinks, he ought to hear them soon. They’ve no reason to be quiet. Or could they have lain down to sleep?
He stops and listens. But the only thing he hears is his own heart. Worried by the silence, he places each foot carefully before transferring his weight over to it as he moves on, and when he comes to the highest point of the shoulder, which is bare, he gets down on his stomach and wriggles forward. Just before he reaches the lip, he stops and listens.
Nothing.
Cautiously he raises his head and looks over the edge. The sight that meets his eyes petrifies him. Two cloaked men are standing motionless on the riverbank staring up at him. Quick as lightning he ducks and presses his face to the ground. Did they see him? Or was it just a noise that made them look up? He shuts his eyes and tries to make out if they’re on their way up toward him. If he hears so much as a twig snap, he’ll take to his heels and run away from them as fast as he can. But the silence is unbroken, and a few seconds later, when he’s convinced himself that they couldn’t have seen anything, blinded by their own light as they must have been, he again lifts his head above the lip.
The two figures stand as immobile as before. But now they’re looking at the water in front of them. One holds a torch in his hand, the other a spear. Both wear chain mail under their cloaks and each has a sword hanging at his side. The glare from the torch encircles them and makes it look as if they’re standing in a cave of light.
Slowly they begin to wade out into the river. They stop roughly in the middle, and one lowers his torch toward the water’s surface as the other raises his spear to throw. The quivering light of the flame leaves their faces and the uppermost parts of their bodies in shadow. Even so, it’s impossible to take one’s eyes off them. In some strange way, Antinous’s gaze seems to meet no resistance, it’s as if it vanishes into them. He looks at the deep red color of their cloaks, enhanced by the light from the torch, he looks at the black metal of the mail and the shining silver scabbards, he looks at the lowered arm and the reflection of the fire in the water. He looks at their mysterious faces, half hidden by the dark, he looks at the small eddies round their boots, the long, narrow fingers curled around the spear, the turned wrist, and all he wants is to be in their presence. Without giving a thought to what he’s doing, he gets up and begins to walk slowly down, all the time concealed by the trees and with his eyes fixed on the two figures, who display no sign of having heard him, but stand there still as ever. Halfway down he notices their wings and thinks what has until then been just a vague inkling: there are two angels standing in the river. The rush of fear and happiness that this sends coursing through him is almost unendurable. Despite it, he ventures right down to a small hummock on the mountain only ten yards away from them, behind which he can hide. But he isn’t able to look at them, even though he wants to, his closeness to them overwhelms him, and for a long time he lies quite still with his eyes closed and his face pressed to the ground.
When the residual image of the angels has cleared from his retina, the blackness in his head is filled with the rush of the waterfall, the almost imperceptible ripple of water along the bank, his own thudding pulse. But although he tries as hard as he can, he hears not a sound from them, and little by little the desire to see them overcomes his fear.
He opens his eyes and is just about to lift his head when there is a kind of hissing from their direction. Appalled, he lies still.