At home in the village, walking was just a way of going from one place to another as directly as possible, alert to every shortcut, every detour a mistake. Only unhappy, desperate people walked aimlessly. As though in a fit, they would suddenly rush out across the fields, blindly into the woods, through the creeper-clogged ditch, somehow down to the river. When somebody rushed off like that, it was to be feared that he wouldn’t come back alive. When my mother was told of her illness, her first impulse was to run out of the village; we had to lock her up in the house, and she almost tore off the door handle. The sauntering step of the idler and the resolute stride of the hiker were also alien to the villagers, who wouldn’t have dreamed of climbing mountains or stalking game for sport; a hunter always came from somewhere else. You walked to work or to church, with a possible stop at the bar, and you came home; the legs, by and large, were a mere means of locomotion; the body sat stiffly on top of them, and it was only in dancing that its parts worked together. Except in a cripple or an idiot, a conspicuous gait struck the people of Rinkenberg as pretentious; in their Slovene dialect they called it “stirring up wind while walking.”
Thus, walking, too, stirred up wind in the Karst when there was none, and with it all brooding ceased. That great thought, more liberating than anything else in the world—“Friend, you have time”—turned me outward again. And it was having time that taught me my particular gait, a way of walking which, with every rise of the shoulders, every swing of the arms and turn of the head, was designed, not to catch the eye of any particular person, but to carry me deeper into the country (just as sometimes the peculiar gaze of a person or animal can make one look around to see what amazing thing this other may be gazing at, which, to judge by his elated expression, must be something pleasant). One feature of walking in this way is that from time to time the walker himself, involuntarily but quite consciously, turned around, not for fear of a pursuer, but out of pure delight in moving about, the more aimlessly the better, with the certainty of discovering a form behind him, if only a crack in the pavement. Yes, the certainty of finding a way of walking, of being all walker and thus becoming a discoverer, set the Karst apart from the few other free regions I have known. True, the impulse to “get up and go” has proved itself elsewhere, in dried streambeds as on roads leading out of big cities, in bright daylight and (even more effectively) in pitch darkness — but I have never set out for the Karst without the conviction that there I would not only fill my lungs with air but also encounter something new. So firm is my trust in the power of the Karst wind to bring someone who has time for it an archetype, a primordial form, the essence of some thing, that I am not far from speaking of piety; the baptismal wind blows as on the first day, and the walker, caught up in it, still feels himself to be a child of the world. Obviously, he won’t barge ahead like a tourist; he will slacken his pace, turn around in circles, pause, bend down: discoveries are usually to be found below eye level. No need to drive himself; before he knows it, landscape and wind have given him his due. Conscious of having time, I never hurried in the Karst; I ran only when I was getting tired, and then it was a slow run.
But didn’t my finds relate to a time long past, weren’t they the last remnants, leftovers, shards of something irretrievably lost, which no artifice could put together again, and which took on a radiance only in the imagination of a childish finder? Was it not the same with these elementary particles as with the dripstones which in their grotto, in the flickering candlelight, give promise of a treasure, but, once broken off and exposed to the daylight, are nothing more in the hands of the thief than grayish stone potatoes worth less than any plastic glass? No. Because these finds could not be carried away; these were not things you could stuff into your pockets, but rather their prototypes, which impressed themselves upon their discoverer’s inner self by letting him know where, unlike the dripstones, they could flower and bear fruit, telling him that they could be removed to any country whatever, most enduringly to the land of storytelling. Yes, if, in the Karst, nature and the works of men were archaic, they were so in the sense, not of “Once upon a time,” but of a beginning. Just as I’ve never thought “medieval” when looking at a stone roof-gutter but, as never in the presence of a modern building in either country: “Now!” (heavenly thought), so at the sight of a dolina I never thought of the prehistoric moment when the earth suddenly settled, but time and again saw something future rising from the empty bowl, swath by swath, a primal form that merely had to be held fast. Nowhere, up until now, have I found a country which with all its divers components (not excluding a few tractors, factories, and supermarkets) struck me, like the Karst, as a possible model for the future.
One day I got lost — as I often did on purpose, impelled by curiosity, thirst for knowledge — on a pathless steppe interspersed with thickets and loose rock. Before long, I had no idea where I was; there were no detailed maps (apart from secret military ones) of this frontier region. As usual once you take a few steps across country, the wind brought no sign of life from any of the hundred villages, no barking of dogs or children’s screams (which carry the farthest). For hours I struggled on, obstinately, zigzagging around dolina after dolina, which lay fallow, their red-earth bottoms strewn with pale boulders, between which here and there great trees shot up, their tops level with my feet. Here I could speak of wilderness and here I learned that this whole waterless country was an immense desert, merely pretending, by putting forth vegetation, to be fertile, a land in whose gentle breeze many an inexperienced traveler had doubtless died of thirst, possibly hearing to the last the soft sound of flowering ash trees, while — supreme irony — a clear mountain stream may have been flowing not far away. For a long time I had heard no sound of a bird (actually, even on the fringe of the villages, one seldom heard a peep); I hadn’t even seen a lizard or a snake. After struggling through a dense thicket, I found myself hopelessly lost in the waning afternoon, at the edge of an immense dolina, as big as a football stadium, barred at the top by a tall, dense palisade of virgin timber, which I noticed only at the moment when I had forced my way through to it. The dolina seemed uncommonly deep, partly because of the walled terrace ledges that divided the evenly gentle slopes; on every level a different green, varying with the crop grown on it, the most intense green shining from the uncultivated empty ring of ground at the bottom, more magical than the floodlit grass of an Olympic stadium. Of all the dolinas I had seen thus far, only one or two were in use. Here, to my amazement, I was confronted by a whole population. On every one of the terraces from top to bottom, there were small fields or gardens, all with several people working on them. They worked with consummate slowness, there was charm even in the way they bent over or squatted with legs spread. From the whole wide circle arose, softly and evenly, what has remained in my ears as the pervasive sound of the Karst: the sound of hoeing. On the vineyard terrace I saw only standing persons, half hidden by a roof of foliage, tying vine shoots to strikingly crooked posts or spraying them, while in the tiny olive field only hands were visible. On every level I saw at least one tree, on every level a different variety, among them, though it seemed almost inconceivable so far from any running water, such meadow trees as elders and willows (of which I once heard an inhabitant of the Alps say, “They’re no trees, just junk; now take a spruce or an oak, that’s a tree”). I distinguished so many different greens that I could have given each a different name; all of them together, dear Pindar, would have added up to a new Olympian Ode. The last light seemed to gather in the dolina as in a lens, which sharply outlined and magnified the details. This enabled me to notice that no wall was like any other; one consisted of two tiers of stones, the next had a layer of earth between the two, while what looked like a boulder at the edge of the bottom circle was a conical hut, built of stone blocks growing smaller toward the top, with a keystone in the shape of an animal’s skull and a roof gutter, from which a long pipe led down to a rain barrel; the hole in the ground was no accident, it was the entrance to the “casita” and had a lintel the length of an eagle’s wing with a sundial scratched into it.