The Horseman on the Roof (40 page)

They climbed among the escarpments, then through a sparse forest. The day was dark blue. The trees were glistening from the night's rain. The branches were shaking off their water amid sighs. A thousand tiny rills were rustling like cats through the grass.

Beyond the scattered pines the mountain turned into pastureland already red-brown. One could also see the line of its crest and the enormous trees, beeches no doubt, that commanded its summit.

The route suggested by the innkeeper was easy to follow and kept the travelers completely hidden under the trees, in the hollow of the valley, and on the flanks of the hillocks. At the last, it even took them over the crest in a sort of natural trench, beneath gigantic beeches. At this point, the lighter air carried to their ears a sort of twittering or chirping, which might have been taken for that of certain birds. But Angelo, rising in his stirrups, saw and pointed out to the young woman some red blobs moving under the branches a few hundred yards to their left.

It was the soldiers, beyond any doubt. Indeed, a few moments later, a small caravan emerged from cover and began to descend the slope. Evidently some people had just been caught by the guards and were being taken back to town. Angelo counted five or six people in black and two red dolmans bringing up the rear.

Contrary to expectation, there was no deep valley on the other side of Charouilles, but simply a wide basin of heavy, almost mournful earth. Chauvac was clearly visible two leagues away on the left.

Angelo and the young lady judged it prudent to turn their backs on it and ride farther away. They covered at least two leagues more to the right, well concealed under the beeches, over easy terrain and in enchanting landscape. Marble branches supported the droop of thick golden fleeces. The gleaming russet foliage seemed to make its own sunshine under the gray sky. Avenues of springy turf led peacefully off on all sides, between columns, under arches white as snow.

Leaving the wood they came into a sad countryside. The unfleshed soil displayed its bones. There was no mill to be seen anywhere. They scaled a miniature mountain of black schist furrowed with ravines. All they could see from the top was a basin half a league wide, containing a few ancient stony fields and three stunted trees worn down by wind, rain, and frost. Advancing, they discovered a little house hidden in a hollow. But it was empty. It contained no trace of recent life.

They thought for a moment of camping there. In spite of their security and solitude, they contented themselves with eating two eggs, without dismounting, and all the time glancing furtively to right and left. Even the grass was uninviting: hard, dry, and gray, it rebuked even the muzzles of the animals. Flowerless clumps of lavender powdered with funereal ash the bony flanks of the hollow.

They climbed the other side, only to find a whole succession of similar hollows and crumbling dunes. A wild oat, small and bright yellow, which grew in thin tufts between the stones, emphasized the sadness of this region, throwing into relief by its color the lividness of the rocks.

For several hours they followed the crests, looking for the mill in every direction.

“We're lost,” said Angelo. “We should try to find a peasant to tell us the way; otherwise we shall wander till evening. Let's go down.”

They entered a very sinister narrow defile, in which a waterfall sounded. The horses scrambled through dark mire. A slack, dirty stream hampered their passage and poked its way among boulders, deposits of mud, tree stumps, half-drowned bushes. Desolate slopes, sightless and voiceless, surrounded them on all sides. Rivulets of funereal silver stressed the coal black of the marly detritus hemming them in. The ravine widened a little, bend by bend, but without any life other than the muddy water that accompanied them and entwined itself about their horses' legs. At last they emerged into a sort of bay; here there rose a little brown field bearing a few leafless nut trees and clumps of box. There seemed to be a sort of path marked out with stones. After following this trail for some time they perceived, nestling in a thicket of old, split willows, a log cabin with an unhinged door. But there was fresh manure here and, under an iron ring driven into the wall, recent stable-litter. Two planks placed on stones bridged the stream. Beyond here began scrub of arborescent box, through which wound a shadow that might be a lane. It was a track marked by the ruts of a log sledge. A little farther on they found more droppings, fresher than those by the cabin, and the hoofprints of a mule heavily shod and evidently drawing a big load, for it dug with the forepoint of its hoof.

Yet even from the height of their horses, and looking in every direction, they could see no living soul. There was something stale and sickening in this monotony of grayness and solitude. The bitter sap of box steeped the air. The bramble thorns, the juniper needles, the brittle grasses clinging like spiders to every little crust of powdery green earth, irritated the eyes. Sadness was in the country like a light. Without it, there would have been merely loneliness and terror. It made perceptible certain possibilities—horrible perhapses of the soul.

“One should be able to get used to places like this,” Angelo told himself, “and even no longer desire to leave them. There's the happiness of the soldier (his I place above all others) and there's the happiness of the wretched. Wasn't I sometimes magnificently happy with my nun; and often at the moment when we were pottering around with corpses everywhere? There's no degree in happiness. If I changed all my habits and even went back on all my moral conceptions, I could be perfectly contented in the midst of that tortured vegetation and that almost celestial aridity. I could enjoy the keenest happiness in the heart of cowardice, dishonor, and even cruelty. Man is just as much made for these feelings that seem to me from another world, as this place, which seems to me to be another world, and yet here is the trace of a log sledge and the hoofprints of a mule. Giuseppe does not reason like this. Were he here, he'd be calling everywhere through cupped hands or else, from sheer weariness, he'd sing a marching-song to enliven the pace. And yet maybe one discerns here the reasons for never having a revolution. When the people aren't talking, shouting, or singing, they shut their eyes. They're wrong to shut their eyes. I haven't said a word to that young woman for two hours, but I am not asleep.”

Still following the tracks of the log sledge, they went along the bitter flank of a pale mountain, shapeless, like a huge sack. At each bend they rose slightly and at last came to dryer ground. Here began a lane that led them still higher, across a small saddle, and started to descend the other side of the mountain, down a slope slightly more wooded but still overshadowed by sadness.

“I'm sorry,” said Angelo stupidly to his companion, “I'd like to talk to you but I don't know what to say.”

“No need to apologize, my head's completely empty as well, except, two minutes ago, for the thought—which I tried to cheer myself up with—that Chauvac and the soldiers are far away now.”

The track wound through a squalid pine forest, worn threadbare by an invasion of caterpillars, which had hung gray rags from all the branches. There was no trace of human habitation anywhere. They could not even tell any longer whether the log sledge had passed that way. The rocky soil, pale and hard, showed no mark.

They reached a ravine bottom, only to ford another stream and climb the opposite slope. They entered a wood of small oaks, thicker, more robust than the fir plantation, and its dry leaves began to crackle as they passed. Although deserted, this region showed signs of having been used. Through the gaps in the branches and the network of bare twigs they kept seeing the pale empty space, the drab shape of the broken-backed, dismal mountain under the white sky; but they found by the roadside four lopped stakes planted in a rectangle at a place where faggots had evidently been stacked. There were also deep ruts made by cartwheels over the earth banks and crushed bushes. A team had been turned here and wood loaded.

The twisting road raised them gradually, flight by flight, up this slope to the bare crest, from which they could see a whole lacework of overgrown ravines, a confusion of slopes covered with rusted woods, a swelling sea with livid crests. The track wound all over the place without seeming to be really leading anywhere. It could be seen disappearing here, bobbing up again there, burrowing into a wood, entering a clearing, crossing a heath, folding round one crest, reappearing on another, doubling back, descending, rising, coiling, on the move but getting nowhere.

“We're lost,” said Angelo.

“I'm not complaining,” said the young woman. “After all, the danger's been avoided. It's a thousand to one the soldiers never come here, and as for the plague, what would it do up here all alone? Without company? Look at us, standing here on our pedestal: we've never been in greater safety. We are well out of reach. You've got maize flour, and you say what you can make with it is better than bread. There's wood enough to burn Rome. The streams are obviously pure.”

They followed down the slope without resistance, and entered a wood exposed to the north. Half the trees, which were short besides, were overgrown with lichen. The carcasses of dead fir trees had collapsed on every side. Gnawed by damp, they were crumbling into dust and reddish stumps. Angelo pointed out that none of them lay across the little trail. There must certainly be, from time to time, some traffic along it. The sledge and mule must have come from somewhere to the cabin in the first ravine, and returned somewhere. There was no trace of it, but it must have passed this way. By continuing in this direction one could count on overtaking it or reaching some inhabited spot. It had barely two or three hours' start.

The ravine whose bottom they had to reach before climbing the other side was very deep. At every turning now they moved into thicker and damper shadow. Thick mosses and lichens hung from every branch. The deep fold of the valley was cluttered with a whole cemetery of trees. The skeletons of great firs and even of a few once-muscular beeches, now tightly hugging, crowded the narrow bed of a stream, which the track forded. Giant leafless clematis encorded these piles of dead branches and fleshless trunks with their white tendrils. Sturdy brambles, with blue leaves and thorns like knife-points, were peacefully battening on the remains. Held back by this dam, black water lay stagnating among horsetails and rushes.

On the other side, they climbed onto a flat heath, all starred with enormous thistles. The track, till then well marked and even in places wide enough for a carriage, was now reduced to two deep ruts. The two lines could be seen winding uncertainly as far as the eye could reach over this vast bare slope, leading finally to a strange rock with jagged edges. After half an hour's riding they realized that these were walls; and they headed straight toward them, to find a deserted and half-ruined sheepfold. Here, however, there was a smell of wool and of sheep's dung. In the yard outside the ruin, some flat stones were still powdered with coarse reddish salt.

“Aha! It rained last night,” thought Angelo. “This salt would have melted. There were still sheep here this morning.”

The little spring that fed the trough was well kept. Its wooden spout, stuck into the side of a bank, had been recently bound with an iron ring that was still bright.

From the crest nearby they would no doubt see new horizons. They went up to it.

They looked out over a maze of wooded ravines, a vast expanse of mountain rooftops. This canton seemed to be a little more wooded than the one they had just traversed, but it bore no trace of life anywhere. Bare heaths, noticeably gray, which must be covered with wild lavender, and great patches of red beeches alternated endlessly to the horizon, where the last beech groves, blue and hardly thicker than a pen-stroke, were pinned against the white sky. The track continued with its two wavering ruts across this whole stretch of country.

“I think I hear a dog barking,” said the young woman.

Angelo listened.

“It's a fox,” he said. “And it's a long way off.”

From the crest a long slanting descent down the northern slope brought them to the first of those beech forests. Its deep red foliage crackled in the still air. The undergrowth was bare, desolate, strewn with big rocks. The thick branches smothered every sound; the horses seemed to be moving through the depths of some dark lake.

They emerged into a thin pasture. Immediately after, there began a stubble field of sparse rye. It had been carefully scraped with the sickle, flush with the stones. The track led on through ill-defined fields dotted with box and lavender.

“What can we do for the man who sows and harvests this field?” thought Angelo.

He had ceased to think of the cholera.

“If we must fight in the streets,” he said to himself, “and kill soldiers who may perhaps be this poor peasant's sons but who have their orders, we must at least have for our excuse the possibility of changing the face of the globe. There is evil and good here that we shall never be able to reform, and which it's probably better not to reform.”

He felt the need to talk with his companion. They both agreed that this field granted some hope of soon finding a farm. But they rode on for more than an hour without seeing anything of the kind, even from the top of a new crest that unveiled once more the expanse of deserted land.

“I suppose we must persist,” said the young woman. “At the worst, we can camp again in the woods.”

“These heights are not so cozy as the pine wood we camped in the night before last,” said Angelo. “It must get cold up here. I'd like to come to a village with a real road leading out of it, and push on to some decent place.”

“You need company, even if they have cholera?”

“I'm not specially fond of it but, in point of fact, I don't get on too badly with the cholera.”

He told her of his adventures with the nun, after he had come down from the roofs of the town.