by Ann
‘You’re shining, too!’
His expression darkened. ‘Then, like the forest, we’re cursed.’
My joy at being alive was so great I laughed, which infuriated Toine. He mastered his temper on the spot and set a hand on my shoulder. ‘Sorry, son. I’m losing my mind with all the things that keep happening.’
I simply smiled. Seeing that strange glow around him, I wondered whether he was right after all. Perhaps we were cursed in earnest. Then the disturbing glow faded and a quiet, serene night enveloped us.
We fell into a slumber similar to unconsciousness, something different from simple sleep – rather an invincible catalepsy. When we resurfaced, red beams pierced the green ceiling of the forest. My companion, I had already noticed, emerged older from these bouts of faint, more bitter, too. I began to wonder whether he was concealing something about his nightmares. Nevertheless, I lulled myself into believing that we would find salvation beyond the mountains.
‘Aren’t you hungry, son?’ Toine asked, rising with a visible effort.
‘Course I am,’ I answered with impatience. ‘It doesn’t change anything, though, because we’ve got nothing to chew on.’
‘We’ll see ’bout that.’
Toine disappeared behind a bush. He soon came back, arms laden with fruits. I was amazed. What courage the man must have possessed in order to touch the reclining treetops.
‘So you’re afraid of nothing.’
‘I am afraid of hunger.’ He let the fruits fall to my feet. He was already biting into an enormous stone fruit. I imitated him and we ate in silence.
Toine was satisfied sooner than I because his appetite was less demanding than mine – due to our age difference, I think. Comforted by the frugal meal, our thirst quenched by the fresh water from our flask, we resumed our journey among the green and purple.
We advanced slowly. The forest had become inextricable and thorns scratched us painfully. The moving vines gave us no quarter and we had to alter our path to avoid them. If life multiplied its forms in the plant world, the forest remained void of animal life. Not the smallest mosquitoes dancing in the patches of light. We humans were somehow suspended between the mineral and the vegetable. The gift of life was available only for the creatures that wore no flesh, as if no incarnated god had ever visited this place.
When we arrived at the edge of a clearing, we hesitated. Was it safe to go any farther?
The grass was darker than usual. And those marvellous flowers of soft or violent colours rose incredibly tall. They bore no resemblance to the waterfall flowers, but they might as well have been as carnivorous.
‘Son, we have to go through,’ Toine said in peremptory tones. ‘We’ve got no choice.’
And he was the first to pass the threshold.
The flowers fled like gazelles as we drew near. Astonished by this delirious sight, we stopped in our tracks.
The flowers stopped as well.
Toine sighed. ‘And I thought I’d seen it all. Maybe it’s a nightmare,’ he added after a few seconds’ silence, ‘but I must admit it’s very beautiful.’
No one could have remained insensitive to the spectacle of a wide stretch of a green ocean where the flowers moved, enormous but as elegant and charming as normal flowers. A heavenly scent followed their movements. At a distance, far away, the mountains were visible, some of the crests lost in the red sky.
We followed the flowers until they led us to a swamp. To avoid being bogged down, we had to go back to the edge of the forest. Without cutting through the woods, our way became much longer, but at least we were free from creeping vines and thorny bushes.
But already the black of night was sneaking up on us. Sleeping near the flowers held no appeal for me. I mentioned my fear to Toine.
‘Don’t worry, son. Nothing is worse than the reclining forest. What can these flowers do to us?’
‘You’re forgetting the flowers at the waterfall. Didn’t those attack us?’
‘All right, only these ones run away when we come near. So perhaps we don’t need to fear them.’
We waited for night to fall before stopping. Then we stretched out on the fresh grass. A heavy silence hovered above us, only disturbed by the light noises of rustling petals as the flowers moved about.
When the sky blossomed with stars, Toine cried, ‘As a sailor, I remember the position of the stars. You know what? Tonight those stars aren’t in the same places. So who’s moving? Them or us?’ Seeing I understood nothing of what he had said, he explained. ‘It’s not complicated. If you head north, you’ll end up seeing the sky filled with stars from north to south. And vice versa. But the stars remain the same. They’ll only be more or less higher above the horizon. Now, the sky tonight has nothing to do with the sky we’ve been seeing since we got here. Either the stars are moving or we are. This is another universe, son. I’ve never seen any of those constellations. We are under unknown skies.’
Toine’s reasoning made perfect sense. Nevertheless, I could not accept the idea that we might be elsewhere than on our dear old earth. If Toine was right, what hope was left for us?
Someone was shaking me. Sound asleep, I did not wish to open my eyes. All I wished was to remain wrapped inside the night I had earned for my pain. Toine’s vigorous hand continued shaking me.
‘Come on, wake up, son.’
I opened my eyes. The sky was a black void.
‘Why did you have to wake me up? I was sleeping so well.’
‘Damn it, can’t you see?’
The clearing was illuminated by the shimmer of the forest living its silvery hour.
A most extraordinary spectacle was the infernal dance in which the flowers had engaged, their petals like the leaves of water lilies when you immerse them and myriads of trapped particles of air cover them, glistening underwater.
The mountainous skyline glowed red, like the embers of a gigantic fire. And the earth rumbled with the beating of a frenzied heart. My gaze remained riveted to the bewitching scene. I could not find the strength to turn away from it. Finally, darkness retook the forest.
Neither Toine nor I could sleep. We kept vigil in our distressing universe, but nothing moved. The large clearing reappeared with the first light of dawn. The flowers were gone. Only a few petals remained like pale specks in an ocean of green. We ate some grass to cheat hunger. At that moment, I noticed for the first time my skin was becoming rough. As though mud had dried over it. I mentioned it to Toine who answered in a weary voice, ‘We’ll take a bath in the next river. It’s just filth.’
And we did not speak about it again.
After skirting the wide patch of moving ground for hours, we had the impression we were going round in circles. Around the middle of the afternoon, we did arrive at the end of that interminable swamp. Below us opened a gorge, a veritable chasm we would have to cross if we wanted to continue toward the mountains that rose majestically on the horizon.
‘We can’t cross that,’ I said.
‘I don’t see what else we can do. Look in both directions. This gorge is like a frontier.’
A revolt verging on hatred surged in me. ‘Then why must we go there? What’s with those inhospitable mountains? We can’t be sure we’ll find salvation if we get there. On the contrary, we’ll risk starving and dying of thirst.’
‘I know,’ Toine said in a calm voice. ‘But do you really think you’re going to survive in these accursed woods? With the meat-eating plants, and all the rest? No, this place here is unfit for human beings. But on the other side of the mountain, maybe we’ll find a normal life, the kind of life we’re cut out for. So, if we must die anyway, it’s better to go down fighting. Oh, I’m as tired of all this as you are, but if you don’t want to go, I’ll try alone. If I make it, I’ll come back for you. A self-respecting man could not live with himself after failing a friend.’
Toine’s words, bitter but resolute, dissolved my anger.
‘If one goes, the other must follow,’ I said. ‘But seriou
sly, how are we getting to the bottom of the chasm?’
‘Down there,’ he said, extending an arm.
This outstretched arm caught my eye. The strange crust Toine had dismissed as filth had thickened. And the legs and the back of my companion were equally covered with the same substance. I examined my body. The thickness appeared everywhere. Shaking, filled with misgivings, I scratched at it, but it stuck to my skin like mortar to stone.
I asked Toine, ‘Are you sure this is filth? You’re hiding something from me. I’m sure of it. I beg of you. Tell me what is happening to us.’
He answered in a voice dripping weariness, ‘You’re not suffering, son, are you? Then forget the rest. It’s probably the sun that is cooking us up.’
He was trying to reassure me. He didn’t believe a word of it! I did not insist, though. I concentrated all my efforts on overcoming this new anguish that was creeping inside me.
Toine guided me to the spot he deemed propitious to our descent. We started down. It was my turn to carry the huge flask, which hindered me considerably. As I was about to lose footing, I had to let go of the thing to hold on. It rolled down and disappeared from view.
‘Don’t worry,’ Toine said, sensing my despair. ‘We’ll surely find some water below. And I still prefer losing the flask to losing you.’
His tones left me with a peculiar impression, as if nothing mattered to him any longer. Perhaps his hope in finding a different life on the other side of the mountain, or…No. I refused to consider any other possibility.
After a long, painful descent, we felt a rock under our feet. It was enormous and jutted far out into the void. We went down on our bellies and crawled forward until we could peer down into the abyss. We were able to take in its extraordinary depth thanks to several fires that illuminated the bottom.
‘Do you have an idea what this means?’ I asked.
Toine kept his gaze riveted to the bluish flames that created living shadows on the dead rock walls.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘No. I really don’t know.’
We resumed our descent. It was more and more difficult. We advanced squeezed between two slabs of rock; a thick malodorous smoke floated up to us and it was getting hot. The red light of day decreased rapidly and soon we had only the glimmer of blue flames to guide us.
Through the crusts that covered our bodies, sweat oozed, as thick and yellow as pus. At the same time, the fatigue that had plagued us vanished. Was it due to the emanations of those mysterious furnaces?
We reached the bottom of the abyss in an almost euphoric state. Toine had found his smile again, frozen in the folds of that disturbing crust. The fires blazed much farther apart than we had thought when we saw them from above. They burst out of the ground through small craters, with thin whistling sounds. We skirted a few of them with no difficulty. We now had to climb to the other side. By some miracle, our strength had increased tenfold, and we attacked the wall right away. We found more finger- and toe-holds, and we climbed easily. It was fortunate for hardly had we reached midpoint than the dreaded thumping suddenly resounded, causing the walls of the chasm to shake in a frightening way. Gigantic flames rose, almost reaching us, giving off an unbearable heat. I was about to let go of my hold when it all went back to normal. The silent night enveloped us with no other light than the unfamiliar stars. Unable to move in the darkness, we remained glued to the wall and waited for daylight. Fatigue retook us, and if the wall had not been gently sloped, we would have fallen and crashed to the bottom of the chasm. As the wait seemed to stretch into forever, the first fire began to burn again, followed by a second, and a third, until the entire gorge was ablaze. A marvellous sensation of well-being erased our fatigue. But when I could make out Toine’s features, I noticed in horror that the hideous crust had evolved. I read in my friend’s eyes that my face had undergone the same transformation. We resumed our ascent without a word.
As we climbed, fatigue gripped us once again, vice-like. I shot furtive glances at Toine. His face resembled a mask and my skin, too, stiffened with the exertion of the ascent. We were hoisting ourselves out of the chasm when the sun began to take on its red hue, tingeing the vault of heaven with a deep mauve while the night died away. The crests of the imposing chain of mountains kept to the shadows, which were quickly fading into the light. The mountains rose at a short distance now, behind a stretch of flat desert land apparently easy to cross. It proved an illusion, though, because as soon as we set our feet on it, we sank into the soil up to our knees. We progressed with terrible efforts. And when the bleeding disk dispelled the night, we discovered we were treading a red powder that resembled dried blood ground to dust. We should have felt horror. Instead, an immense detachment freed us from the horrible and the monstrous. Our exhaustion, too, vanished. Once at the feet of the mountain, we were thus able to commence our ascent with no delay. But despite the curious calm that now pervaded me, I could not help glancing at Toine’s face in disgust. It was turning to mud.
XII
The mountain was made of a porous rock like the silt found at the bottom of the oceans. It resembled sponge because of the holes peppering it, but instead of being smooth, it was rough and full of imperfections like an abrasive pumice stone.
Hardly one hundred metres up, we discovered a great number of those strange statues in human or animal shapes. All of them stuck to the mountainside. To my surprise, I had brotherly thoughts for the stone silhouettes – a much stronger emotion than the fleeting compassion I had experienced for the skeleton in the hut. The higher we climbed that hideous vitrified sponge, the greater the number of mineral spectres became. All those beaks, muzzles and mouths expressed a single emotion – fear.
We continued our ascent all day, speaking as little as possible because every attempt at moving our mouths caused physical pain. But our horrified eyes were free to exchange frequent glances. Under the progress of the hideous crust, little by little we were becoming mineral. The great bleeding disk finally sunk behind the horizon, beyond which, for all we knew, only emptiness existed.
At this time of the evening, a crowd of mineral creatures encircled us, glowing with a soft purple light. The haunting beat resumed. When the night conquered the sky, the plain and the mountains bathed in the gloomy shadows we already knew. A murmur like a whispered prayer reached us. Our gazes riveted to the forest, we kept still, leaning our backs against the slope. We feared fear. He who has never experienced this feeling knows nothing of terror. Since that whisper similar to a death rattle had begun, I had the impression I was turning into one of those earthen creatures. From my poor deformed mouth I managed to express my feeling aloud, hoping Toine would hear me. He did. I believed he felt the same terror, but in a hideous grimace, he laughed at it. To the very last, that incredibly brave man tried to reassure his companion.
We had resumed our silent contemplation. The forest was visible now. A silvery glimmer emanated from the tree trunks and the leaves. From the centre of the mountains, the thumps became more insistent and the shadows surrounding us more luminous. It was such a supernatural sight I hoped in my madness that I would soon escape that vivid dream and awake to a normal world. Toine’s hand on my arm destroyed my illusion.
‘Look,’ he said.
His mud-gloved hand pointed to the forest, where all the trees shone with a metallic glow. In a brusque movement, I detached myself from the mountain soil. I heard a bizarre sound, and I felt moisture under my muddy hand. I bent low to examine the place where I had been lying. From the spongy rock oozed a thick dark fluid. I was appalled.
Toine kept pointing at the forest. In the vault of the sky, the stars scintillated with a cold light. The entire mountain glowed while blue flames rose from the abyss.
Then, beyond the red-dust desert, beyond the chasm and the wide clearing, the entire forest bowed. This adoration of nature enthralled us. In the meantime, the mountain vibrated with violence. Then, as it had happened each time, the stars paled and winked out, one by one. At our fe
et, the mysterious nature had melted into the night that plagued our diseased eyes. A deep blackness swallowed us. We were lost. We were nothing. The shadows of oblivion enveloped us like a leaden carapace. Soon we were part of a slumbering fellowship.
I awoke with the impression of a long ascent from the bottom of a pit. Darkness still inhabited the world. On the horizon, a pink shade was about to engender the red day but for now the sky, empty, enjoyed solitude. Hidden by the wall of the night, the plain was only darkness, as silent as a hole dug into infinity.
With my mud-caked lips, I called Toine. My voice barely carried, and I wondered whether I had called him or just imagined I had. Or had I become deaf? Withdrawing into the hopeless agony of expectation, I closed my eyes and began to tick the seconds off an imaginary rosary.
A noise I remembered all too well told me Toine had detached himself from the stone. Then a perfect silence reigned.
Little by little, as the red glowing deployed, blurred shapes became visible. Then, for the first time, on top of the mauve sky, appeared the summit of the gigantic mountain. It soared into the heavens like the tip of a thorn. Clinging in clusters to the mountainside, uncountable silhouettes of all kinds of beings seemed to continue their ascent toward eternity.
I turned with some effort to Toine to ask him whether we should go on or not. My question remained unspoken, trembling on my earthen lips: he was horrible to look at. The mud mask had become solid, while the features, rough and impossible to recognise, gave it the aspect of a face in gestation. The only trace of life on his face was his gaze, which left me with no uncertainty about my own appearance. I should have lost my mind right then, but a strange calm inhabited me. Was it the beginning of acceptance?
Toine tried to tell me something but his half-open mouth, already stiff, could only utter incomprehensible sounds. When he struggled to rise, I understood he intended to continue our ascent. Did he really believe our salvation lay on the other side of the mountain? I could not think any longer. I submitted to his decision.