The Great Wall of China

by Franz Kafka

  But if that is the case, why do I hesitate, why do I dread the thought of the intruder more than the possibility that I may never see my burrow again? Well, luckily this is an impossibility; there is really no need for me to persuade myself by my reflections of what the burrow means to me; I and the burrow belong so indissolubly together that I could calmly settle down here, calmly despite all my anxiety; I do not need to try and force myself to open the entrance in the teeth of my scruples; it would be quite enough if I waited passively, for in the long run nothing can keep us apart, and somehow I shall quite certainly get down inside again. But on the other hand how much time may pass before then, and how much may happen in that time, up here no less than down below? And it lies with me alone to cut short that interval and do what is necessary at once.

  And so, by now too tired to be capable of thought, with hanging head, trembling legs, half asleep, more groping than walking, I approach the entrance, slowly raise the moss, slowly climb down, leaving, in my abstracted state, the opening uncovered for a needlessly long time; then I remember what I have failed to do, climb out again to repair the omission – but what, pray, am I climbing out for? I am just supposed to be closing the moss cover, very well, so I climb down once again, and this time I do at last draw the moss cover across. It is only in this state, exclusively in this state, that I can carry out this operation. So then I lie there beneath the moss, on top of my collected spoils, encompassed by blood and flesh juices, and could begin to sleep my longed-for sleep. Nothing disturbs me, no one has followed me, above the moss everything seems, so far at least, to be quiet, and even if all were not quiet I do not think I could stop now for further observations; I have changed my place, I have come out of the upper world into my burrow, and I feel its effect at once. It is a new world, giving new strength, and what was fatigue up above has here a different quality. I have come back from a journey, dog-tired from my exertions, but the sight of my old home again, the task of settling in that awaits me, the necessity of taking at least a superficial look at all my rooms immediately, but above all of making my way at full speed through to the castle keep; all this transforms my fatigue into restlessness and energy; it is as though I had taken a long and profound sleep during the first moment of my entering the burrow. My first task is a very laborious one and occupies all my attention: that is, to get my spoils through the narrow and thin-walled passages of the labyrinth. I shove them ahead with all my might, and the work progresses, but far too slowly for me; to speed things up I drag part of the mass of flesh back again and push my way over the top of it, through the middle of it; now I have only a portion of my spoil before me, now it is easier to propel it onwards, but I am so deeply embedded in the profusion of flesh, here in these narrow passages which I don‘t always find easy to negotiate even on my own, that I could well be stifled by my own supplies; sometimes their pressure is such that I can only preserve myself by eating and drinking. But the work of transport is successful, I complete it before so very long, the labyrinth is behind me, with a sigh of relief I find myself in one of the regular passageways, push my spoils through a communicating passage into a main passage, which is expressly designed for the purpose and leads down at a steep slope to the castle keep. Now it is no labour any more, now it all rolls and flows down practically by itself. The castle keep at last! At last I shall be able to rest. Everything is unchanged, no major disaster seems to have occurred, the small defects that I note at a first glance will soon be repaired. First, however, comes my long round of the passages, but that is no hardship, it is a sort of chat with friends, like the chats I used to have in the old days, or rather –I am not yet so very old, but my memory of many things is already quite confused – like the chats that I actually had or that I just heard were customary. I begin now with the second passage, deliberately taking my time; having seen the castle keep I have an endless amount of time, always within the burrow I have endless time, for everything I do there is good and important and in a way satisfying. I begin with the second passage, then break off my inspection in the middle and go over to the third passage, and let that lead me back to the castle keep, and now of course I must take up the second passage again, and so I play with my work and increase it and chuckle to myself and take delight in everything and grow quite confused with all the quantity of work, yet I still keep at it. It is for your sake, you passages and chambers, and you above all, castle keep, that I have come, that I have counted my life as nothing, after having spent so long foolishly trembling for it and delaying my return amongst you. What do I care for danger now that I am with you? You belong to me, I to you; we are bound together, what harm can come to us? Even if the crowds should already be gathering up above, and the enemy’s muzzle should be ready to burst through the moss? And thereupon the burrow welcomes me with its silence and emptiness, and confirms the truth of my words.

  But now a certain lassitude does overcome me after all, and I curl myself up a little in one of my favourite chambers; I have not yet inspected everything by a long way, and I have every intention of continuing my inspection to the end; I do not want to sleep here, I have merely succumbed to the temptation of settling myself down here as if I did want to sleep; I should like to see if I can still manage that as well as I used to. I do manage it, but I don‘t manage to tear myself away again, and I remain here in deep slumber. I must have slept for a long time, I am only aroused from the last light sleep that dissolves of its own accord; my sleep must have been really very light, for it is an almost inaudible whistling noise that wakes me. I understand it at once: the smaller fry, whom I have watched over far too little and spared far too much, have bored a new channel somewhere in my absence, this channel has run into an old one, the air is being sucked in there, and that is what is producing the whistling noise. What an indefatigably busy lot they are, and what a nuisance their industry causes. I shall first have to locate the disturbance by listening carefully at the walls of my passage and making test borings, and only then will I be able to get rid of the noise. However, the new channel may be quite welcome as additional ventilation, provided it fits in at all with the general plan of the burrow. But from now on I shall keep a much sharper eye on the small folk than I used to; none of them shall be spared.

  Since I have a good deal of experience in investigations of this kind it should not take long, and I can begin at once; there are other jobs waiting to be done, it is true, but this is the most urgent; I must have quiet in my passages. This noise is in any case a comparatively harmless one; I did not hear it at all when I arrived, though it must certainly have already been there; I had to feel completely at home again before I could hear it; it is, so to speak, only audible to the householder who is really in his house and carrying out his function. And it is not even constant, as such noises usually are; it makes long pauses; these must obviously be caused by blockages in the flow of air. I start on the investigation, but I fail to find the spot where intervention is necessary; I do make some diggings, but they are only random ones; naturally they do not achieve anything, and the great labour of digging and the even greater labour of filling in and smoothing out is all in vain. I get no closer at all to the source of the noise; it just goes on unchanged on the same thin note, with regular pauses, now like a whistling, now more like a piping. Well, I could simply leave it alone for the time being; it is very disturbing, certainly, but there can hardly be any doubt about what I take to be the origin of the noise; so it will scarcely get louder, on the contrary it can well happen – though up till now I have admittedly never waited long enough – for such noises to vanish of themselves in the course of time, through the further activities of the little burrowers; and apart from that some chance can often put one on the track of the disturbance quite easily, while systematic searching may fail for a long time. Thus I try to comfort myself, and I should greatly prefer to go on roaming through the passages, visiting the chambers, many of which I have not even seen since my return, and always romping about a little in the c
astle keep between times; but I can‘t get away from it, I must continue my search. The small fry cost me a lot of time, a lot of time that could be better employed. In such cases as the present it is usually the technical problem that attracts me; for example, from the noise, which my ear is well trained to distinguish in its finest shades and which I am capable of recording exactly, I visualize its cause, and then at once I feel impelled to check whether my picture corresponds with the facts. And with good reason, for until something has been firmly diagnosed here, I cannot feel secure, even if it were merely a matter of knowing where a single grain of sand that falls from a wall will roll to. And from this point of view a noise of the present kind is by no means a trifling matter. But trifling or not, however much I search I find nothing, or rather I find too much. This had to happen in my favourite chamber of all places, I think to myself, and I move well away from there, almost halfway along the passage to the next chamber; I really do it as a joke, as if I wanted to prove that it was not just my favourite chamber that had caused me this disturbance, but that there were disturbances to be found elsewhere as well, and with a smile I begin to listen; but I soon stop smiling, for, yes indeed, I find the same whistling here. It isn‘t really anything, sometimes I think no one except me would hear it; but at this point I can, in fact, hear it more clearly than ever, now that my ear has become attuned with practice, though it is really exactly the same noise everywhere, as I can easily prove to myself by comparing my impressions. Nor is it growing any louder, as I discover when instead of holding my ear close to the wall I listen in the middle of the gangway. Then it is only by straining my ears, by listening with utter absorption, that I can more divine than hear the faintest breath of a sound now and again. But it is precisely this uniformity of the noise in all places that disturbs me most, for that cannot be made to square with my original assumption. If I had guessed the cause of the noise correctly it should be emanating at maximum intensity from one particular spot, which would just need finding, and as one moved away from there it should grow fainter and fainter. But if my explanation did not hold water, what could the answer be? There still remained the possibility that there were two separate centres of noise, that up to now I had been listening at some distance from these centres, and that as I drew closer to one of them the noise from that centre increased, while owing to the decreasing volume of sound from the other centre the net result for the ear remained approximately constant. And already by listening closely I almost thought I could detect, if very indistinctly, differences of tone which supported the new assumption. At all events I must extend the area of my investigations much further than I have done hitherto. So down the passage I go to the castle keep and begin to listen there. Strange, the same noise here too. Well, then it is a noise produced by the burrowings of some insignificant creatures or other who have infamously exploited the period of my absence; in any case they can have no kind of hostile intention towards me, they are occupied solely with their own work and so long as they meet with no obstacle they will keep on in the direction they have taken; I know all that, yet what I find incomprehensible and agitating, what fills my mind with confusion when I need so badly to have it clear for my work, is that they should have dared to come right up as far as the castle keep. I will not attempt here to distinguish between the various possible reasons, but whether it was the depth at which the castle keep lies – which is after all not inconsiderable – or whether it was its vast extent and its correspondingly powerful currents of air that had previously scared off burrowers, or whether the mere fact that it was the castle keep, the solemnity of the place, had penetrated to their dull minds by some channel of information or other, at all events I had never until now noticed any sign of burrowings in the walls of the castle keep. Certainly, quantities of little creatures had come along here, attracted by the powerful exhalations, this was my best hunting-ground, but these had bored their way somehow into my upper passages and then, full of trepidation yet irresistibly drawn on, they had come running down the passages to the keep. But now they were evidently burrowing in the walls as well. If only I had carried out the most important schemes of my youth and early manhood, or rather, if only I had had the strength to carry them out, for the will to do so was not lacking. One of these favourite plans of mine was to isolate the castle keep from the earth surrounding it, that is to say, to limit the thickness of its walls to about my own height, and to create a hollow space of the same width right round the exterior, apart from a small foundation for the keep to rest on, which would unfortunately have to remain attached to the ground. I had always imagined this surrounding space, probably not without justification, as the most beautiful haunt I could wish for. To be able to cling on to the dome, to pull oneself up and slide down, to tumble off and find ground beneath one’s feet again, and to play these games literally on the back of the castle keep and yet not within its actual chamber; to be able to avoid the castle keep, to be able to give one’s eyes a rest from it, to postpone the joy of seeing it until later, and yet not to have to do without it, but instead literally to hold it firm between one’s claws, a thing that is impossible if one has only the one, ordinary, open access to it; but above all to be able to watch over it, and thus to have such rich compensation for being denied the sight of it from within, that if one had to choose between staying in the keep or staying in the surrounding space one would surely choose the surround for the rest of one’s days, just so as to be able to wander up and down there for ever, protecting the castle keep. Then there would be no noises in the walls, no insolent burrowings up to the very keep itself; then peace would be assured there, and I should be its guardian; then I should not have to listen with loathing to the small folk’s burrowings but with delight to something that I am now wholly denied: the whispering silence of the castle keep.