The heat hung heavy and thick, like layer upon layer of curtains. The air had stopped being light: now it was oscillating over the whole surface of the desert, a block of turbid gelatine that made movement difficult. Y. M. H. was no longer walking; rather, he was swimming, his body straining forward with the effort, his arms opening and closing, his legs threshing against the distant ground. On the horizon the black mountains trembled like seaweed-covered reefs. Y. M. H. tried not to lose sight of them. The jagged peaks drifted behind the white haze, became double, stood out clearly, were swallowed up again. First, they rose several miles high, as though someone were breathing very hard; then they sank back, deflated, into the ocean of sand. The world was sick with fever. The world was dying of thirst and exhaustion. The world was stupefied by heat, its perspiration was streaming under its armpits in long ribbons of mica. Gold, there was gold everywhere, nuggets as big as eggs, gleaming in the middle of the grey dust. The wheels of the trucks, sinking into the road surface as they passed, had left behind grooves of powdered gold that sparkled in the sunlight.
Y. M. H. looked at all these riches spread over the sand; they pleaded with him to stop, to have a drink and fall asleep. So he sat down at the edge of the track, stretched his legs out and took the water bottle out of his bag. It held something over three pints. The first water supply point was a two days’ walk away. It was there that the trucks filled their tanks.
Y. M. H. took a gulp, then a second, then a third. The water filled his mouth and made a raucous sound as it went down his throat. Y. M. H. squinted through the neck of the bottle to gauge the level of the water, then damped his handkerchief and wiped his face, neck, chest and arms. He recorked the water bottle and put it back in his bag. He felt the need for a smoke, lit a cigarette, and smoked it, sitting on the ground. When he had finished, he extinguished the butt by poking it into the sand. His mouth hurt him. He took out the water bottle once more and swallowed another mouthful. The bag also contained some biscuits, some hard-boiled eggs, a can of corned beef, some oranges and lemons. With his knife, he peeled an orange and ate it slowly. After that, he started walking again.
About two o’clock that afternoon, he heard the sound of an engine. It was a truck, lumbering toward him in a cloud of dust. He watched it grow larger and larger on the road. When the truck stopped in front of him, Y. M. H. noticed that the driver was a swarthy man with sharp features. Sitting beside him was a fat red-haired man wearing a T-shirt, a turkish towel knotted round his neck. The driver looked at him without saying anything, but the fat red-haired man climbed down from the truck and walked up to him. He burst out laughing, then said to him in English:
‘O.K., buddy, what gives?’
‘I’m walking,’ said Y. M. H.
‘On foot?’
‘Yes.’
The fat red-haired man dabbed at his face with a corner of his towel.
‘You crazy or something? This heat will roast the hide off you.’
‘Do you happen to have a little water?’ said Y. M. H.
‘Not a drop,’ answered the man. ‘Apart from what’s in there!’ He gestured towards the truck’s engine, laughing.
‘Is it far?’
‘What?’
‘The water depot.’
‘Supply point 100?’
‘Yes.’
‘Forty or fifty miles!’ said the man.
‘Yes, that would be about it.’
‘You have enough water?’
‘Yes, I’ve got some in my bag.’
The red-haired man was mystified.
‘Say – is this a bet, or something?’
‘Sort of,’ said Y. M. H.
‘Because, goddamn it, man, this sun will burn you to a cinder.’
‘I’m used to heat.’
‘Too bad we’re on an outward trip, today,’ said the red-haired man, ‘otherwise I’d have given you a lift.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Y. M. H. ‘I like walking.’
‘All the same,’ repeated the other, ‘this sun will burn you to a cinder, that’s for sure!’ Then he climbed back into the truck’s cab, and shouted ‘Good luck!’ The driver looked at him without saying anything, and let in the clutch. Y. M. H. closed his eyes because of the dust. He heard the sound of the engine grow fainter as the truck vanished into the distance; then everything was the same as it had been before. On the road, now, two fresh tyre marks stretched straight ahead.
The sun was lower down, now, and to the right. It leaned against Y. M. H.’s body, digging its fist into his flank to make him fall. Little by little, thirst once more descended upon the desert’s plateau, spattering the sand with millions of droplets of quicksilver. To resist this new thirst, Y. M. H. tried to concentrate his mind. He closed his mouth and made an effort to think about something else. But nothing stirred in his head. Only the water flowed, the river of water, leaping, clear, murmuring, the quick-fingered water running down his body, entering his eyes and nostrils. It made a peculiar noise, like a woman’s voice, close to his ear, it swirled around his feet, throwing him off balance. Y. M. H. tried to eat a lemon, but had to spit it out again right away, because it tasted salty. Inside the bag slung from his shoulder, the water bottle was a dead weight. Y. M. H. shifted the bag’s position. Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers painted on the great slab of marble, huge black and white squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering under the cold wind. For a split second, Y. M. H., by screwing up his eyes, managed to read the writing, but it vanished with lightning speed and he could not be sure. It seemed to go like this: There’s no reason to be afraid. No, there’s no reason to be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid. No. No, there’s no reason to be afraid. No, there’s no reason to be afraid.
At nightfall, Young Man Hogan chose a spot, by the side of the road, where he could sleep. He settled himself under the shelter of a dune, and ate, sitting in the sand. Then he drank for the second time that day: four or five gulps of water. His mouth and throat were so dry that he could not swallow. Shadow rapidly spread across the desert. Y. M. H. lit a cigarette and watched the night fill the sky. The stars came out one after the other, shining steadily in the depths of the blackness. After a moment, the moon rose, white, with little designs etched in its centre. Out there, too, there was a desert, no doubt, with great plains of sand and silence, endless silence. Since he was still thirsty, Y. M. H. ate an orange while he gazed at the moon.
Thirteen centuries before, Hsüan-Tsang had seen the same thing, after the first day, the second day, the third day of walking. He had eaten a fruit, just like that, while looking at the moon. His companion had turned to him, and had said to him in a voice pitched low because of the silence:
‘Master, when shall we reach our goal?’
And since Hsüan-Tsang did not answer and continued to gaze at the moon:
‘Master, are we near?’
Hsüan-Tsang had answered:
‘No, we still have many days’ march ahead of us.’
‘Master, I am afraid of the unknown,’ pursued the companion.
‘There is no unknown,’ said Hsüan-Tsang.
‘I am afraid of the silence, O Master!’
‘There is no true silence,’ said Hsüan-Tsang.
‘Why do you say that, O Master? Is it not the unknown, here? Is it not silent?’
And he added:
‘Master, I am afraid of dying before reaching the goal.’
Hsüan-Tsang, without taking his eyes off the moon, answered simply:
‘It is not the unknown, since it is the path of the Buddha. It is not silent, since we have the word of the Buddha. Why should you be afraid to die, since it is the life of the Buddha?’
Then his companion no longer dared say anything. He burrowed into the sand, his teeth chattering, and gazed eagerly at Hsüan-Tsang, who went on gazing at the moon.
ON THE FOLLOWING day, the sun was back in the same position again, and Young Man Hogan continued walking. He had drunk the last remaining drop of water an hour before. The water bottle, stowed in the blue bag that dangled from his shoulder, weighed almost nothing. Y. M. H. looked at the black mountains. They seemed to be closer now, great peaks that ripped the sky’s white sheet. Over there, at the foot of the mountains, was water.
He had already been walking for hours along the sand track. His feet came down regularly one in front of the other, sending up little clouds of dust. The dunes stretched as far as the eye could see, motionless, on either side of the track. Even the calcined bushes had petered out by now. Nothing was left but the dazzling sand with its millions of tiny broken grains, and dry, striated stones that crumbled away in layers. Occasionally, there was a sprinkling of bone fragments and broken seashells beside the track; or empty, rust-gnawed cans that had once contained beer. No one. No trucks passed. No humans walked. No aircraft ever appeared in the immense sky. The insects and the lizards were all dead, the snakes had migrated to another continent. The nothingness was so great that it could not even be called solitude any longer. It was like walking on top of oneself, crawling eternally over the same bit of ground at the bottom of a crevasse. It was like being spreadeagled on the ground, without respite, or being fastened down on an esplanade in the middle of a desert of automobiles. It was like floating on the ocean, thousands of miles from land, while tiny waves sweep forward in ripples. The very idea of solitude had vanished from the surface of the earth; it had been swallowed up by the sand, gulped like water. Everything had been instantly filled to the brim; the sky had been stretched taut, an invincible ceiling harder than steel. The black mountains reared up, the dunes were frozen in mid-movement; the line of the horizon lay close to the sky, a thin black thread that never ceased to contain, to retain. And above, the sun was a glowing dot, nothing but a dot. It would have been impossible to add a single thing more: this was a world crammed full to overflowing, a world with a bulging bag, standing guard against intruders. There was no room for anyone. The crowd had jammed itself into the car in its hermetically sealed tunnel lining, and the doors had closed upon them. Each element of the desert weighed a ton, pressed violently downward. The heat in the air was as thick as mud, and the air itself so hard that it would have needed an axe to cut through it. The ground was an enormous crushed rock, and the road streaked to the horizon, like a wall or a dike.
Everything reverberated, everything vibrated, was full. It was all the same scene, presumably: the same city crowd, neon flashes, carapaces of automobiles. Today they were wearing different masks, indulging different violences. But it was still the same place from which flight was necessary, desperately necessary, in order to breathe freely once again.
Noticing the buttress supporting the far horizon, Y. M. H. identified it as his body, his body which had already overtaken him. He identified two or three ideas of his in full flight, over there, across the expanse of sand. He heard his words as they made off up the road, words of his now stretching their ellipses round the sun. No one would ever reach the goal. No one would ever find anything to drink, not even a puddle of stagnant water at the bottom of a hole, not even a gob of spittle.
It took him a little time to realize that he was lost. He was walking in the tyre tracks left behind by the trucks, staring straight ahead of him at the cruel landscape. And it gradually dawned on him that he was no longer going in the same direction as before. He looked for the black mountains: they were behind him now, distant, inaccessible, floating above the dunes. Not only that, but they had changed shape. Y. M. H. stopped a moment, his feet sinking into the sand. He swivelled round and looked back along the trail. There, across the desert, ran the tyre tracks, and, superimposed on them, the hollow ridges left by the soles of his shoes. The road must have forked, a while back, and Y. M. H. had taken the right-hand path without noticing. Under the sun’s heat, everything was equal, silent, consumed by fear. Emptiness encompassed the earth, and the sky was absent, lacking depth. Nothing spoke. There were no signs. At the zenith, the bright hole swarmed with light, hurled its white darts. There were no clouds. It was just as easy to go in any direction. It made no difference at all.
Y. M. H, began retracing his steps. Then he stopped again. He looked for the mountains, and they were there, appearing and disappearing at every corner of the horizon. The black peaks rose from the river of sand for a few seconds, then sank again. They had become a gigantic shark swimming in the distance, circling its prey. It was slowly closing in on the lost traveller, forcing him to zigzag, to flee blindly. At the last moment it would rear up right in front of him, would swoop, its jaws wide open.
Y. M. H. turned round once more, and thought he saw the black summits far away across the sand, between two dunes. He set off again along the trail, his eyes burning, his feet slapping the hard sand at an ever-increasing tempo. He stumbled up to the top of a hillock, so that he could see as far as possible. But his gaze seeped away on the surface of crumbled stone, his gaze slid straight over the burning sand, meeting nothing on the way.
Without understanding what he was doing, Y. M. H. simply followed his nose, in a strange kind of stupor. He walked for a long time in the red sand, gasping. He saw the ground rise and breathe like a wave. He saw the dunes slide over each other, great billows with foaming crests. The sky itself had become a sheet of sand, had grown dry, hard, filled with hatred. The sun, haloed with dust, glided through this leaden sea. It was an endless road fragmenting itself across the world, pulling forward with all the force of its emptiness. Y. M. H. looked down at his feet, and noticed that the tyre tracks had vanished. There was nothing left but sand, a heap of smooth sand into which the soles of his shoes sank with a crunching sound. Y. M. H. rummaged in his bag for the empty water bottle, brought its neck to his lips, and tried to suck out one last drop. Something wet touched his cracked lips and evaporated before reaching his throat. Everything was dry, here, utterly waterless. The sky, the sun, the earth, the stones were all dying of thirst, but an immense thirst, a thirst so intense that it would have needed all the Mississippi, the Nile and the Vistula to slake it. The grains of sand were no longer soft: they were cruel needles lying in wait, from the depths of their heat, for the tiniest drop of water, urine or blood, so that they might drink at last. The sky was an unbearable blue, the blue of thirst, and the sun blazed fiercely, the full force of its violent heat straining, like a jaguar’s tongue, towards the earth.
Y. M. H. moved forward more and more rapidly, his eyes dim from sheer fatigue. Ever since he had left the trail, the sand had been making its way into his clothes and shoes, and after a time he took the shoes off and started walking barefoot. The fine powder also entered his mouth, scorched his gums and throat, parched his glands. He would surely fall soon, fo
r the first time, face down in the sand, and the black circles floating round the sun would swoop down upon the world.
On the afternoon of the eighth day, Hsüan-Tsang was plodding on, absolutely alone in the middle of the desert. His companion had slipped away, one night, without saying a word for fear of his master’s reproaches. When Hsüan-Tsang had seen that he was now alone, he had understood that his disciple had not had the courage to continue, had been unable to endure such sufferings and had preferred to regain China. Perhaps he would reach his home safe and sound? He had absconded with half the supply of water and half the rice and other rations. Hsüan-Tsang had understood, too, that the Buddha had need of him and no one else, having left him alone, like this, in the middle of the desert. And this thought had helped him to carry on.
He advanced westward, without ever stopping. His robe was reduced to tatters by now, and the sun burnt his emaciated body. His face was the colour of brick, and his eyes had been so fretted by light glare and sandy dust that they were quite gummed up with tears. The sand had gradually rasped the skin from his feet, so that they oozed blood on to the track as he walked. Sometimes the pain was so agonizing that he sat down on the ground, groaning, and wrapped his feet in bits of cloth torn from his clothing. His right hand was bleeding, too, from gripping the stick that rested on his shoulder and that had the bundle of provisions dangling from its tip. Hsüan-Tsang walked straight ahead, over the sizzling sand, under the empty sky. It was a long time since he had placed his parched lips to the aperture of the calabash and drunk the last gulp of water. He had been saving up that last drop for days, without daring to think about it, but finally his thirst had become too strong for him; now there was none left, none in the whole wide world. He walked over the sheet of motionless sand, leaning forward, butting the wall of heat with his forehead. Each time he placed one foot in front of the other, a peculiar noise came from his throat, a sort of rrhan! rrhan! of pain and effort. His head, too, was filled with emptiness, an unbearable emptiness. The faces of mankind had disappeared. Words, their long sweet-sounding words, had vanished across the sands. Silence weighed upon the world like a stony haze. A long rosy-hued grey cloud rising from the grains of sand and swelling the air.
The Book of Flights Page 9