And I could see Him still....
He was walking rapidly, slipping through the underbrush with surprising
ease. And I thought of Madeleine, whom I had seen six hours ... six
centuries?... before ... gliding in that same way over the same rough
ground.
The dawn was streaking the eastern sky; but the valleys behind the
screen of mountains were still sunk in darkness. Nevertheless I could
see Him still.... Though to see Him was like touching Him. Those
supernatural moving eyes with which I was following Him step by step,
those miraculous eyes attached to his flesh doubtless because his flesh
was my flesh ... those infallible eyes which made me see with absolute
distinctness ... were like two hands ... feeling rather than seeing.
The Man was getting farther and farther away, walking very rapidly now.
Around Him I could dimly see the enormous blocks of stone with the
smooth hewn faces, those monoliths of geometrical design, rising naked
from the soil, which had astonished me on my own passage through them.
In that labyrinth the Man did not hesitate at all, but hurried on his
way with the same certainty as before....
Around my ankles now I could feel the scratching of the juniper and
the briar ... as though it were I and not He whom the thorns were
tearing.... And as He kept walking, I grew fatigued, more and more
fatigued, till a sharp pain caught me in the joints of my hips and
knees....
The Man was beyond the labyrinth of stones, advancing along the deep
ravines and precipices which also I recognized from having followed the
same path six hours before. Not far from there, indeed, the spotlight
of my guide had lighted the faint trail, his cane beating to right
and left to open the way before me. Those very brambles that were now
scratching the Man’s legs and my legs....
* * * * * * * * *
My cries of “Mercy! Mercy!” had worn me out.
* * * * * * * * *
The Man stopped suddenly.
The glow of sunrise had now climbed to the zenith. The whole landscape
was bathed in a pale but brightening light. A clump of tall ferns
appeared, masking the precipitous wall of a ravine.
The Man stopped, folded his arms, and leaned forward. I leaned forward
with Him.
A precipice was there, the precipice on the brink of which I had
earlier been moved to terror. I recognized it, as I had recognized
the labyrinth of monoliths, the region of ravines and precipices, the
thickets of juniper and briar. I recognized the same smooth wall of the
chasm, the same white stones of the river bed over which the deep black
water was rushing in a torrent.... And I recognized the same nauseating
chill of vertigo.
In the strip of bright sky along the eastern horizon, a first splash of
red, the color of blood, marked the oncoming of the sun....
I was striving to master that nausea, that vertigo, when an atrocious
snap of all my muscles hurled me violently from my chair, hurled me
into the air as a diver is tossed from a spring-board. Weak as I
was, exhausted, prostrate, my muscles contracted with such desperate
violence that I was thrown up up through the air, to fall two, three,
four yards from my chair, which was thrown over backwards by the push I
gave it.
I fell ... I fell ... my head and arms thrown forward ... and I lost
consciousness again.
I lost consciousness again; but not before I had had time to see the
Man likewise hurled headforemost into the abyss, where He fell, and
fell, and fell, to be dashed to death on the white boulders under the
black rushing water....