It was beautiful to ride out freely into the endless plain. In the west there still shone a reddish glow, into which projected in lacy outline the chain of mountains. The earth suffered from drought; it had not rained for long, and crooked fissures split the ground. Hundreds of grasshopper traps were set up in the fields, and the pits behind them, which were from two to three metres deep, were filled with the insects.
When she reached the observatory, it was dark. The building was like an oriental house of prayer. From a low structure of brick arose the mighty iron dome, the upper part of which rotated on a movable axis. The shutters of the windows were closed, and there was no light to be seen. Friedrich Pestel waited at the gate; he had tethered his horse to a post. He told her that the professor and his two assistants had been absent for a week. She and he, he added, could enter the building nevertheless. The caretaker, an old, fever-stricken mulatto, had given him the key.
The Indian boy lit the lantern that he had carried tied to his saddle. Pestel took it, and preceded Letitia through a desolate brick hallway, then up a wooden and finally up a spiral iron stairway. “Fortune is kind to us,” he said. “Next week there’s going to be an eclipse of the sun, and astronomers are arriving in Buenos Ayres from Europe. The professor and his assistants have gone to receive them.”
Letitia’s heart beat very fast. In the high vault of the observatory, the little light of the lantern made only the faintest impression. The great telescope was a terrifying shadow; the drawing instruments and the photographic apparatus on its stand looked like the skeletons of animals; the charts on the wall, with their strange dots and lines, reminded her of black magic. The whole room seemed to her like the cave of a wizard.
Yet there was a smile of childlike curiosity and satisfaction on Letitia’s lips. Her famished imagination needed such an hour as this. She forgot Stephen and his jealousy, the eternally quarrelling brothers, the wicked old man, the shrewish Doña Barbara, the treacherous Esmeralda, the house in which she lived like a prisoner—she forgot all that completely in this room with its magic implements, in this darkness lit only by the dim flicker of the lantern, beside this charming young man who would soon kiss her. At least, she hoped he would.
But Pestel was timid. He went up to the telescope, unscrewed the gleaming brass cover, and said: “Let us take a look at the stars.” He looked in. Then he asked Letitia to do the same. Letitia saw a milky mist and flashing, leaping fires. “Are those the stars?” she asked, with a coquettish melancholy in her voice.
Then Pestel told her about the stars. She listened with radiant eyes, although it didn’t in the least interest her to know how many millions of miles distant from the earth either Sirius or Aldebaran happened to be, and what precisely was the mystery which puzzled scientists in regard to the southern heavens.
“Ah,” she breathed, and there was indulgence and a dreamy scepticism in that sound.
The lieutenant, abandoning the cosmos and its infinities, talked about himself and his life, of Letitia and of the impression she had made on him, and of the fact that he thought only of her by day and by night.
Letitia remained very, very still in order not to turn his thoughts in another direction and thus disturb the sweet suspense of her mood.