He turned again, but whatever lurked in his wake was there no longer. It fitted too well perhaps to the tune of his own footsteps and the midnight rock-shadows shifting across his eyes, and he became confused and blinded on swinging quickly to try and catch a glimpse of him or it. The wilderness is full of ghosts. Everyone comes here when they die, or when life has ripped the bowels out of them. If an atom-bomb drops the shadows will rush in million upon million to choke the living, suffocate those who elected to come here.
Whoever pursued him (or dogged him, for there could be no purpose in ever catching up) wandered through the dream-Arabian deserts of his own mind, in those villages where he sketched the depraved inhabitants of his secret landscapes. All houses were crumbling and all people old, or eaten by the vices of their ancestors which kept the pretty mouths of their daughters half-open and their eyes large. Even the hills on which their villages stood were falling to sand and ruin. This pilgrim who sketched his own world and followed him through black night and bright day played a mouth organ, and his best drawing was an auto-portrait of a lonely, thin, long-haired, half-young, pain-racked figure with a meagre wallet on his back, and a vine-stick in hand, making his way across a plain, the eternal pilgrim, poet-painter, still endeavouring to escape the packed tormenting dissidence within himself, to find another pilgrim with the symptoms of the same disease and totally infect him.
You could not hide among the rocks and wait in ambush for him, because he was as cunning as you would ever be. In any case, you do not meet your pursuer when hundreds of miles of wilderness are spread around. And if during the day he caught you up while you slept, then he could do you no harm, for anyone was entitled to share your dreams and get what they could out of them, and put what they could into them. No matter how long he follows me, he thought, and I expect he’ll stick close behind for a while, he’ll get little enough to eat or drink on this thin leg of the trip.
He walked beyond dawn. Pokers were laid over the shoulders of the mountains as if the sun were handing out knighthoods that would last only one day. They were pale orange, about to merge with each other as the bloody middle pulled itself up among them. He crawled across the map at half an inch a day, soon to turn north and head for the mountains. In a pool of water he saw his walnut face, and the sun burned as if to draw a deeper hue out before finally releasing him.
His legs would not stop walking, and he let them have their way. They would run his soul into the ground. There were no shadows in the daytime except his own, the two of them going along pleasantly together. The sky was empty except for a few birds wheeling some way ahead, but he went on in a state of total alertness, looking for any movement in the flanking hills, and listening for the first cat-purr of aircraft or lorry-engines.
The valley widened, hills far away. In the middle of the plain a few birds gyrated above a black mound, angrily trying to make a foothold among the mass of birds already there. He threw stones, and a score of humpbacked hawks rushed into the sky, so huge and many that he thought they might attack him. One by one they swooped down again at the camel carcass, wings wide but perfectly still before the feet touched down. He stood some yards away and watched, fascinated at this manifestation of natural activity. They tore and scraped deep into the open flank of the dead animal, with many sharp swipes exchanged among themselves as they fought to close in on more tender regions. He walked near and they ignored him, as if no danger could threaten the ranks of their hunched backs set against him. Triumphant and all-conquering, they indulged in a rite peculiar to themselves rather than a common and horrible meal. They fed as if, after a great and valiant effort, they had dragged the camel from the track while it still walked. He threw another stone, but when they did not move, he passed and walked on, hoping that soon he would catch up the people and the caravan to which the dead animal had belonged.
He found a sheltering rock where the valley narrowed, rested where there was shade. He never completely slept, haunted by the thought of fire, the dread of a sudden-opening bomb that would come on like a furnace and burn him into the rocks where he lay. There was nowhere for him to run, but he hoped to hear the warning of the engine and get one last look at life before it happened or, if there was still time, roll into a position where he would not be seen. Dawn was the hour to look for a hiding-place, but he had for once ignored this necessary caution. He didn’t know why. There was no hurry, and it was unwise to let exultance carry you beyond the pitch of mere tiredness, to the insomnia of exhaustion when the shallow sleep hardly brought back your energy. In rest you withdrew from the world, closed your eyes, in sleep but not of it, bound by innumerable steel threads to the stones that ultimately refreshed you enough for another long span of the wilderness.
It was impossible to edge right out of the sun, and his legs and feet seemed too close to a fire. He slept with head covered by his arms, locked in a fever of sweat and darkness.
A cool breeze opened over his legs, shadow and wind, as if he lay under a tree and the leaves rustled. A bayonet scratched the length of his clothes, grazing his skin, tugged as if to pull him from the rock. The shade had gone. He dreaded to see on opening his eyes that he had been caught. His senses swam in an ocean of darkness, then gathered together, separated and became suddenly clear. Reaching to the gun, he was surprised at the steel touch, gripped it hard and opened the safety-catch. Hearing no voice, he expected the bayonet or knife to go right into him. They were not standing close by, but perhaps lying flat a few feet away, watching, waiting for the moment of his greatest hope before striking so as to get the most amusement out of his death. The shadow came again, a rustling of palm-leaves. They were playing with him. He heard a soft noise, like an arm coming to rest.
Opening his eyes, a huge black vulture sat a yard away, hooded, unmoving, yellow and black eyes beamed on him. It seemed all set to sit there for months, though patience could not describe the fixed gaze. Its eyes were as inhuman as its feet, head, drawn-back wings, part of the expressionless whole, two coloured stones someone had thrown at it that had stuck right in and been used from then on as eyes, when instinct would have done just as well, because it looked as if it had no need to see.
He moved his leg, horrified but not frightened, wanting to kill the bird. The blue-black, glossy feathers were unreal, shining in the sun as if they were wet. When he stood up, a ripple went across one of its eyes, and he stared into them as if they were daring him to push down their impossible wall that blocked him from a world he should know about, to horizons of heaven and hell beyond the scattered horrors of the plain that he was already familiar with and only wanted to defeat and forget.
It was the middle of the afternoon and he had slept a few hours out of the day. The buzzard must have lost its glut from the camel, and set off through the scorching bileless sky to find more flesh. A line of others sat along the bottom of the valley like blackened tree-stumps that had burned down years ago, whose ash had been utterly blown away. The one nearest lessened in size, and he levelled his gun. To shoot that head would show nothing beyond the wall of merciless unfathomable eye. Within the eye was a desert brain that craved food from a desert that had none. Its life was a miracle, and if it hated anything it was only the earth from which it could get so little food, and this hatred was a javelin for nosing out the dying, whose digested flesh would let them fly eternally through this hell-sky and sometimes perch on the baking land. If he shot it, would they tear the dead bird to pieces? Or will they gang up on me? They lived on the mountains to the north and roamed over thin forests and wilderness, hunting and haunting all flesh and blood from their endless province of space between sky and earth.