The Crater

by Robert Gore Browne

The storm was getting closer. Crashes of thunder were more frequent and louder. The flicker of lightning was incessant. It revealed, concealed, revealed the walls of the crater that had trapped them. Those old hills, had they ever seen pain like this before? Pain, the only rival in man's experience of their immortality. Peoples emerge and disappear, gods are honoured and forgotten, pain alone endures.

A wind began to blow, cold wet gusts that drove the heavy stale air before them. The night grew darker. A distant hissing sound came nearer and clearer, like the approach of a railway train. The boughs of the forest lashed and waved. The noise resolved into the slash of rain on leaves. A moment of lightning disclosed the oncoming of an opaque wall of water. The deluge burst on the camp.

Norah faced the rain, bending her body to withstand its violence. Her eyes were blinded but her brain seemed to be cleared. Great relief filled her heart, tempered by a foreboding that such luck could not endure; for the traces of the imaginary struggle would be washed from the shore before morning.

Near the crumbling shell of the church tower, which seemed in the tremulous illumination of the storm to bob and stagger at each recurring crash of thunder, naked to the waist, smeared with mud, dripping with rain and sweat, Archie dug.

His lantern was perched on the heap of liquefying earth he had thrown up behind him. Each gust reeled the flame over to the brink of extinction and whistled sibilantly through the air holes.

He worked slowly, but without pausing even to throw off the water which ran over his eyebrows and into his eyes, or to free his shorts which flapped clammily against his legs. As he dug, the rain ran into the grave, so that his boots squelched in the mud and once he slipped, falling with his face in the loose earth he had thrown out. Each hoeful had to be tossed up on to the heap, the hoe held by the heel and handle. His lumbar muscles rose under the strain, catching the dull gleam of the lamp.

When he had dug for a couple of hours, the moon appeared and the clouds thinned to wisps of black vapour that scudded across her face. The roar of the rain in the forest was lowered, till the drip of each separate leaf seemed audible over an undertone of the surge of the waves on the lake. The smell of the earth, wet after seven months' drought, rose and the perfume of fresh green.

Archie clambered out of the hole and measured it depth with the handle of his hoe. Apparently satisfied, he walked over to where Ward's body lay and tried to lift it. But Dick had been a big man and Archie was a small one, exhausted with fever and back-breaking labour. With a shrug of the shoulders he abandoned the effort and taking hold of the corpse by the collar he dragged it over the uneven ground to the grave.

He laid it supine and endeavoured to straighten the twisted limbs. Already the body was stiff and resisted him. So he pushed it into the resting-place he had prepared. But in its bent-up attitude the knees stuck out of the shallow grave and Archie had to roll it over on to its side.

Without waiting he started to pull earth into the grave, using his hoe sideways as a scraper. As the soil tumbled in, he reflected, with wonder and no bitterness, that the face his wife had so lately kissed was now pressed into the cold, wet earth....