“Let’s go,” Clarke said. Gauna came up, his eyes still bleary.
The Indian again:
“Far be it from me to give you advice, but I’d just like to mention that it seems one of your party is still asleep.”
“Mister Gauna?” said Clarke, somewhat put out at what he considered an unnecessary dig at his tracker’s continuing breathing problems. “Don’t worry about him. I don’t think he’s sleepwalking.”
“Right. I beg your pardon,” said the Indian.
“Are you feeling all right, Gauna?” Clarke asked him, to draw the matter to a close.
“Perfectly fine.”
“Just a moment,” the Indian interjected, pointing to the gaucho. “Is this Gauna?”
“Who else could he be?” Clarke answered, by now exasperated.
“What’s his name then?”
The Englishman followed the direction of the savage’s gaze, and was not a little surprised to see none other than Carlos Alzaga Prior sleeping peacefully at his feet.
“Of course, Carlos!” he exclaimed. “I’d completely forgotten him. Just imagine. If you hadn’t pointed him out, I would probably have left him here. I don’t know where I’ve put my head today.” He bent down to wake the youth up, but stopped halfway. “Look how he’s sleeping. The sleep of the innocent. Isn’t it a shame to wake him?”
“A real shame,” agreed Gauna.
Clarke shook Carlos. He pulled his boots on sulkily.
“These gentlemen,” Clarke told him, “have invited us to take breakfast in their tents, which just happen to be nearby.”
“They are not tents,” the Indian corrected him, “but we do hope our food will be to your liking.”
“Well then, let’s be off.”
The savages asked them to follow. They walked a short way into the whiteness, and Clarke realized that the fog was not solid, but occurred in pockets. They climbed up among the rocks, not far, but probably just enough: it seemed that at any moment they must reach the ceiling of mist, but instead it appeared to climb with them. Suddenly, without any transition, they were walking in an interior. It was obvious they had entered a cave. As they were still surrounded by mist for a while, their eyesight had time to grow accustomed to the new surroundings.
Pleased with the surprise he had given them, the Indian, after nudging the companion he was walking alongside (the third Indian was behind, next to Gauna, at whom for some unknown reason he was staring with open admiration), turned and said:
“We live in here.”
“How incredible!” exclaimed Clarke.
“You can have some beer and cakes as soon as we get there.”
“That’s all right, I’m not particularly hungry.”
“Can you see?”
“More or less.”
“We’ll soon have torches.”
Sure enough, a little further on, where the cave became narrower and really dark, the Indian took some small torches from the wall and proceeded to light them. Each of the three Indians held one and positioned themselves alongside the visitors, to shine it down at the floor for them. The ground was of a whitish stone, and was worn quite smooth by the tread of bare feet. It soon began to tilt downward, so that they had to take more care of how they walked. They turned bends, went down rough-hewn steps, sometimes even had to jump. Up ahead and behind them, everything was dark. Clarke had viewed the excursion as something perfectly natural, and far from worrying him, the unexpected turn (or rather descent) events were taking seemed to him delightful. Part of this delight came from the cruel satisfaction of knowing that Gauna must be furious. This reminded him of the tale the gaucho had told him the previous day. He had to admit it was a very solid and plausible story, but that was entirely due to the fact that it included all (or nearly all) the details of what had happened in reality; by the same token, there must be other stories which did the same, even though they were completely different. Everything that happened, isolated and observed by an interpretative judgment, or even simply by the imagination, became an element that could then be combined with any number of others. Personal invention was responsible for creating the overall structure, for seeing to it that these elements formed unities. Of course, Clarke was not going to put himself to so much trouble. . but he could swear, a priori, that apart from Gauna’s version, there must be an endless number of other possible stories. Moreover, between one story and another, even one that was really told and another that remained virtual, hidden and unborn in an indolent fantasy, there was not a gap but a continuum. And the existence of such a continuum, which at that moment appeared to Clarke as an undeniable truth, created a natural multiplicity, of which Gauna’s story was shown to be merely one more example. But Clarke had no intention of telling Gauna this, because that would be to run the risk of no longer counting on his company. To Gauna, his story was not simply one among many, but the only one.
Even though they were going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, they could still feel currents of air, and from time to time crossed chambers with lofty ceilings. Then all of a sudden a light shone ahead of them. “We’re almost there,” their Indian guide said. Turning to his companion who was still admiring Gauna, he told him: “Llanquén, go and tell Pillán.”
“OK,” Llanquén said, and scuttled off.
“Welcome to our humble abode, Gauna, Carlos, and Mister. .”
“Clarke,” said the Englishman, who had not previously introduced himself
“Equimoxis, at your service.”
“What an odd name.”
“My mother had a priest name me: it was taken from a book found in an ox-cart wreck in the Andes many years ago. The book was called Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb.”
“I know it. By Chateaubriand.”
They had reached the end of the passageway; in front of them opened a vast chamber, made to seem all the larger for not being completely lit; the hundred or so fires that were burning produced as much effect as a match struck in a cathedral. There was no smoke, a sure sign there must be fissures in the roof of the cave which provided air. The clear, dark atmosphere, like that of a summer night, the cool temperature, the silence free even of the sounds of birds or insects, offered them a welcome that was far more eloquent than Equimoxis’s words.
“An underground city!” Carlos Alzaga Prior exclaimed in astonishment. “I never thought life would be so generous as to reward me with such an amazing discovery!”
“My dear young friend,” Equimoxis told him with a paternal smile, “it’s not a city since, as you can see, there isn’t a single house. It’s an interior-exterior. And as for discovering us, I fear you aren’t the first, far from it. Only last week, to go back no further, we had a visit from one of Rosas’s officers.”
They had set out on a stone path — or rather, they followed a line across the stone that they would have crossed anyway, toward a group of fires clustered together more closely than the others. A small party of Indians came to greet them. The Indians were naked (they must only wear clothes to go outside); a tall, white-skinned individual with fierce features stepped forward. This was their leader, Pillán.
“It’s an honor to have you with us. Which one of you suffers from asthma?”
“I do,” grunted Gauna, who hated any mention of his illness.
“Come over to the big fire; my wives are expecting you. I had a special preparation made up for you, from eucalyptus seeds, that’ll ease the problem in no time.”
Having done his duty in this way, Pillán addressed himself formally to Clarke, squinting as he did so.
“Words fail me. . ”
“Think nothing of it! We were in the area, and at a loose end.
. .”
“Mister. . Clarke, isn’t it? Your name sounds English.”
“I am English.”
“And what has brought you so remarkably far from your homeland?”
“Studies, nothing more.”
“Historical studies?”
“Natural history.”
“Botany? Zoology?”
“The second rather than the first.”
“Then I must show you the little dogs we keep. But after breakfast, if you’ll do me the honor of accompanying me.”
They went over to the fires. These Indians had few possessions. Little more than blankets and clothing carefully folded on the stones, and some very artistic pots, all of them out on display, nothing kept in trunks or bags. As is the case with natural and fortunate peoples, they themselves were their only riches. Except that, although for the moment they seemed relaxed and contented, they bore signs of not always having been so. Their bodies were crisscrossed with great weals, scars that had turned pink and scarlet due to the lack of sunlight. Their chieftain was the worst in this respect, his skin offering a veritable showcase of knife cuts. The raised area next to the fire where Pillán brought the Englishman and Carlos was occupied entirely by men. The women were further off: plump, attractive creatures whose aggressively indigenous features contrasted with their white, barely ocher, skins. Apart from those who were fanning the concoction designed to help Gauna’s breathing — which seemed to be doing him a world of good — the other women stood idly by. Clarke surmised that the Indians liked an easy life. He could tell simply by the way they moved. Not that they moved all that much, and besides, who could tell what was going on in the more distant chambers? There must have been about two hundred Indians sitting or lying about around fires that gave off a brilliant light but little heat (which was unnecessary anyway). The atmosphere was one of a calm evening get-together after a day’s hunting or traveling, a reunion that was drawing to an end as everyone considered