“What are they holding in their hands, umbrellas?” she asked, but very softly, when the carriage was no more than fifty paces from the mountaineers.
“Yes, that’s what it looks like,” he muttered. “Where did they get those umbrellas?”
At last the carriage passed the mountaineers, who stared after it. Bessian turned his head, as if to make sure that the things they had in their hands really were old umbrellas with broken struts and ragged cloth.
“I’ve never seen mountaineers carrying brollies,” he murmured. Diana was surprised too, but she took care not to mention it, so as not to make him angry.
When further on they saw another group of mountaineers, two of whom were laden with sacks, Diana pretended not to see them. Bessian looked at them for a while.
“Corn,” he said at last, but Diana did not answer. Again she leaned her head upon his shoulder, and again her hair began to slide gently to and fro with the movement of the carriage.
Now it was he who watched the road attentively. As for her, she tried to turn her thoughts to more pleasant things. After all, it was no great misfortune if a legendary mountaineer heaved a sack of corn onto his back, or carried a dilapidated umbrella against the rain. Had she not seen more than one man from the mountains, in the city streets at the end of autumn, with an axe over his shoulder, and crying out plaintively, “Any wood to cut?”, a cry that was more like the cry of a night bird. But Bessian had told her that those people were not representative of the mountain country. Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue. The real mountaineers are up there, on the Rrafsh, he had said to her one night, lifting his arms towards the celestial heights beyond the horizon, as if the Rrafsh were somewhere in the sky rather than on earth.
Now, pressed against the window, he never turned his eyes from the desolate landscape, for fear that his wife might ask: these poor wayfarers, with their skeletal umbrellas in hand, or their backs bent under a sack of corn, are these the legendary mountain stalwarts of whom you have told me so much? But Diana, even if she were to lose all her illusions, would never ask him that question.
Leaning against him, her eyes closing now and then with the jolting of the carriage, as if to ward off the sadness that the barren scene aroused in her, she thought in a fragmentary way about the days when they were first acquainted and the early weeks of their engagement. The chestnut trees lining the boulevard, café doors, the glitter of rings as they embraced, park benches strewn with autumn leaves, and dozens of other such memories — all those things she poured out upon the endless waste, in the hope that those images might in some sort people the void. But the wasteland did not change. Its wet nakedness was ready to engulf in a moment not just her own store of happiness but perhaps the heaped-up joy of whole generations. She herself had never seen such a country. The mountains that loomed above her were well named “the Accursed Mountains.”
She was pulled out of her dozing state by a movement of his shoulder, and then by his voice, which had a tender note.
“Diana, look. A church.”
She drew near the glass pane and caught sight of the cross that surmounted the stone belfry. The church rose up from a rocky height, and since the road descended very steeply, or perhaps because of the grey background of the sky, the black cross seemed to rise up and sway threateningly among the clouds. The church was still far off, but as they drew closer, they could make out the bell and its bronze shimmer spreading abroad like a smile beneath that black cross-shaped menace.
“How beautiful!” Diana exclaimed.
Bessian nodded, but did not speak. The dark shadow of the cross and the pleasant gleam of the bell soared aloft in every direction and must have been visible, one and inseparable, for miles around.
“Oh, look. There are the kullas of the mountains,” he said.
With difficulty, she turned her eyes from the church to look for the high stone dwellings.
“Where are they?”
“Look up there on that slope,” he said, pointing. “And there, there’s another farther on, on that other hill.”
“Ah, yes!”
Suddenly he came to life, and his eyes began to search the horizon avidly.
“Mountaineers,” he said, his hand stretched out towards the little window in front.
The mountaineers were coming towards them, but they were still a long way off and you could hardly see them.
“There must be a big village somewhere near.”
The carriage drew nearer to them, and Diana guessed at her husband’s sense of strain.
“They have rifles slung on their shoulders,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, relieved, not taking his eyes from the window. He was looking for something else. The mountaineers were now no more than twenty paces away.
“There,” he called out at last, seizing Diana by the shoulder. “You see the black ribbon on his right sleeve. Do you see?”
“Yes, yes,” she said.
“There’s another mark of death. And there’s another.”
Excitement made his breathing irregular.
“How terrible!” The words had escaped her.
“What?”
“I meant to say that it’s beautiful and terrible at the same time.”
“Yes, it’s true. It’s tragically beautiful, or wonderfully tragic, if you will.”
He turned towards her, suddenly, with an odd light in his eye, as if to say: Admit it. You never believed all this. As it happened, she had never mentioned any such doubt.
The carriage had left the mountaineers behind, and Bessian, his face lit with a smile now, had thrown himself back in his seat.
“We are entering the shadow-land,” he said, as if talking to himself, “the place where the laws of death prevail over the laws of life.”
“But how does one tell the difference between those whose duty it is to avenge a killing and those from whom vengeance is sought?” she asked. “The black ribbon is the same for everyone, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s the same. The mark of death is exactly the same for those who mean to kill and those who are being hunted.”
“How horrible,” she said.
“In no other country in the world can one see people on the road who bear the mark of death, like trees marked for felling.”
She looked at him kindly. Bessian’s eyes shone with the deep brilliance that bursts out after unbearable waiting. Now, those other mountain folk, with their ridiculous ramshackle umbrellas, their prosaic sacks of corn on their backs, seemed never to have been.
“Look, there are still some more of them,” he said.
This time she was the one who first saw the black ribbon on the sleeve of one among them.
“Yes, now I can say that we are well within death’s kingdom,” Bessian said, never turning his eyes from the window. Outside, the rain was still falling, a fine rain, as if diluted with mist.
Diana started to smile.
“Yes,” he said, “we have entered death’s kingdom like Ulysses, with this difference — Ulysses had to descend in order to reach it, but we must climb.”
She listened, looking at him still. He had leaned his forehead against the glass that was clouded over by their breath. Beyond it, the world seemed transformed.
“They wander these roads with that black ribbon on their sleeves like ghosts in the mist,” he said.
She listened, but she did not speak. How many times, before they had started out, had he talked about these things, but now his words had a different sound. Behind them, like a film scene behind the subtitles, the landscape looked even more somber. She wanted to ask him if they would also meet on the roads men whose heads were muffled up in their shrouds, whom he had mentioned once, but something kept her from asking. Perhaps it was simply fear that just asking the question would provoke the apparition.