XXXIII
And I could see Him still....
He was walking rapidly, slipping through the underbrush with surprising ease. And I thought of Madeleine, whom I had seen six hours ... six centuries?... before ... gliding in that same way over the same rough ground.
The dawn was streaking the eastern sky; but the valleys behind the screen of mountains were still sunk in darkness. Nevertheless I could see Him still.... Though to see Him was like touching Him. Those supernatural moving eyes with which I was following Him step by step, those miraculous eyes attached to his flesh doubtless because his flesh was my flesh ... those infallible eyes which made me see with absolute distinctness ... were like two hands ... feeling rather than seeing.
The Man was getting farther and farther away, walking very rapidly now. Around Him I could dimly see the enormous blocks of stone with the smooth hewn faces, those monoliths of geometrical design, rising naked from the soil, which had astonished me on my own passage through them. In that labyrinth the Man did not hesitate at all, but hurried on his way with the same certainty as before....
Around my ankles now I could feel the scratching of the juniper and the briar ... as though it were I and not He whom the thorns were tearing.... And as He kept walking, I grew fatigued, more and more fatigued, till a sharp pain caught me in the joints of my hips and knees....
The Man was beyond the labyrinth of stones, advancing along the deep ravines and precipices which also I recognized from having followed the same path six hours before. Not far from there, indeed, the spotlight of my guide had lighted the faint trail, his cane beating to right and left to open the way before me. Those very brambles that were now scratching the Man’s legs and my legs....
* * * * * * * * *
My cries of “Mercy! Mercy!” had worn me out.
* * * * * * * * *
The Man stopped suddenly.
The glow of sunrise had now climbed to the zenith. The whole landscape was bathed in a pale but brightening light. A clump of tall ferns appeared, masking the precipitous wall of a ravine.
The Man stopped, folded his arms, and leaned forward. I leaned forward with Him.
A precipice was there, the precipice on the brink of which I had earlier been moved to terror. I recognized it, as I had recognized the labyrinth of monoliths, the region of ravines and precipices, the thickets of juniper and briar. I recognized the same smooth wall of the chasm, the same white stones of the river bed over which the deep black water was rushing in a torrent.... And I recognized the same nauseating chill of vertigo.
In the strip of bright sky along the eastern horizon, a first splash of red, the color of blood, marked the oncoming of the sun....
I was striving to master that nausea, that vertigo, when an atrocious snap of all my muscles hurled me violently from my chair, hurled me into the air as a diver is tossed from a spring-board. Weak as I was, exhausted, prostrate, my muscles contracted with such desperate violence that I was thrown up up through the air, to fall two, three, four yards from my chair, which was thrown over backwards by the push I gave it.
I fell ... I fell ... my head and arms thrown forward ... and I lost consciousness again.
I lost consciousness again; but not before I had had time to see the Man likewise hurled headforemost into the abyss, where He fell, and fell, and fell, to be dashed to death on the white boulders under the black rushing water....