The wind blows, and moves the dead leaves along the road. The bushes crackle. Lizards shoot across flat stones and then stop dead, only their throats palpitating. The thorns of a plant are quite stiff, with points as sharp as finger-nails, and they are waiting. In the thickets, extreme wildness prevails; branches are intertwined, leaves crackle, and pungent odours rise in the half-light; the insipid odour of sap, the smell of incipient fires, of crushed pulp. The stalks are green, they dazzle. Spiders’ webs are stretched over hollows and between twigs, and the shadow is peopled with hairy blobs, tragic-eyed, always on the watch. Fatigue is heavy, it prowls low down, close to the ground, between the feet of the bushes. And a sort of milk-colour gradually invades the membranes of the plants, bends the slender stalks as it passes, covers the furrowed skin of the old laurel bushes with little cracks.
High in the sky, a buzzard is circling, unhurried. A bird’s-eye view shows the earth as an immense, desolate chaos, a thing of ruins, where white torrents flow, thin as trails of spittle. A cry rises from a shrub, and one sees nothing; an unknown ‘rak-rak-rak-rak’ that catches at one’s throat and stirs ripples of anxiety.
Still higher up, against the flat, blue-painted canopy of the sky, the clouds are still swimming. One of them is very long, with a kind of filiform tail that melts into the ether. They are constantly altering their shape, by imperceptible changes; they form and dissolve, assemble, separate, turn round the mountain peaks, fray out, are swallowed.
At the other end of the valley, where the stream disappears, there are two uprights, rather like gateposts, on each bank. Beyond them lies the unknown. The river must continue its winding course, and the banks must be green, no doubt, with more olive-trees and more reeds.
But here, in this enclosed corner, one would think everything has been daubed in; the clean air, the cool, the shade, the wind—it’s all bare, incredibly bare. The contours of the ground are fixed, almost glazed. Between the mountain walls, lines run criss-cross, some of them slender, others heavy, for ever and ever. Nothing will move, nothing will change. The rocks are impassive, balanced, the trees and plants stand erect and a peopled silence reigns. The whole thing is an untidy weave, with knots, patches of colour, blackish blots. One has to live in there, one has to be one spot among others, a little speck of ink indicated by an arrow. In the heart of the show, an insect belonging here, a real grasshopper, kneeling in meditation. To see everything. To live everything.
A tiny hollow is your domain: around you the horizon is closed in by gigantic banks with things like hairy tree-trunks growing on them. Down along the bumpy ground the air is hot, laden with scents, and wavers as it rises. Impossible to see any higher: a few centimetres above ground-level the atmosphere suddenly becomes opaque, traversed by blisters like a liquid surface. One lives no higher than the dust, a terrible weight shackles on to the cortex of the earth. Ah, if one had wings! But there’s nothing to be done, one has to crawl over the slipping blocks of leaf-mould. And here there is no rest: the ground is alive, bubbling all the time, groaning, opening and shutting like a mouth; bubbles burst under your feet, slow, musical vibrations shake the earth’s crust, and the waves of the air pass shrieking between the columns of the reeds. The vegetation is so thick that the sun’s rays never touch the ground. The animals walking there are pallid, blind, groping. They are the prey of the other winged creatures that fly above their heads, searching the dark corners with voracious eyes beneath glossy shells. The earth is really terrible when you know it well. Monsters are not rare there, no, monsters are not rare there.
To the south the valley follows its slope, the stream with its grey water flows down to the sea, placidly; the fall of the ground is almost imperceptible, and the mountains melt round the horizon into a sort of undulation with soft curves. Down there, close to the sea, the sky has taken on yellow and pink colours, and the clouds have completely dissolved into the atmosphere. Only a pearly curtain of mist reminds us that there is humidity in the air, that the pulverized drops of water are floating like specks of dust, miles above the ground.
This, far away from the dislocated cubes of the mountains, is the place where people live; they have built their houses on the sides of the hill, overlooking the river-mouth, and they live there, cook their meals, light fires in the middle of plots of waste land. The roads insinuate themselves through the thickets of trees, follow the windings of the streams, constantly cross and recross one another. Along these little white lanes cars follow one behind another, like columns of insects. The olive-trees are more numerous, and sometimes, from very high up, one discovers hexagons of ground with rows of maize-plants growing on them. The people live at the bottom of the great slope of the river. They lead their toilsome lives, bent over by the fall of the ground, in the open spaces where the sun shines from morning till night. Where they live there are no clouds and no walls of rock. Everything is gentle, shaken by a tranquil fever, and time passes quickly.
The trees must be fine ones, not stunted as they are up here; strong, prolific trees, heavy with fruit and leaves, with branches as regular as the prongs of a fork. Sounds and smells must multiply there, and there must always be an air full of promise for the human being, full of anxiety and hatred for the wild animals.
Here, in the circus made up of fissures and projections, stifling and yet free, the animals have nothing to fear. The earth and the rocks belong to them, and their cruel, significant games can be played out to the full. The light does not shine on them; the ants have no need to fear the terrible midday sun that dehydrates them and dries them up on a flat stone. Only water, cold and shade surround them.
The sun is rarely seen: it passes behind the mountain peaks, appearing and disappearing in accordance with the line of the crests. The light does not come from the sun, one would say; it seems to gush out all over the vault of the sky and rush down, a furious avalanche, into the hole, the valley. There it reverberates like an echo from the precipitous walls, it bounces back and flies in all directions, it collides with spears of rock-work, it bashes into the mouths of caves and against the sheets of pebbles. It slides over the quivering surface of the stream, is cut off and does not penetrate it. It covers everything as it passes, it glazes, coats everything. The boulders and grass-banks turn white, their hermetically-closed shells are saturated with this pitiless light. It seems as though nothing had the power to stop this bleaching rain; for its very origin is unknown. There is no sunlight to quench, no moon to cover with clouds. The light is part of the violence of the landscape, and the earth, reduced to submission, can only offer itself to that light, immolating its wrinkled, smarting skin.
On the ground, the little reddish stones are shining like diamonds, and washed-out fire flies up in sparks from the pebbles laid out in rows along the riverside. The colours are burning, side by side; the green of the leaves, the pink of the river-bed, the blue of the sky, the white of the flower-petals. Everything is hardened, stiffened, possessed. But is it really what is called light? For even sounds and smells are imbued with it, it would seem; the wasps are flying with a noise as straight as a pencil stroke, and the pine-needles are giving off a zigzag, brittle, deep perfume, full of prickles and glue.
To left, to right, in front, behind, stand the mountains; it is they who have modified life in the valley in this way. They are responsible for this asperity and this mystery. For the mountains are living creatures; they have bodies, they have eyes, they breathe. Their vast domes are bellies, their crests bear the awe-inspiring traces of the orders they have given, once and for all, to everything around them: be hard, be hard. In the silence, in the emptiness, be hard. They rise up, bloated, sharp-pointed, massive, into the four corners of the sky; some of them even appear to be petrified in a dizzy equilibrium, seated, immovable, yet tilted in such a way that they ought to have fallen centuries ago, to have fallen softly in on themselves and dissolved into avalanches of sand. They have grown according to some confused plan, wide wrinkles of molten lava, waves of magma petrifie
d in the act of rushing downwards. And then they stayed like that, just as the pacified earth left them, grotesque and inaccessible. The harmony of silence is already at the heart of their contortions. Their life now is no longer the life of movement, of a volcano, but a weight of simple calm and menace. Tons, millions of tons of stubborn, grandiose silence, a paralysed anger that crushes everything, holds everything quelled beneath its plinth.
Between their pyramids the other life, the life of stream and valley, does the best it can for itself; it nibbles away, it weathers down, year by year, century by century. But all the same it is defeated by eternity. The rock will be there long after the streams have evaporated and the bones of the animals have been reduced to nothing. When the planet has become a mere shrivelled core, a target for meteorites, there will still be walls of rock, with faults, chasms, columns of implacable strength. There will still be mountains.
One needs to know that; for no aspect of this sinuous, devouring life, no part of this wearing-down process in the valley-prison is extraneous to the power of the rock. Even the sand, even the flat pieces which break away from the mountainsides during the rainy season, are full of a victor’s strength. Here, life is not warfare: it is simply a natural movement of things, as a result of which every scrap of the landscape is inhaled by the rocky matter and mingles with it. There is a cold air-current that leads towards the ore, and objects tremble with the wild desire to enter, living, into the stone. The water of the stream, for example: it appears to be wasting the walls that hem it in. And yet its life is the same as theirs; the water is merely rock, a form of rock, the unknown eternity of the mountain. The air, too, is made of rocks, is built up of broad prisms of limitless matter which has the power of enduring; differences of nature, aspect or finality, what do they matter? On earth, in the sky, in the water, all is stone, because all is but infinity, the glorious eternity of matter, the insolubility of what is and can never cease to be.
The mountain rears its vertical wall, so high that it seems impossible not to crash against it. From every peak a ridge runs down towards the valley in an almost straight line, with other lines slanting off from it and dividing the surface of the rock into irregular prisms. In the middle of the mountain, escaping from the denuded curve of a saddle, a ravine hurtles down the slope with cascades of stones and long black furrows full of repulsive shadow. On the face of this gigantic wall shrubs have grown in clumps, like seaweed clinging to an under-water rock. The stone is greyish-white, the seaweed is dark green, or sometimes red. It covers the whole visible surface of the mountain, and the odds are that it grows on the surfaces that are out of sight, as well; a regular pattern of rough flecks, twisting towards the summit in order to survive. The roots run along the face of the rock, visible, spreading out in star shapes like the claws of a bird of prey. Rain and trickles of dust filter, no doubt, through their scrawny branches, and when the rising sun shines on the rock-face it must send a fierce electrical heat, drawn straight from the precipitous wall, surging through the fibres of green wood. Some places are quite bare of vegetation; at the base of the mountain, to the left, a triangle of yellow earth has been dug out.
Other ravines run down from the top of the mountain; the spring or autumn rains have traced their course, thin veins winding like roads, tremendous torrents of dust and stone hardened by months of drought.
The masses of rock have thrust up on all sides, dented, cracked, millions of years old; heavy, rugged backs, elephantine forms, swarming with life. The trees and animals are parasites, their roots and claws perpetually foraging the rock. Occasionally a thunderstorm settles on a peak, and the lightning shakes the columns of rock with its repeated attacks, while rain and mud run down their flanks like floods of voracious tears.
In the hollow places, the holes in the ravines, there isn’t a soul; nothing remains except the deserted stone and air, alone in their contact. The cold wind slips past, vibrating; the rock never moves. The silence, there, is almost total, and movement has closed up into very hard crystals; there is nothing on the rock or underneath, not an animal, not a worm, not a blade of grass. Not a perfume quivering in the air. The soil is absent, and the sand that forms, a grain every six months, evaporates instantly, one doesn’t know where to. Poverty, extraordinary poverty of the stone, stone that is naked, immobile, serene, cold, amid passing time. Vertically there is nothing either; one might perhaps have to travel for millions of light-years before meeting anything else.
All the stretches of rock were made in the same way: tons of hard, flaking matter, scored with oblique striae. Tons of coolness and calm, laid down there, in front, one on top of another; between them, sometimes, there are valleys, lakes, little houses with tiled roofs in which people live among olive groves in soft shades of grey. That’s possible. Roads, churches with villages round them, names of places, Marie, Saint-Dalmas-le-Selvage, Les Baux. Cow-byres, green meadows, ponds, brooks inhabited by the fish. There may be pleasant things and delicate scents, here and there. But it’s nothing compared with the miles of wildness and quiet, nothing compared with these immense walls, towering straight into the clear sky, these pallid mountains where nothing is tranquil, these mute darts hurled at infinity, these blocks of stone covered with angles and striae, where a sort of hatred echoes unceasingly, unaccountably, like a mystery of long-ago violence which may be the very nature of their upthrust out of the seething marshes of the earth.
If the circle of mountains was alive, it was with this kind of life; this unparalleled strength which had caused it to rise up and battle against the soft erosion of time. Like a crater, spreading round it the overflow of energy from the expanding world, the mountain had heaved its gigantic breath once and for all. It stood erect, all its matter utilized to the utmost, in opposition to nothingness, so that emptiness should not prevail. All round it, as the shadow moved, it projected its beam of broken lines and sent this surging in all directions, moved by a majestic fury. Everywhere it intervened. In front, it ran against one like an obstacle, it thrust one back; its white brow pushed towards you, stunned you. On the sides it hugged your chest and gradually smothered you, squeezing you in a vice. It was coldness, vertigo. And behind, it overhung you, it crushed you beneath its feet. More than vertical, it was toppling over on you; it was twisting the back of your neck, and the dazzling burden, worse than an icy breath, was making your forehead sweat gently, unfolding before your uprolled eyes such visions of terror as came only to the defeated. Everything was going to fall; landslides were about to start off, avalanches would be thundering down, burying everything beneath tons of rubble; the mountain, so high that one could see no end to it, was an unimaginable disaster, bursting out on all sides like an active death of which one had to be the victim. One was nothing. One was a crumb, a frail, bending bramble, an old rusty tin that a single pebble would flatten out.
Better still: the mountain was not falling; one was falling oneself. One was knocked down, pushed into the tunnel of the bottomless pit; vanquished at the far end of a black shaft where the moist gleam of the stars reigned, and the pungent smell of the hammering rocks.
Lying face to the ground, one saw the flat hardness setting in; the rock crumbling where it stood, not into dust but into rough, grating slabs, as it were sharp weapons ready to chop up the flesh, to bury everything that was not themselves. All was defenestration.
And yet from this landscape, so beautiful and so powerful, a contrary passion was rising as well, tearing you apart and setting you erect, skywards. The brute strength, heavy as concrete, entered into you and made a mountain of you. Ascending lines planted themselves in your limbs, and you were suddenly imbued with a stirring, direct, architectural intoxication, you positively took off for the upper layers of the atmosphere and went on rising, gorged with oxygen. Facing the rampart, shooting up like an arrow. A longing to grasp everything, to hold everything in your arms. In the silence, in the cold. A longing to eat. To have stone in your stomach.
The trees and animals were no
longer visible. Instead there was an absolute lunar landscape, full of craters and peaks, covered with faults and striations, a sea of pyramids. Spread over the entire surface of the ground, you are suddenly open like a calyx, you are holding up the vault of the sky with your outstretched arms.
You are no longer yourself. You have ceased to live. Have you ever lived, in fact? Nothing counts here any longer except the rock, the impassive rock, the rock laid upon rock, the whetted, serene, victorious stone. The years go by. Water may seep out, leaves may scratch the soil in passing. That’s your skin, it is over your body they are advancing. The wind may hollow the sand, at the cliff edge, into soft, round shapes. It’s nothing. You will win. Time is on your side. In mineral crystals it is hardening, time that was once so liquid. In the permanently open space, where the air is as though vitrified, the purity of slowness reigns. Majesty. Long minutes, long seconds. Years. Centuries. Day, night; night, day. Little cracklings, as though of vertebrae. Little landslides. It’s nothing. Here, time is unhewn marble. The impulses that are felt are never resolved. They are stopped before that, for stoppage is the perfect form of their existence. Slowness of the rocks. Virtue of the rocks. Little stones, enormous stones. Life is a cube.
Another time one would stand facing the sea, in an immense sunset. Night would fall softly, with slow withdrawals of colours; they would sink below the horizon, one by one, following the route taken by the ball of fire. Ash-grey shades began to cover the sky, and the shadows turned blue, then mauve, then black. The cape jutted out into the sea, and the bay suddenly lit up with street lamps. A sort of peace could be heard there, too: it had scraping sounds in it, the splash of waves on the shingle, rubbings of bats’ wings, the monotonous sizzling sound of the electric standards.
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