We had even come upon oyster shells, gleaming with mother-of-pearl. And these could not be fossils, could they? There had been no ocean here, had there? And what hermits ate mussels and oysters? Had them delivered up here in the mountains? And the legions of shell-casings on the way up — in every tenth thicket a blue capsule (which one soon stopped mistaking for a glimpse of the sky on the other side)? Hermits who in the meantime were also hunters? Had mutated into hunters? And now also shots, from shotguns, again and again; in the forest down there?
The longer she stood and gazed down into this broad depression, so close to the summit plain (or the “cirque,” circo, as it is called in the area), the more contradictory the image became, less in the sense of off-putting than of attractive: contradictory? erratic, jumpy. Here in the trackless wilderness, to reach the colony below she had to strike out at random, clambering, jumping, also slithering down sandy slopes, then fight her way through, and on the opposite slope, up to the former pass, a real vehicular road in serpentines, this, too, not there on her previous visit to the Sierra, or overlooked. So was the Puerto de Candeleda in use again? even widened as never before, and likewise on the steep southern descent more or less passable, at least with an all-terrain vehicle? But this road leading so straight up to the bare horizon that one involuntarily thought: “Not suitable as an escape route.”
And in the midst of the chaos a helicopter landing pad, not built as such, but already there, a square of quartz and granite polished by the glacier, and a helicopter there just about to take off? no, that was merely the full-sized outline of one, with broad, blazing red stripes, in the middle of the square, intended to mark the destination for pilots heading for the depression. And there was a constant crack of shotguns, and at the same time, as she descended, from far below as well as from the slopes to the right and left of her, people were waving. From all sides dogs came racing toward her for a moment, each of them guarding a herd of sheep, goats, or calves, and they all jumped up on her at the same time and licked her from top to toe.
The shepherds, or whatever they were, who went with the dogs, without exception young and speaking into walkie-talkies, belonged to different and in every case quite mixed races, one with Asian eyes in an American Indian face, another dark-skinned and red-haired, a third with the lips and forehead of an Australian aborigine, but tall and narrow-hipped, the next, a kerchief under her mannish hat, a girl with such a white skin and such black eyes that the two women, when they encountered each other, jumped backward for a moment, and all the young shepherds, not dressed in shepherd style, but positively elegant — which actually seemed even more practical and also appropriate to the circo of glassy, green, gray, blue-tinged rock walls — were intently focused on their work, the result of their not having been at it long — having started only yesterday or this morning. And as they carried out their “shepherdly” duties, they were also engaged in other activities, not only playing musical instruments, above all lutes, oud in Arabic, and steel harmonicas, whose brittle sound went well with the granite, but also juggling, walking on their hands, turning cartwheels on the edge of precipices, as if indeed practicing to perform in a circus, but also following the lines of a book with their fingers, rubbing flints together, tasting the mountain fruits, and many more such things.
How transformed these faces seemed, too, faces one might have encountered on a grand boulevard in Madrid or Rome, in the light of the high Sierra, in the broad-spectrum reflection that deepened and clarified the colors and lines of individual details, which the granite gallery encircling all of Hondareda, as well as the flat ledge underfoot, emitted; a light and refraction that showed the features of the faces not as isolated details, as mouth, nose, ears, but all in one.
“As a visage?” the author interrupted: “insofar as that word can still be used …”—She in reply: “At least for this book of ours you should describe less the mountains or the natural phenomena of the Sierra than the way the faces of people appear in the glow of the high Sierra!”
27
Not that the great depression, or basin, or bowl, below the uppermost rocky crest was thickly settled. And yet, on what was for now Ablaha’s final crossing, it appeared to be full of people. And that impression did not stem merely from the fact that during her previous times up/down there in Hondareda not a soul had crossed her path, or at most one to three hermits.
Altogether, this place presented fundamentally different numerical conditions, or, to put it another way, perceptions of quantity. A scant dozen figures, moving about or merely expelling visible — at long last visible — puffs of breath in the otherwise motionless stony expanse at her feet, made the impression of being “numerous.”
Earlier she had received a similar impression from seeing the mountain goats in this high-altitude depression: even when it was only a single pair, grazing at a distance from one another, the peculiar nature of the location made it appear to her like a sizable flock. Or: whenever a pair of moths fluttered around each other, it looked like a whole swarm. Even the perception of space as one gazed down toward the floor of this supersized stadium, as well as around at the slopes or tiers, was unusual. The body of water at the bottom was at one moment a mere puddle, at the next a good-size lake. The dimensions of the lone building one encountered before the Puerto de Candeleda shifted between those of a vast mountain hotel, a half-collapsed little shelter, or a toolshed on the edge of the southerly access road (or was it nothing but a former glacial trough, full of light-colored scree?). And were those swaths of snow or trails of spilled flour?
She climbed down, down, down, for an hour? for two? for half a day? and yet had hardly come any closer to the first of the rock dwellings, which had at first seemed no farther away than a hop, skip, and a jump, or an ibex’s leap. Along with the confusing — confusing? no — numerical conditions in this Hondareda went measures of distance that at first seemed unconventional, then somewhat amusing, and finally familiar from long ago, becoming, the longer one was exposed to them, just as clear and self-explanatory as the commonly used meters, kilometers, miles, or, if you will, “leguas” or “versts.” As in earlier tales, she literally and figuratively — the path was heading downhill again, steeply — saw before her, after the treeless stretch, a dwarf conifer at a distance of “a stone’s throw,” then only a “chamois’s leap,” and then one member of the observation team, strangers to the area, at “crossbow-shot distance.”
A while later, she again had in her field of vision down below King Charles V / Emperor Charles I, or the man playing or replaying him, making his way without his litter and bearers, alone, hopping “over sticks and stones” with no sign of his gout, despite his almost sixty years, also with no signs of his king- or emperorship, his mouth open “as wide as a barn door,” as when he was a child and stood there “as if to catch Spanish flies,” at what distance from her? perhaps in “paper-airplane range.” And the abandoned litter tipped over among the broom branches, how far away? Approximately a “spear’s toss,” no, “a bowshot” away. So does this make it a tale from an earlier time, too? No, from now (and now, and now).
The observer dispatched from the outside world to the new settlers’ region of Hondareda — who had just jumped out of the barely landed helicopter down below, along with several others of his ilk — noted, however, in his later report that in fact it appeared that up here people had completely taken leave of the present, by even a few gloomy degrees more decisively than in Pedrada, halfway up; a regression was at work here that set them back not merely by decades but into the far-distant past, by centuries, perhaps millennia, actually an “atavism of an atavism.”