But for the present it is also a boon to have turned their backs forever on water and the sounds of water that have been with them so long, the roaring of the torrent, the murmur of the river, the bubbling of the spring.
The plateau slopes gently to form an immense hollow — only in dreams might one expect to see a hollow so vast — which curves upward just as gently at its distant, but clearly outlined, blue edges. The edges, as far as the eye can see, are wavy and dunelike; every single hilltop, gently sloping on the lee side and steeper to the windward, seems to ride behind the next, and all — with no mountain peak, belonging to a region yet to come, behind them — border on the open sky. Thus the plateau, an almost perfect oval extending to the horizon, seems to be a realm apart, distinct from the familiar world, not a mere region, but a country in itself, a separate continent on top of our continent.
The dominant form of this country is the oval, which spreads everything contained in it out before our eyes; between us and the horizon there seem to be no nooks and crannies, no clefts or hidden far sides of hills. All objects are seen clearly and without distortion. Thanks to the overall form, each is distinct from the others, but all are joined in a community of graceful shapes which within the oval create an illusion of active life, one might even say of frenzied expectation, as though a buoyant, festive mankind had assembled there.
Yet this country is obviously uninhabited, showing no trace of any recent civilization, such as a settlement, a sentry box, a device for measuring rainfall, or any kind of trigonometric point. The neat rows of vines in the hollow are wild juniper bushes and the great midwestern fields of yellow grain waving in the wind are one vast barren prairie. Into the prairie from all directions, almost in human form, trees come running, withered, branchless, barkless trees, running through pale grass. The groups of small still-living conifers, rising at intervals from the hollow and forming a jagged line on the upper reaches of the oval, are so bemantled in a gray filigree of dead wood that their greenery looks like islands in it. But what makes the country look utterly dead is its empty sky, beneath which, when contemplated for any length of time, the trees, even the healthy ones, take on the aspect of ruins; for a moment it might seem that this sky is hostile to life, so much so that the tiny bird, hardly bigger than a fingertip, which darts out of a bush, loses no time before squeaking with terror and diving headlong back into its shelter. It is no doubt from such a sky that in a prehistoric era, which in this region is still in progress, the numerous, grotesquely shaped, bone-colored boulders, often as big as houses, rained down, filling the whole prairie, sprinkling the bare woods, and in places running straight ahead like rows of megaliths, a cosmic rockfall capable of recurring at any moment.
This chimerical country, changing shape every time one looked at it, had a different effect on each of the four walkers. The woman clung to the gambler, so violently as to make him stagger, then looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the river valley, which had long since disappeared from view. In her panic, her face showed its beauty: widened eyes, taut cheekbones, blood-red lips. The gambler, ordinarily at ease under any conditions, raised his hand to his nose — something he had done now and then before throwing the dice or playing a card — as though to restore his self-confidence by sniffling (he had never gambled in such a country). As for the soldier, he marveled in silence at the unknown place, delighted not to know where he was, in much the same situation as a man who wakes up far from home, not knowing where, rid of his name yet certain that he is at last present—for the morning, the light, the step out of doors, the raindrops in the dust, the eyes of the first person to come along, the words of the old book.
But the soldier’s delight did not infect the others; for a time each of them, including the old man, the leader, remained shut up in himself; he who had been in such a hurry to reach the plateau stopped on its threshold, and the gesture with which he at first pointed out his kingdom was transformed by his lowered eyelids into an attitude of awe, discernible also in his voice, which did not find its level and was either too low or too high, too loud or too soft, as though he were constantly listening to it, as though he had never spoken an audible word in this country except possibly to himself — though obviously he had been there any number of times over the years and was thoroughly familiar with it.
“This is the place. We are there. Now we have time. This is our day, and tomorrow will be like today. Just now you are afraid, and rightly so. Here it is winter in the summertime. The clarity of this country is an optical illusion; nowhere can this wilderness be framed, ordered, and tamed by a hotel window, nowhere is there flowing water; on all sides only silence, no creature who looks at you, no one who will speak to you, no mirror image that will reassure you; under every stone there may be a viper. Here you have no opponent who will let you think out your moves, no enemy into whose eyes you can look. In this country, unlike all other places, you will not find the right moment for anything, neither for drawing a knife nor for opening a book. Here it will not be a case of now or never, but of always and always! or never and never! In this country your knife will never cut into living flesh, and here you will always be able to read — in your books or in their commentary known as NATURE. I threaten you and I promise you. I promise you not only that here you will neither hunger nor thirst, that you will have a roof over your heads and a place to sleep, that you will return home from here — I also promise you beauty. We shall see things in a different light; as long as we breathe the air here, we shall perceive coherent, living signs in all that is lifeless and confused; after the first few steps, as long as we keep starting out in the morning and walking in the light of this country, our inner images will appear to us in space, in the form of a word, a rhythm, a song, in the shaping of a story. You are new here, but not strangers. Each of you has been here before! In the period when you were wandering around aimlessly, you wanted to return here, you traced the paths leading to this country on the watermarks of your banknotes; when a book didn’t speak to you of this country in the daytime, your dreams spoke of it at night. Desolate land, which for thousands of years has served the nations only as a place of transit or a battlefield, time and again ravaged and destroyed, disparaged by the poets who passed through, termed ‘insignificant’ by one who barely turned to look and ‘sea of stones’ by the next—‘as though God had stood here when he cursed the earth after the fall of man.’ Without treasure vaults or pomegranate trees, you, in your ever and ever regenerated emptiness, have always been the land of glory for our kind of people. All my life I have been disloyal because of my accursed notebook, my tormentor here; I have been faithful to you alone, barren, devastated, inexhaustible land of pathways.”
Undoubtedly, if one looked at the country as he spoke, the old man’s words had the power to make things visible by giving them their contours, to raise, as it were, the lifeless hollow from the depths; but though the old man’s voice rose to a quivering psalmody addressed only to the country, our group did not accept his message. The soldier listened absently, as though he knew the text in advance and was actually listening to something else; the gambler stared at the bunch of keys in his fist, from which steel points protruded between his fingers like a knuckle-duster; and the woman looked at herself in a pocket mirror which she held so close that she could only see her eyes.