It has already been noted that, to reach a latitude nearly equivalent to our starting point, we had to travel four days, which under normal circumstances would have been a quarter of our journey. And so, as the fifth day dawned, we started westward, determined, searching for the dry land that would allow us to go south. Within hours, we advanced into the flattest, emptiest, most wretched part of the plain. A southerly wind, frigid and persistent despite the limpid sky — not a single cloud in sight — pummeled us across our left flank as we made our way inland, shaking the dried grasses along the ground, winter-thinned and gray. We traveled all day, bearing away from the water into high desert, and when we camped at dusk under a low sun — enormous, round, and red, almost touching the horizon’s edge, accentuating contours with a brilliant red halo — I had the impression, more sad than terrifying, that we had arrived at the very heart of isolation. Above the lowlands slipping quickly into the night, it seemed to me, for a few moments, that we were the only living things to writhe beneath that crushing and disdainful alien sun. I probed all along the circular horizon with my gaze, detecting no other motion but the trembling inclinations of the wind-whipped grass, no sound but the whistling of that icy blast from the south. And though I knew the desert swarmed with life, not just animal but solitary, nomadic human life, it was the inhuman wind in that landscape that made me shudder. Never, not before or after that journey, have I received, as if I were ruler of the barren land, the enormous red sun and, some hours later, the overwhelming stars, such clear tidings about the true state of all things growing, creeping, fluttering, pulsating, and bleeding, twitching in grotesque contortions, within the fiery engine that, for some reason, chance had placed in motion. We lit a modest fire, as brush was scarce in those parts, and, after we ate, I got into bed partly-dressed to ward off the cold and, before falling asleep, read a few pages of Virgil by candlelight.
For leagues and leagues, in every one of its parts, the desert remains identical. Only the light changes: The sun recurs, rising in the east, climbs slow and regular to its zenith and then, with the same ritual precision with which it has reached the apex of the sky, descends to the west and, finally, having grown enormous and red, gradually fading and cooling, flaring with a brightness perhaps familiar in infinite space but foreign here below, then sinks to the horizon and disappears, covering everything with night’s viscous blackness until, a few hours later, it reappears in the east. Were it not for the changing light and color of that perpetual turning, a rider crossing the plain would think himself to be always riding in the same point in space, in a futile, slightly oneiric sham of motion. (On cloudy days, that illusion is perfect and a little unsettling.) The rhythmic sounds of displacement — in cart, in carriage, on postal coach or horse, repeating and identical for long stretches, despite the regularity, if not the absence, of the terrain’s features — seem also to infinitely repeat the same moment, as if time’s colorless ribbon, stuck in the groove of the wheel (or the who-knows-what that displaces it) shimmers motionless in place, suspended and unable to rest because of its essence of pure change. Such monotony numbs. As a rider moves forward, things might often happen that are specific to a place, but they come to adapt themselves to that illusion of repetition; if at first they succeed in attracting the traveler’s gaze and even his curiosity, past a certain point they become more than familiar and float, phantomlike, far outside experience, and, at times, even beyond knowledge. The life that swarms among the tall, even grasses, for example, pulled out of their quiet by the passing of a cart or horseman, that diverse and vibrant life that could occupy a naturalist’s whole existence — the traveler with no other concern but to leave behind those poor, abandoned fields as soon as possible might find his interest awakened at its first appearance, but after a few hours it blends into the most uniform monotony. If a hare leaps into his path, his eye will always capture the same image of the jump, and he will always see the short-tailed hindquarters a little more sharply than the rest, springing up, while he will just make out the tips of the ears in a flash as the head dives into the grass. In the case of partridges, it will always be a pair, plumage neither gray nor green nor blue, and with a metallic sheen, that comes flying side by side, male and female, almost level with the grasses, to disappear into them again and take up their short, slow flight on a light breeze a few meters away. League after league, the same caracara will appear, wheeling over the same skeleton, and the same wild horses on the same winter migration will graze in herds of fifteen or twenty, tiny and docile, along the horizon. A peculiarity in the scenery that suddenly appears, introducing diversity, repeats itself over the leagues and ultimately there is nothing but the same field as in the beginning, a field whose novelty fades almost at once. Like the sea, the plain varies only at its edge; its interior is like an undifferentiated nucleus. Barren and measureless, when it produces some imperfection in itself, that imperfection always gives the illusion (or the perhaps the true impression) that it is the same one, again and again. When something out of the ordinary happens, its passing is so intense and vivid that, whether brief or lasting, its evidence will always seem too much, and will trouble us.
Thirty years later, when I recall that trip on rainy nights in Rennes, I often think: No one in the world knows what loneliness, what silence is, but me. One morning, ten or so days after departure, I broke off from the convoy with Osuna and rode about an hour to explore the surroundings on the pretext of visiting some ranch, which, at any rate, we never found, and to this day I suspect was purely imaginary, and that the real cause for our excursion was Osuna’s growing fear that, any day now, we would come face to face with Chief Josesito. It was not the loss of life he feared, but rather his reputation as a guide; as his task consisted of bringing us safely to our destination, he too would find himself vulnerable if he failed. It was near ten in the morning, and as the south wind had died down and not a cloud appeared to block the sunlight from warming the earth, despite how recently the first days of August had passed, a herald of spring was already drifting in the air. The brightness grew so quickly in the clear morning that Osuna and I seemed to be galloping not to somewhere on the horizon, which appeared motionless and always set in place, but to the impossible point in time where the noon hour shone, flaming and fixed. At the edge of a lake, we paused to let the horses drink and I saw that, due to spring’s premature beginning and the terrain’s favorable saturation, a new flower was beginning to sprout. In order to observe it, that I might discuss my findings with Dr. Weiss later on, I proposed to Osuna, if he promised not to be long, that I would wait for him by the lake while he finished exploring the surroundings. Osuna was flattered by the interest that spot awakened in me as if he were its proprietor, accepting my suggestion immediately, and with his habitual bent for practical matters that, to one who did not know him as well as I, might have concealed what tugged at him internally, flew straight into a gallop southeast. He went clear and deep into the morning, and his green-and-red-striped poncho flowed about his rigid torso, angled back somewhat, shrinking by disjointed leaps as if he were being compressed, and when he’d gone far enough that hoof-beats could not be heard, the motion of the gallop — without the accompanying sonic consequence to grant it intelligible sense — became an unreal caper, almost impetuous, like that of an exaggeratedly loose-jointed paper doll manipulated via an invisible thread, tossing about silently in the air until it collapses to the ground, undone. Osuna and his horse, still distinct from each other only because my memory persists in saying so, after that clear compression by successive leaps, became so small that before the horizon swallowed them up, all at once, with no transition, and disappeared, and no matter how the eye went searching for them just over the horizon, there, in the dark and insignificant strip of land under the open blue sky, endless and even, like a luminous abyss, it could not catch sight of them again. Although the mind presumed that they remained, it could discern no indication, no sign, no consequence of their presence or their passage.