He kicked the snow away from the gate, opened it, and set off in the opposite direction to the previous morning.
Beneath him lay the valley, white and still in the mist. On the other side only the foot of the mountains were visible. They looked as if they were hiding, he thought.
He halted. High up in the mist he saw a gleam of light. It could only be coming from a fire, and he ran down the road again, hurried across the courtyard and into the house, where he pulled his old pack out of the cupboard in the hall, carried it into his study, and rapidly found a rope, some scalpels, a large pair of scissors, writing materials — objects he’d always taken with him on his wanderings — ran down to the hall again, got out a lambskin coat, a woolen hat, a pair of mittens, and a pair of thick socks, put them on, and hurried out.
After tearing away for the first few hundred yards, he realized that he’d never get there in one piece at that rate and began to take things easier. In any case, something inside him knew that he had plenty of time. The angels were there and they wouldn’t disappear that quickly.
He followed the river through the valley. It seemed narrower than it actually was because of the snow, which softly rounded itself into drifts along the length of its banks. Black and smooth ran the water through the otherwise white landscape. He hadn’t been out here for many years and something wistful arose in him as he spied once more his old fishing place. He’d been so happy here, and life, life itself, had stretched before him, although he hadn’t given it a thought, so completely self-absorbed as he’d been then. And he might even have had a good life. Perhaps there might have been a continuity in it, an extension of what he’d been when he’d fished here as a nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old, to something else, and then to something else again, in which something of the former state was always carried over. That he might have lived a life of fullness and meaning.
Was that what his mother had meant? Was that the sense in which he was dead? He had no children. He’d brought no life into the world.
If only he hadn’t stopped fishing that day, he thought. If only he hadn’t set out to explore. If only he hadn’t destroyed that anthill. Then he would never have seen the angels, and his whole life would have been different.
He bent down, picked up some snow, and pressed it into a snowball. The snow was so wet that water trickled through his fingers. He threw it into the river, where it vanished with a small plop, only to reappear again a few seconds later, slowly turning in the black river water.
But then he wouldn’t have known that God was dead. Then he would still have believed that all this had some meaning.
He continued on past the rapids, stopping now and again to look at the snowflakes falling into the river, where for a fraction of a second they remained whole on the surface of the water before they dissolved and disappeared. He was hot, the snow reached to his knees and was difficult to negotiate, and he undid the top buttons of his coat, picked up a bit of snow and rubbed it over his face, wiped the moisture away with a handkerchief, and carried on. Above him the dim yellowish glow in the mist had gone, but he didn’t let that worry him; if they weren’t there, they’d be somewhere else in the valley behind.
He halted at the point where more than forty years before he’d decided to clamber up the mountainside in front of him. It had been summer then, the ground firm and dry, and he, eleven years old, had climbed it like a goat. It would be harder now.
He noticed some trees by the river below him. They must be warmer than the ground, because the snow didn’t settle on them. Wet and bare they stood gleaming in the mist.
If he hadn’t made any other life, he thought, he had made his own. It was quite different to anything that could have been anticipated, and that was valuable in itself. Get caught up by life and follow it wherever it might lead you. Nostalgia was dangerous, it was in league with the past against you. And against life. For you can’t live in the past. There is no way back there.
It must have been his parents’ insane appearance the day before that was making him so sentimental. Dead he certainly wasn’t! No matter what his mother might think.
He smiled. And as he smiled, he saw himself from the outside. The lean, birdlike face, the dark hair, the shining eyes.
And as he saw himself from the outside, a frisson passed through him.
They were here.
Heaven’s angels were here.
Once they had been God’s equals. They knew the secret of life, and they knew the secret of man’s life. Everything about mankind that mankind didn’t know itself. It was in their image man had been created.
Now they were here.
Antinous Bellori turned and began to walk up the mountainside. The going was slow, the snow deep, the path hard to follow, the mountain steep. But after an hour or two he stood at the summit. Now he couldn’t see the town on the other side of the valley. Even the bottom of the valley was out of sight. Only mist and snow wherever he turned. But as he’d been careful to pinpoint the fire carefully from below, he found it after searching for less than half an hour.
It was quenched and deserted, as he’d anticipated. It had melted its way down to the rock beneath. And in the snow around it there were footprints.
He’d never seen the tracks of an angel before, and he became so excited that his hands shook as he opened his sack and took out his notebook.
The tracks looked like paw prints, only bigger. Their toes must have grown together somehow, he thought as he traced them, for they were only just visible at the end of the foot. Then he realized that they were claws, not toes.
He stood up and took a deep breath. So, he really would be able to see them once more. Even without scouring the continent. They were here, right outside his own hometown, and the ground was covered with snow: it was only a matter of following the tracks.
The footprints around the fire were so confused that it was impossible to say how many there’d been, but after only a few yards he realized that there were two of them. They seemed to be heading down into the craterlike valley beneath him, but after a short distance they turned up again and followed the spine of the mountain. Then they crossed it and disappeared into the valley on the other side, where he’d come from, just a little way farther along. It almost looked as if they’d changed their minds. He got the impression that it was his presence that had made them alter direction. That they had noticed him down there in the valley, and now wished to lead him away from something. .?
The mist was such that he couldn’t see more than a few yards in front of him. It was still snowing, and if anything the snow had become even wetter. His feet sank deep into it at every step, his clothes squeaked, and he began to pant.
Then the tracks vanished. He had followed them out onto an overhang where the snow was deeper, and had just begun to wonder if he should go any farther. The slope was steep, and there was a chance that the snow didn’t follow the contours of the rock, but had created its own, when they ceased.
He whipped round. Had they lured him out here?
But there was nothing but mist and snow to be seen.
The only possible explanation was that they must have jumped off here, he thought, and flown across the valley.
In that case they could be anywhere.
He retreated from the overhang and continued down the mountainside. Something told him they were by the river. Not out in the valley, where he’d just come from, but in the side valley from which it emerged. It was there he’d seen them last time, and it was there he would see them now, he thought, although this prospect of symmetrical perfection raised doubts in him as well. But he had no better plan to follow at the moment.