The listeners accede without protest to the old man’s command. The gambler, who always has what is needed ready at hand, distributes walking equipment. The clothing is airy and the shoes, too, are light. The odd part of it is that on the four even the most ungainly garments acquire style, as though made to order for them. For all the disparity of their dress, its elegance enables them to form a group. The woman wears her headband like a tiara, the soldier his parka like a dress uniform, the gambler his dust coat like a robe of office. The last two load heavy knapsacks on each other’s back, and instead of crumpling under the weight, they seem to grow, as though the extra weight were just what their shoulders needed.
The camper has been left behind deep in a shadowy thicket, where its slats gleam like a forgotten woodpile. The forsaken spot is enlivened by a bird; its wispy legs are perched on a stone in the middle of the brook and its longer-than-body-length tail keeps bobbing up and down. Incessant, too, is the sound of the water, racing over the massive round stone, a dark, rhythmic pounding that pervades the general roar, a sonorous vibration as of a musical instrument, or the after-echo of a forgotten epic. The bullet holes in the ruined building are covered by spiderwebs sprinkled with mortar. From the bridge rises the vapor of thawing ice and snow; the planks creak. The place has the feel of a forbidden zone.
The walkers did not cross the bridge but followed an old mule track along the river. We were heading downstream, but sometimes, when we looked to one side and the waves came fast, we seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, that is, upstream; in the end, the picture became so reversed that we were confused — as at old Westerns, when the stagecoach wheels appear to be moving backward.
Our first stop was at the point where the river emerged from its valley and the bank on our side flattened out into a plain, while the opposite slope, though still steep, receded from the bank in a long arc, leaving room beside the water for a road, a railroad line, and finally fields, before turning into a long mountain chain paralleling the river at a distance.
Here, at the end of the defile, we crossed the river on a high footbridge so narrow that we had to proceed cautiously step by step. From then on, it was a different river, bathed in southern light, shallow, its water dispersing into rivulets between broad banks of gravel. Sparsely inhabited; as far as the eye could see, only an occasional lone fisherman, none of whom so much as raised his head as we hove in sight.
When we came to the road on the other side, we saw why it was unused: it had long fallen into disrepair and had never been open to ordinary traffic; it had been specially built during the world war to carry troops and supplies to the front. Grass was growing in the cracked asphalt; whole bushes and small trees had taken root, and their tops had joined to form a leafy roof. We could have walked comfortably on this straight empty road, with an elastic ribbon of moss under our feet, but our leader motioned us to the railroad embankment that ran parallel to the road.
The railroad had not by any means fallen into disuse. Trains kept passing, those heading upriver gathering speed, those heading downriver slowing down, as though approaching a considerable city — though of such a city we saw no sign. In the trains moving away from the invisible city, the passengers were sitting still, while in those approaching the station, a jolt went through the cars from first to last, ushering in a general rising from seats, and there were also repeated scenes of conductors in seven-league boots racing through the corridors from back to front. After crossing the embankment through an opening shaped like a portal, we took a gently winding path up the mountain slope, wide enough to have permitted us to walk abreast. But all of a sudden our aged leader was in a hurry and apparently wanted to be alone, so that even at the start of the climb we walked in single file. A little later the woman passed him with a cocky side glance, signifying that she no longer needed a leader, and vanished around a bend, only to reappear much later on an open stretch, silhouetted against the sky, high above her companions. Not once did she look around. Even on the shortcuts, she moved with swinging arms and head aloft, on steep hills as on level stretches. The gambler and the soldier with their knapsacks brought up the rear, walking slowly. The soldier came last, so as not to leave the gambler alone, for he was not accustomed to climbing and his knees kept buckling.
Only a short time has passed since they left the plain, and yet the very first S-curve has carried them far away: the plain’s details and movements stand out clearly all the way to the snow-covered mountains on one side and the luminous mist on the other which, along with the dark ships that sail it, is called the “sea.” At the same time, almost all its sounds have been swallowed up, and those few that are still audible transformed: the clanking of trains into a soft knocking, as though from behind a glass wall; and the crowing of cocks, also as from behind a glass wall, into incessant call signs. The clear, varied, quiet design is that of medieval panels, in which for the first time pure landscape became subject matter, and taken together, sea, tilled plain, and high mountains represent the whole world. The car flashing somewhere in the distance is also a part of this silent world, and despite their many different colors the houses of a settlement plunked down in a niche in the mountainside give off the same sienna tone of earth shooting up at the sky. So sharpened is the hearing by the silence here that not even the grazing of butterfly wings against the sand of the path goes unheard.
As the S-curves narrow and become more and more overgrown with brambles, they seem to be leading nowhere, and there is reason to fear that after the next bend the path may end in an abandoned quarry and prove to be the wrong one. The boat by the roadside halfway up the slope, as thick-walled as a dugout canoe, seems to have been washed up here in prehistoric times when this upland was still covered by the sea.
After the bend, however, a first goal comes in sight: a military cemetery, as wide and deep as two or three quarries, laid out in gently rising rows — one for each letter of the alphabet. Larger than man-size marble slabs; affixed to each one a bronze tablet incised with columns of names, and over each column — unlike the names, legible even at a distance — the same word: PRESENT, in black letters which shimmer throughout this enormous field of the fallen and seem to shout from soundless throats.
The soldier takes an interest in the cemetery and examines the inscriptions, while the others regard the place as a mere way station. They take a different attitude toward the field where the dead of the defeated power lie buried. No larger than a village graveyard, it is equally overgrown with grass. Few of the wooden crosses are marked with anything but numbers; most of the names are incomplete, followed by question marks or so garbled as to suggest nicknames. Here we stop, wait for one another, drink from a water spigot, and get ready to proceed together. Next we enter a steep defile through a vault of overhanging bushes that leave the clay floor in half darkness. It is a short climb, but numerous changes occur. At first audibly gurgling, the rivulet alongside narrows after a few steps, and at the same time the muddy ground gives way to bare rock; the dividing line is reinforced by a tree root shaped like a snake. This borderline tree between brown, bricklike earth and smooth, light-colored stone is a huge, wide-branching, solitary plane tree; it shades the path, and its roots draw the last available water from the ground; in the rock which now begins there is none. Here the defile culminates in a natural staircase. After climbing the last steps side by side, the four stop close to the tip of the plane tree’s uphill branch — snake-shaped like its root, thick, long, and with the bulbous head of a diamond-patterned python protruding horizontally into the air. Then, leaving the protection of the fairy-tale tree, they find themselves on the threshold of a vast plateau, at first sight so barren that the seedpod of the plane tree, swinging close to their heads, looks to them like the last token of a living world.