They walked along, up and down the dunes, Ernst continually stopping and Addie continually forcing him to go on. At last, Ernst went down on his knees and dug a big hole with his two hands:
"It's here," he said. "I can hear Mamma's voice sighing. O God, O God, how she's moaning! She'll be suffocated, she'll be suffocated. Her mouth, her throat, her eyes are full of sand. What cruel wretches people are! What harm has poor Mamma done them? The wretches, the savages!... It's here, it's here: yes, wait a bit, Constance, wait a bit. I'm digging you out, I'm digging you out!"
He dug away, with his stick and his hands, dug away till the sand flew all round him, making his clothes white with dust. Addie had stretched himself on the ground and was letting him have his way, looking on quietly with his serene blue eyes, which seemed to study each of Ernst's movements. He said nothing more, finding no words with which to dispel the hallucination. At that moment, all words were vain. The hallucination was so vivid that Ernst actually saw Constance through the sand, saw her lying four or five yards beneath the surface, stuck fast in the sand, with its myriad grains pressing so tightly round her that she could not move and that, when, through her sighing and moaning, she was compelled to open her mouth, the sand at once trickled into it. He saw her body, as in a black garment, glued tightly to her limbs, stiff and motionless in that tomb of sand, in that winding-sheet which pressed closer and closer to her until the pressure threatened to choke her, especially now that her mouth was full of sand. Ernst could just see her black eyes faintly gleaming through a screen of sand; sand trickled into, her ears; and the sand, though there was no room for it below, kept trickling faster and faster, till it became an eddy of trickling sand. The trickling grains of sand were now gyrating madly around Constance like a great cyclone ... and Ernst dug and dug, with furious hands. He dared not use his stick ... for fear of hurting Constance. He dug, like an animal, with frantic hands. He dug away, dug out a regular pit; and the sand became wetter and wetter: he was now flinging out great lumps of sand.... Then, as he dug, he saw the dark body sinking, for ever sinking a yard lower: he could not reach his sister. The body sank and sank; and he reflected that, however deep he might dig his pit, he would never reach Constance:
"Addie!" he cried. "Addie! Help me, can't you? Help me!"
Addie, lying at full length, with his chin on his hand, looked quietly at his uncle, with all the serenity of his searching blue eyes. Suddenly Ernst stopped his digging, quickly turned his head halfway towards Addie; and his restless eyes looked into Addie's eyes. Then Addie shook his head gently, as if in denial, as if to explain to Ernst, without words, that it was not as Ernst thought, that there was not a body under the sand....
They looked at each other like that for a few minutes. Ernst lay on his knees by the pit, his fingers still cramped with the effort of digging. Suddenly, his feverish energy seemed to subside; he shivered and cried:
"O my God, O my God, O my God!..."
Then he bent over the pit and looked down. He saw nothing now: the body was not there; there was nothing but the hard, impenetrable subsoil. Then he listened, with his head on one side, for the plaintive voice. There was no voice: there was nothing but the great subterranean silence. There was nothing now: no body, no voice. He looked around: around him lay the sand which he had flung up, those senseless heaps of sand.
"O my God, O my God, O my God!" he cried.
Addie looked at him, very quietly; and Ernst shuddered under the blue serenity of that compassionate, studying glance. Then, with a jerk which shook his whole frame, the tension relaxed and his body seemed to go slack. But he still scraped some sand together and carefully filled up the pit to a certain depth, so that the wet sand was powdered over with dry, white sand. Finally he stretched himself at full length, with his legs straight out and his arms under his head. He was very tired, especially in his head. He could not have spoken a word. Heaving a deep sigh, he lay staring up at the tremendous clouds. They drifted past like something unearthly in their immensity, drifted very, very slowly, before his upturned gaze....