Stonier grows the way, an eternal up and down over cliffs and through chasms…. The edges of the weathered stones become steps for our feet. Breathlessly we climb the peaks. Beyond them we clatter into new abysms.
My feet bleed. My limbs jerk numbly like those of a jumping-jack. An earthy taste is on my lips. I have long lost all sense of progress. One cliff is like another in its jagged nakedness; one abysm dark and empty as another. Perhaps I wander in a circle. Perhaps this brown hand is leading me wildly astray, this hand whose grasp has penetrated my flesh, and has grown into it like the fetter of a slave.
Suddenly I am alone.
I do not know how it came to pass.
I drag myself to a peak and look about me.
There spreads in the crimson glow of dawn the endless, limitless rocky desert—an ocean turned to stone.
Jagged walls tower in eternal monotony into the immeasurable distance which is hid from me by no merciful mist. Out of invisible abysms arise sharp peaks. A storm from the south lashes their flanks from which the cracked stone fragments roll to become the foundations of new walls.
The sun, hard and sharp as a merciless eye, arises slowly in this parched sky and spreads its cloak of fire over this dead world.
The stone upon which I sit begins to glow.
The storm drives splinters of stone into my flesh. A fiery stream of dust mounts toward me. Madness descends upon me like a fiery canopy.