"Throw once more."
Antek finds a larger stone, throws it.
No sound!
"What does this mean, no bottom, or what?" asked Antek.
"Hard to help it! We will sit here till morning."
We are sitting there. Antek throws a couple of stones more; all in vain. An hour passes, a second, at last I hear my friend's voice,—
"Vladek, but don't go to sleep—hast a cigarette?"
It appears that I have cigarettes, but we have used up our matches. Despair! The hour may be one in the morning, or not even so late. Very fine rain begins to fall. Around us, darkness impenetrable. I come to the conclusion that people who live in towns or in villages have no idea of what silence is,—silence like that which surrounds us, silence which rings in our ears. I almost hear the blood coursing in my veins; I hear the beating of my own heart perfectly. At first the position interests me. To sit in the midst of the silent night on the back of a cliff, as on a horse, and right over a bottomless abyss, that could not be done by some shopkeeper of the city; but soon the air becomes cold, and, to crown everything, Antek begins to philosophize,—
"What is life? Life is just swinishness. People talk about art! art! May I and art be ——. Art is pure monkeying with nature, and meanness besides. Twice I have seen the Salon. Painters sent in so many pictures that one might have made canvas beds of them for all the Jews living; and what were these pictures? The lowest possible pandering to shopkeepers' tastes, painted for money, or the stuffing of stomachs. A chaos of art, nothing more! Were that art, I would that paralysis had struck it; luckily there is no real art upon earth—there is only nature. Maybe nature is swinishness also. The best would be to jump down here—and end everything quickly. I would do so if I had vodka; but as I have no vodka, I will not, for I have made a vow not to die sober."
I was used to this gabbling of Antek's; still, in that silence and bewilderment, in cold, in darkness, at the edge of a precipice, his words made even me gloomy. Fortunately he talked himself out and stopped. He threw a couple of stones more, repeated a couple of times more, "Not a sound," and then for three hours we were silent.