Sometimes he wondered whether he was safe, but when there are no visible boundaries between one state and another-no passport examination or customs house-danger just seems to go on, travelling with you, lifting its heavy feet in the same way as you do. There seemed to be so little progress: the path would rise steeply, perhaps five hundred feet, and fall again, dogged with mud. Once it took an enormous hairpin bend, so that after three hours they had returned to a point opposite their starting-place, less than a hundred yards away.
At sunset on the second day they came out onto a wide plateau covered with short grass: an odd grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky, leaning at different angles-some as high as twenty feet, some not much more than eight. They were like trees that had been left to seed. The priest stopped and stared at them: they were the first Christian symbols he had seen for more than five years publicly exposed-if you could call this empty plateau in the mountains a public place. No priest could have been concerned in the strange rough group; it was the work of Indians and had nothing in common with the tidy vestments of the Mass and the elaborately worked out symbols of the liturgy. It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith-to the night when the graves opened and the dead walked. There was a movement behind him and he turned.
The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated [146] pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith-faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?
Vamos, the priest said, but the woman scraped the sugar with her sharp front teeth, paying no attention. He looked up at the sky and saw the evening star blotted out by black clouds. Vamos. There was no shelter anywhere on this plateau.
The woman never stirred: the broken snub-nosed face between the black plaits was completely passive: it was as if she had fulfilled her duty and could now take up her everlasting rest. The priest suddenly shivered: the ache which had pressed like a stiff hat-rim across his forehead all day dug deeper in. He thought: I have to get to shelter-a man's first duty is to himself-even the Church taught that, in a way. The whole sky was blackening: the crosses stuck up like dry and ugly cacti: he made off to the edge of the plateau. Once, before the path led down, he looked back-the woman was still biting at the lump of sugar, and he remembered that it was all the food they had.
The way was very steep-so steep he had to turn and go down backwards: on either side trees grew perpendicularly out of the grey rock, and five hundred feet below the path climbed up again. He began to sweat, and he had an appalling thirst: when the rain came it was at first a kind of relief. He stayed where he was, hunched back against a boulder-there was no shelter before he reached the bottom of the barranca, and it hardly seemed worth while to make that effort. He was shivering now more or less continuously, and the ache seemed no longer inside his head-it was something outside, almost anything, a noise, a thought, a smell. The senses were jumbled [147] up together. At one moment the ache was like a tiresome voice explaining to him that he had taken the wrong path: he remembered a map he had once seen of the two adjoining states. The state from which he was escaping was peppered with villages-in the hot marshy land people bred as readily as mosquitoes, but in the next state-in the north-west corner-there was hardly anything but blank white paper. You're on the blank paper now, the ache told him. But there's a path, he argued wearily. Oh, a path, the ache said, a path may take you fifty miles before it reaches anywhere at alclass="underline" you know you won't last that distance. There's just white paper all around.
At another time the ache was a face. He became convinced that the American was watching him-he had a skin all over spots like a newspaper photograph. Apparently he had followed them all the way because he wanted to kill the mother as well as the child: he was sentimental that way. It was necessary to do something: the rain was like a curtain behind which almost anything might happen. He thought: I shouldn't have left her alone like that, God forgive me. I have no responsibility; what can you expect of a whisky priest? And he struggled to his feet and began to climb back towards the plateau. He was tormented by ideas: it wasn't t only the woman: he was responsible for the American as welclass="underline" the two faces-his own and the gunman's-were hanging together on the police-station wall, as if they were brothers in a family portrait gallery. You didn't put temptation in a brother's way.
Shivering and sweating and soaked with rain he came up over the edge of the plateau. There was nobody there-a dead child was not somebody, just a useless object abandoned at the foot of one of the crosses: the mother had gone home. She had done what she wanted to do. The surprise lifted him, as it were, out of his fever before it dropped him back again. A small lump of sugar-all that was left-lay by the child's mouth-in case a miracle should still happen or for the spirit to eat? The priest bent down with an obscure sense of shame and took it: the dead child couldn't growl back at him like a broken dog: but who was he to disbelieve in miracles? He hesitated, while the rain poured down: then he put the sugar in his mouth. If God chose to give back life, couldn't He give food as well?
[148] Immediately he began to eat, the fever returned: the sugar stuck in his throat: he felt an appalling thirst. Crouching down he tried to lick some water from the uneven ground: he even sucked at his soaked trousers. The child lay under the streaming rain like a dark heap of cattle dung. The priest moved away again, back to the edge of the plateau and down the barranca side: it was loneliness he felt now-even the face had gone; he was moving alone across that blank white sheet, going deeper every moment into the abandoned land.
Somewhere, in some direction, there were towns, of course: go far enough and you reached the coast, the Pacific, the railway track to Guatemala: there were roads there and motorcars. He hadn't seen a railway train for ten years. He could imagine the black line following the coast along the map, and he could see the fifty, hundred miles of unknown country. That was where he was: he had escaped too completely from men. Nature would kill him now.
All the same, he went on: there was no point in going back towards the deserted village, the banana station with its dying mongrel and its shoe-horn. There was nothing you could do except put one foot forward and then the other: scrambling down and then scrambling up: from the top of the barranca, when the rain passed on, there was nothing to see except a huge scrumpled land, forest and mountain, with the grey wet veil moving over. He looked once and never looked again. It was too like watching despair.