Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  Gnawing the hangnail on my thumb, I watch as the strong man sinks to his knees, slips his right arm through the corresponding strap of his rucksack, draws himself up with the load angled on his hip, then slips the other strap on. He smiles. He hooks his thumbs behind the straps and takes a few slow steps. Then, after a moment’s pause, he stoops to pick up the tripod as well.

  I wait for Arne, Mikkelsen and Qvigstad to take their pick of the remaining rucksacks. The last one will be for me. Protestations flit across my mind (‘No need to leave the smallest one for me! Oh, come on, don’t overdo the hospitality!’), but there doesn’t seem to be a single English word left in my vocabulary, so I keep quiet.

  I take up the burden assigned to me, aping their gestures. Damn, even heavier than I thought. Bowed down by my rucksack, I follow in their footsteps, initially sinking to my ankles in the mud, then placing my feet gingerly on the soggy slope. My camera and the pocket containing my map, both dangling from my neck, knock against my stomach with each step. Having to jerk my head up to look in the distance makes me feel like a mole or some other creature designed for keeping their eyes to the ground. I can feel the blood swelling in my temples and hammering on the ache in my skull. Having let down my head-net, I survey the landscape through a green haze of mosquito netting.

  Twenty paces already. I am not lagging behind. They are walking as slowly as I am. Feeling the weight of their rucksacks, just like me. No-one speaks.

  Two birds swoop across my path, strenuously flapping their wings as though intent on flustering me.

  How stupid of me not to listen when that girl said her name. Her expression was a mix of levity and melancholy, a bit like certain sonatinas. It is not often I compare a girl to a piece of music, but when I do it is always a girl I am so dazzled by that even if I saw her every day it would be months before I dared to touch her. As if I had to study the music first.

  She could be called Filippine, Renate or Francine. Or Dido – that would be good. My mother’s name is Aglaia. How such an unusual name can sound so distasteful is beyond me. Yes, Dido would do very well.

  I glance at my watch. I can look at my watch any time I want. The straps of the rucksack have rucked up my sleeves in my armpits, so my forearms are half exposed. Crawling with insects. The mosquito oil has long worn off, washed away by sweat.

  It is five to nine. It was a quarter to when we met up with Qvigstad and the strong man. That makes ten whole minutes of trekking. Each step feels as if it will be my last. My watch has a revolving second hand. So I can measure exactly how long it takes to put one foot before the other: two seconds. As for the distance covered – not more than sixty centimetres each time, is my guess. Per minute that is thirty times sixty centimetres. Which is eighteen metres. Sixty times eighteen is … is … nought, six eights are forty-eight, six plus four is ten, which is one-nought-eight-nought. Which is … just over one kilometre per hour!

  We’ll never get there at this rate. It’ll take us a day and a night just to cover the first twenty-five kilometres.

  I notice that Qvigstad, Arne, Mikkelsen and the strong man are now gradually getting ahead. I force my legs to go faster. I was panting before, now I am gasping. I push up the head-net to get more air, and with my next intake of breath a mosquito flies into my mouth. I can feel it at the back of my throat, on my epiglottis … I cough, splutter, try frantically to muster some saliva, gulp.

  I have swallowed it.

  19

  As a famished prisoner prizes every potato, even a sliver of potato peel, for the nutrition it contains, so I now perceive distance as a precious commodity, gradually coming into my possession with each step I take.

  Each step shortens the twenty-five kilometres stretching ahead. Each step is one in the right direction. My mouth and throat are paper-dry from all my panting.

  Much as my head feels it is about to explode, much as I have to strain every muscle to keep my balance despite the load on my back, I am making headway. We all are. It will be some time before we reach our limits.

  To think that people shunted megaliths weighing up to five tonnes over the moors, simply to build burial chambers! How they managed without horses, winches, wheels is a mystery. But it may have taken several generations to assemble twenty or thirty boulders in one place. Building cathedrals was to the Middle Ages what shunting megaliths was to the Stone Age. Levering them forward with the aid of tree trunks, half a metre a day. Which is one hundred and fifty metres a year. One point five kilometres in a decade. How many boulders of a size they considered large enough would there have been lying around the countryside? How big was the radius within which they collected them? Ten kilometres? Twenty? Surely not more. It was a feasible, if lengthy, process. Anything is feasible, provided people aren’t in a hurry, provided they have faith in their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and don’t doubt the necessity of the task at hand – such as building barrows for the dead.

  Cathedrals took even longer to build, and they were just as useless. Barrows are the Stone Age version of cathedrals. What is my cathedral? I am bulding a cathedral of unknown proportions, and by the time it is finished I will be long dead and no-one will ever know of my contribution.

  The slope becomes less soggy as we climb. It also becomes less steep, and after a while there is no gradient at all.

  We unload our rucksacks onto some big rocks. We have been hard at it for twenty minutes. Qvigstad strolls around, swinging a colossal hammer with a handle half a metre long. He steps up to a sugar-white rock and knocks off a corner.

  ‘I’ve chipped one of Mother Earth’s teeth!’ he roars.

  Arne opens his battered camera case and takes out his old Leica. Handling it as if it were a piece of antique porcelain, he raises it to eye level. The camera itself is battered, too, with glints of brass showing through cracks in the black enamel.

  Arne presses the shutter, then says, with a rueful shake of the head:

  ‘Perhaps …’

  From here it looks as if the Vaddasgaissa range begins just over the next hill, but according to the map we have at least another fifteen kilometres to go.

  The celluloid window in my map pocket is too scratched to be of any use in this light. The transparency of these windows never lasts beyond the first trip. I pull out the map and study the route with my magnifying glass.

  I try to count how many rivers we have yet to cross. There seem to be ten of them, all big. Small ones are not marked on the map. Nor are the rises and falls indicated in any detail: variations of less than thirty metres are ignored. Which is to be expected. One centimetre on the map represents one kilometre in reality.

  As I fold away my map, I see Mikkelsen offering Qvigstad a drink of water. Qvigstad takes a swig and passes the bottle to Arne. Arne drinks and passes it to me. My mouth and throat feel like pumice as I gulp the water down. We dig little graves for our cigarettes with our heels, then hoist our rucksacks. We are off again, downhill this time.

  Going downhill brings fears about my knees giving way, but they are proving remarkably trustworthy. The complexity of the human knee! With each step the combined weight of torso, rucksack and thighs slams on the bundle of slithery ligaments and cartilage at the head of the tibia known as the knee joint. No tearing, no dislocation. Imagine if a grain of sand got in! Even the tiniest particle would cause havoc. Where did I hear about rock-hard crystals of ureum forming in the joints of people with arthritis, or was it rheumatism? Oh, Father, what agony! This pain is so excruciating that it attacks the very organ we use to overcome it!

  Going downhill means gearing the entire body to shock absorption. The resilience of the meniscal cartilage. The strength of the tendons: beyond belief if you know how easy it is to bend a wire until it breaks. What a piece of work is man! But what an ordeal to put your own piece of work to this test!

  If you tip your chair back often enough the legs will break. I even managed to break a metal chair that way once.

  Isn’t the sheer,
incomprehensible toughness of the human body enough to make you despair of this torture ever coming to an end?

  Downhill. Responding willingly to the pull of gravity, but it’s hardly a question of willing, because I can’t stop.

  The carpet of moss thickens, then come the dwarf beeches with their dark green leathery leaves, and later still the polar willows with their asses’ ears of pale green felt. The branches set about untying my shoelaces.

  A stretch of spongy peat, which I sink into. Better to step on stones, but they are all round. Pools of black water, with nothing growing in it. Bigger and bigger pools, with black earth in between.

  The river. Shallow. Hardly any current. Mikkelsen, Qvigstad and Arne stop to scoop water into their plastic cups. I haven’t got my cup to hand. Should I take off the rucksack to hunt for it? My mouth is so parched that I can’t shut it any more – what, already? Arne turns round and passes me his plastic cup.

  I go up on my toes where the water is less shallow, but by the time I reach the far side both my feet are wet and cold.

  Far side … pools, marshes. More of those grass-covered hummocks with a core of ice which are known by the Icelandic name of thufur. More polar willows, then a stretch of dwarf beeches petering out into just moss and stones. The slope steepens. Insects patter on my canvas hat like hailstones. The low sun sets alight the clouds of mosquitoes circling the heads of my four companions.

  We have done fifteen minutes of climbing. How much more of this slope is there? How steep is it? Steep enough for it to be impossible for me to stand up straight without the weight of my rucksack pulling me over backwards.

  I plod on, putting one foot ahead of the other. Each step counts. A miracle, wouldn’t you say? One step. Just one step and the distance to the top is less than it was before. Step, step, merely lifting the foot and bringing it down slightly further on. Couldn’t be simpler. Hardly more strenuous than standing still, what with the heavy load on my back. Step. Between the stones there is moss. Also bare ground. Sand and pale grit, an occasional bleached bone or vertebra. No sign of anyone having been here before. But then we too have been covering our tracks.

  My watch tells me it’s nine thirty-five. We’ve been going for nearly an hour. An hour already! And I can easily keep it up for another hour, two hours, three, as long as I like. It’s bad, but it’s not getting worse. Where’s my headache? Gone, since I haven’t given it a thought.

  The top.

  When we take a rest the strong man doesn’t even bother to take off his rucksack. He looks round for a stone of exactly the right height for his rucksack to fit on top, and then leans back, holding the collapsed tripod like a spear in his crossed arms.

  I spread my map on the ground and take out my compass. I try to align the map along a north– south axis, using the compass. But the ground is uneven, and the compass needs to be horizontal for the needle to rotate freely. My hand is trembling too much for me to keep the instrument steady on my palm. Holding the map with the other hand doesn’t help. The sharp stones dig into my knees as I lean forward.

  ‘What are you looking for? North?’

  Arne squats down beside me. He repositions the map.

  ‘There you are,’ he says.

  Now I can see what is on the end of the frayed cord round his neck. It’s a plastic boy-scout compass. He holds it in his left hand. As it is a fluid compass, it always points roughly north, whichever way it is held.

  ‘This is where we are now, isn’t it?’ I ask, indicating a spot on the map.

  ‘Oh no,’ Arne says. ‘Not there. We’re only here.’

  He stabs a chewed yellow pencil stub at a point three centimetres further down. Three whole kilometres.

  I focus on the map and the landscape by turns, trying to match the one with the other. I raise one knee, but that only increases the weight bearing down on the other and hence the pain. I sit down, but find I can’t bend over far enough to read the map. Damn! I’m not in good shape today. What will they think? I don’t want to be a laughing stock. I WILL NOT BE LAUGHED AT.

  They must speak highly of me when my back is turned! I must be just as capable as they are, regardless of my in-experience – more capable, in fact.

  20

  Black shadows of the Vaddasgaissa streak southwards across the plain. Beyond the shadows the ground is pale green, grass green, bottle green, British racing green, brown. Small lakes and winding streams reflect the blues and pinks of the sky in shades of anodised aluminium.

  All the pools and lakes are linked by streams. Not a single hole remotely suggestive of a meteor crater. I have never actually seen a meteor crater, just pictures in books. If I came across one I might not even recognise it.

  But the man who first thought of attributing a hole in the earth’s crust to the impact of a sizeable meteor? Who was he? When and where did he make his discovery? What was his name?

  A deep loathing of textbooks engulfs me. Don’t textbooks describe everything as if everyone has always known that that’s the way they were? Where does that leave all the human effort, doubt and despair that had to be endured before a particular conclusion could be reached? Ninety-nine out of a hundred discoveries are seen as foregone conclusions, or else as the work of legendary figures, nameless supermen to whom the failures or semi-failures of their predecessors simply did not matter. There is no glory in geology. Just think: all those writers getting their names and photographs in the paper thanks to my mother’s weekly articles, whereas I can’t come up with the name of a single expert on meteor craters. Yet there must have been hundreds. It’s not just me who’s so ignorant, not even Sibbelee would be able to give you names. Nobody can, apart from a few scholars specialising in the history of science. Nobody reads what they write either, except for the tiny number of people who happen to have taken an interest in the history of science instead of in umpteen other subjects that are no less fascinating. But the information never runs to more than a name or two, possibly a few dates, and that’s it. Rarely if ever do scientists spend their days in the company of people who could write their biographies.

  How happy I would be to find just one little stone of cosmic provenance. A meteorite. I vow that no detail of the wildernesses roamed by me will escape my notice. But these mountains offer nothing but rubble.

  I am falling behind again. Not by much, but I am finding it harder and harder to keep my head up. Almost doubled over now, I try to make my legs go faster.

  What if she were called Dido. Where did I get that name from? Dido, Queen of Carthage, fell in love with Aeneas, the hero who fled, carrying his father on his back. A sight heavier than my rucksack.

  Her name certainly isn’t Dido. But I can call her that anyway. I don’t know her address, not even her surname. Too late to ask Eva. I won’t be writing to anyone at all during the next couple of weeks.

  My purpose here is to find something. Something that will cause a sensation. The rest is irrelevant. Any fool of a tourist can send postcards. I have other priorities. Still, there are plenty of things everyone else is capable of doing. But not me. Not me …

  Yet another river. A wide one. It gets wider and wider as I approach. The strong man is already on the other side, gesturing, calling out. Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are perched on different stones in the rushing water, laughing. They look as if they’re playing tag, ducking this way and that as they spring from one stepping stone to the next.

  The river foams like a waterfall. The bank is so soggy that I am almost knee-deep in mud. I stand still.

  The stone closest to me is occupied by Arne. How did he get there? It is quite pointed, and one-and-a-half metres out from the riverbank. He can’t just have stepped onto it, he must have taken a running jump. But how, on such muddy ground?

  Looking further away I see Mikkelsen flexing his knees. He gives a shout, flies through the air flailing his arms and lands on the stone already occupied by Qvigstad. They grab hold of each other, teeter, regain their balance. Then, one after the
other, they stride across the remaining stepping stones as if they’re wearing seven-league boots. They catch up with the strong man, who has already started walking.

  I am still at the water’s edge, scanning the river upstream and down, but can’t see any stones closer to the bank. Arne reaches out to me.

  ‘Jump,’ he says. ‘Draw up your knees as much as possible.’

  Jump! My feet are sinking deeper and deeper in the mud. Bracing for push-off will only make me shoot into the ground like a bomb. Arne’s hand is too far away for me to catch hold of it. I can’t very well keep him waiting, though. False step, losing my balance, being fished out of the water soaking wet, watch ruined, camera full of water, rucksack with food – not just my own food! – sopping wet, down sleeping bag waterlogged. I can’t remain standing here and I can’t walk away either. What a nuisance it’ll be for the others if I arrive at the other side soaked to the skin. Not that they’ll laugh at me, they’re too polite.

  I am unafraid. There is nothing to be afraid of for someone who has no choice, someone with only one thing left to do: the impossible! I lunge forward, grope for Arne’s hand – miss it, fall flat onto the stone he’s standing on, face smashed, waist-deep in water, ankle fractured. I jump. It’s as if Arne and I exchange a fleeting handshake. My right foot touches down, the rubber sole has excellent grip, the left foot follows, I draw myself up and there I am, standing next to Arne on a pedestal in the rushing water. He bends over. Scoops water with his cup, then offers it to me.

  ‘Let me take your camera and that map pocket.’

  ‘Why? They’re not heavy.’

  ‘Just let me take them, then they won’t get wet in case you slip.’

  He lifts the straps off my neck and passes them over his head. Then, taking a big stride, he brings his foot down on the next stone and swings the other leg right over to the stone after that and so on to the other side. Next thing I know I am doing the same. Seven huge strides across the frothing current.