He hesitates, turns towards the east, goes. "It's there--no, I've
passed it. It's not there. I don't know where it is--or where it was.
Ah, misery, misery!" He wrings his hands in despair and staggers in the
middle of the medley of plaster and bricks. Then, bewildered by this
encumbered plain of lost landmarks, he looks questioningly about in the
air, like a thoughtless child, like a madman. He is looking for the
intimacy of the bedrooms scattered in infinite space, for their inner
form and their twilight now cast upon the winds!
After several goings and comings, he stops at one spot and draws back a
little--"It was there, I'm right. Look--it's that stone there that I
knew it by. There was a vent-hole there, you can see the mark of the
bar of iron that was over the hole before it disappeared."
Sniffling he reflects, and gently shaking his head as though he could
not stop it: "It is when you no longer have anything that you
understand how happy you were. Ah, how happy we were!"
He comes up to me and laughs nervously: "It's out of the common, that,
eh? I'm sure you've never seen yourself like it--can't find the house
where you've always lived since--since always--"
He turns about, and it is he who leads me away:
"Well, let's leg it, since there is nothing. Why spend a whole hour
looking at places where things were? Let's be off, old man."
We depart--the only two living beings to be seen in that unreal and
miasmal place, that village which bestrews the earth and lies under our
feet.
We climb again. The weather is clearing and the fog scattering quickly.
My silent comrade, who is making great strides with lowered head,
points out a field: "The cemetery," he says; "it was there before it
was everywhere, before it laid hold on everything without end, like a
plague."
Half-way, we go more slowly, and Poterloo comes close to me-"You know,
it's too much, all that. It's wiped out too much--all my life up to
now. It makes me afraid--it is so completely wiped out."
"Come; your wife's in good health, you know; your little girl, too."