In search of shelter, we headed for the bushes at the edge of the prairie, but our progress was as slow and awkward as in dreams; we kept sinking into the mud, stumbling, pulled down by the weight of our clothing, shackled at the knees, falling, stopping to catch our breath; our pursuer, instead of being behind us, was everywhere. At length we found makeshift shelter in the thicket with its roof of tough, dense-layered leaves, which reduced the watery onslaught to spray. There the four of us stayed a long while, each in a separate niche, cut off from the others by wooden bars as in individual cells, staring at the deluge which before our eyes was reducing the high plateau to a swampy, mist-shrouded plain and turning our bushes into an island.
The rain abated in fits and starts; every time it seemed to be stopping, it started up again, fortunately for shorter and shorter periods; in the end, it was falling only from a single tree in a last onslaught of the wind, which was also dying down by fits and starts. While the rain was falling, the water on the ground had been so deep that the prairie looked like a rice plantation; now, before we knew it, the water was sucked up by the soil; all that remained was a quickly receding gurgling, giving way to sounds suggesting the uncorking of bottles. The water in the bushes had dispersed into myriad drops which, instead of falling, hung from the branches in motionless chains.
There were no puddles and consequently no birds that might have bathed in them. The storm was followed by a deaf silence: the old man’s word for it — he was writing again, his pencil made no sound on the dampened paper — was “nonstillness.” The gray around us was not fog; it was the kind of haze, dense, uniform, without puffs or wisps, which settles on a snowy landscape when the snow has turned to rain. Our only horizon was ourselves and a few leaves, which in the dingy light looked like symbols drawn in India ink; the outermost limit of our field of vision was still within reaching distance: a black, sharply delineated, beak-shaped thorn, pointing into the unknown.
In emerging from our niches, we had to tear our clothes from the brambles in which we had unwittingly become entangled in our search for shelter. On the next leg of our journey, it was useless to look persistently at anything, as we ordinarily did. In the illusory calm, any movement, however slight, would have been noticeable; but there was none; even the bit of fluff on a blade of grass seemed to have been pasted on; even if one had blown on it, or so it seemed to us, it would not have stirred.
The wind did not start up again until late, and then from the opposite direction, as though it had turned around behind our backs. As we sensed from the start, this was an entirely different sort of wind. The former one had made itself heard by means of things — clearly distinguishable varieties of needles and leaves; the new one came on as a single undifferentiated blow, whistling and clattering like a wind that is traversing not a desert but thickly settled country whose population — just a few birds, to be sure — has sped away, all with flattened wings, lamenting like prisoners.
In no more time than it took the clouds to gather and roll away, our clothes dried; the almost inextricable knots in our shoelaces were our only reminder of the downpour. Thanks to the wind, the air had become painfully clear; whatever we looked at was too close, too sharply delineated — and deceptive to boot: side by side with trees, we saw incessant lightning flashes, their negative images; the apparent herd of antelopes that passed us by with a loud clatter of hoofbeats proved to be a single deer. The prairie grass in front of us was so thoroughly combed apart that far and wide nothing remained but the naked stone desert. This wind howled through our skulls and seemed to dominate all space; under its harrying, the moon seemed to wane, while the countryside below lay trembling, pressed into an inclined plane.
The only calm spots were behind bends in the cliff. There, sheltered from the wind, we found ourselves in a warm, clear midsummer afternoon. In one of these oases, the soldier crouched down and pressed his fist to his forehead. The others gathered around him, looking down. At length the soldier raised his face, which had suddenly become the face of an old man. In attempting to laugh, he showed all his weakness and a moment later laughed at it without restraint. He stood up unaided, gaining new strength from the avowal of his misery. As he walked on, he moved his lips, as though preparing to say something. In reality, he was only counting his steps to himself.
Under the evening sun — long, apparently flickering shadows — our leader suddenly quickened his pace, but intimated that we could take our time. Well ahead of us, he entered a gently rising mixed forest, in the middle of which we discerned a row of cypresses that might have lined a cemetery walk. The wind was blowing so hard that the thick multiple trunks, usually cloaked in dark foliage, gaped wide in their nakedness. This was no optical illusion. At the end of the walk, the old man vanished through an arch of light, and a moment later we saw woodsmoke rising — smoke signals, we thought. Clearly, this was our goal for the day.
The old man was waiting for us at the entrance to something halfway between a natural cave and a man-made structure. Our first impression was of an ivy-clad, windowless dwelling with an ingenious door opening — on the lintel a festoon of stalactites, in the clay floor a matching threshold; between them creepers hanging like the string curtains one sees in southern countries; and a flat roof green with shrubbery. While the old man parted the strings with a gesture of hospitality and showed us in, one of our number automatically took off his shoes in the grass and the rest of us did likewise. A black-and-yellow salamander, motionless, looked up at us — the heraldic emblem of the cave hostelry.
This cave had once served as a bunker and the inner walls had been reinforced with concrete; the stalactites hanging from the ceiling were as sooty as the meat in a smokehouse. But this was only the vestibule; rounding a bend, we entered another cave. Though deeper in the rock than the first, it was lighter, thanks to a number of almost circular, seemingly artificial windows in the thin roof, where once trees had rooted and now the outside world shone in, its colors intensified by the windows; the entire cave seemed irradiated by the summery green of the bushes on its roof and their reflection in the likewise round puddles on the floor. A plank led past the puddles into the background: a dry “chimney corner,” recognizable at a glance by the cast-iron stove, in which the fire burst into life with a roar that drowned out the howling of the wind (so that was why the old man had been picking up wood on the last stretch of the way). The stove was connected by two slanting pipes to a hole in the wall; the thicker one served to evacuate smoke, while the thin one carried rainwater into the reservoir of the stove. Consonant with the picture of a hostel were the wooden table beside the stove, the long bench against the cave wall — whose stalactites were like smooth backrests — and the adjoining sleeping quarters, an alcove floored with a thick layer of foliage intertwined with corn husks and straw, which one might have taken for mere animal litter if not for the carefully folded gray army blankets on top of it; an overhanging rock, this one without windows, made the half-darkened alcove look something like a room.