And when Madame and the English girl return from their secret excursion to the inland part of the island and one of the three men sitting in the shadow of the cliff, their hands and arms covered in dried grey sand, suddenly remembers how full of hatred a hand was as it moved down against a hip, they stop in surprise at the sight of the two low sandhills that have appeared on the beach.
‘He got a decent burial, nobody can deny that,’ says Tim Solider, and he’s forgotten all about keeping his distance now that so many horrible things are behind them.
‘He passed away from us so quickly,’ says the captain, anybody would think he’d got sunstroke, he’d stopped walking over to the boxer, and all the sand he carried he just flung over the emptied water keg, it was as if he were even less able to bear the sight of that than of the dead body. He worked like a slave to get it covered up and in the end he was crawling on all fours between the tank and the water with sand in his hands, and when we tried to help him up he squirmed like a snake and kept yelling that we ought to let him go because he was just as dead as we were, he just yelled. Anybody would think he was the one who’d done it, nobody knows any more, knows nothing, knows nothing about that.
Then Madame goes up to Lucas Egmont who’s lying outstretched like a gravestone on the grave over the water keg and his body is all limp when she tries to lift him up.
‘We ought to try and get him into the shade at least,’ she says. It’s just then she notices the white rock, and she lets him slump back on to the sand and wades out into the water and bends down and strokes it, for under the sand they have carried away to make the graves is a shimmering white rock, but none of them had noticed.
‘You must have been blind,’ she says, brushing the sand off it, ‘you must have been blind as bats.’
She’s no idea how blind they are.
5
The white rock is quite different from what they had first thought. They imagine it starts at the spot where Madame discovered it and then runs out towards the middle of the lagoon, covered with a thin layer of sand; but when they scrape away the sand with their weary hands, they find it takes off in a quite different and unexpected direction, and suddenly they’re all possessed by a powerful, compulsive desire to uncover the whole of the white rock, and to persuade it to reveal its white secrets. Indeed, they’re all so keen to get to work that they kneel down in the water and start digging away the sand with urgent movements of the hands.
It’s already less hot than it was and the water in the lagoon is motionless. There’s a slight breeze higher up and they can hear the panicles of the grass rustling, a single iguana is falling from one stone to another, and although the sea is so near it sounds as though it’s in the far distance, swishing like an invisible waterfall from a point beyond the horizon. The closest noise is Lucas Egmont’s voice as he talks in his sleep. They’ve put him in the shade next to the cliff, and he’s still asleep, lying on his stomach, and convinced he’s on the water keg’s grave; from time to time he says, quite clearly: I want to be crucified, and he seems to be groaning with happiness.
There are five of them kneeling in the water, digging, and they’re working so doggedly, so self-sufficiently, as if what’s lying hidden under the coarse sand is the soul of the world, the solution to the riddle of earthly suffering, and they’ve forgotten about everything else apart from this warm, shallow water and this sand which is still hot when it fills their cupped hands, and the white rock whose whiteness grows more and more dazzling the closer to land its nakedness shines upon them.
And they’ve forgotten everything else, in fact: little mouse, says the grey cat of fear, little mouse, go and run around in the grass for a while, forget my mouth, forget my claws, let the sharp, white teeth hovering over you be swallowed up by the twilight. Little mouse, dear little mouse, let me stop torturing you for five minutes or twelve minutes or two hours or three days, run as far as you have time for, run as far as you can manage, run as far as you dare! Run through the clear night whose brightest stars are my eyes, they’ll light you up for as long as you deserve, run through the dewy morning and don’t worry about who’s forcing the grass apart just behind you, run through the long, sunny day and seek oblivion in my merciful shadow which is following you all day long, just as faithfully as your own! And never complain about the loyalty of fear, little mouse, but do so occasionally about your own disloyalty whose only excuse is that it won’t last any longer than I let it.
They’re working away now lustily and energetically, as if they were digging a canal leading to their rescue; they’ve stopped using their hands as they’re not efficient enough, the rock goes down deeper the closer it gets to land, and the captain is scooping sand with his jackboot while Boy Larus and Tim Solider are using their canvas shoes, which means they have two tools each and in order to make the work go more quickly — needless to say they hope the rock will prove to be endless and they’ll still be working away stubbornly when the liberator comes with his teeth and claws — the women’s job is to empty the filled receptacles in the deeper water beyond the far tip of the rock, and a circular membrane of sand rests like a blind eye on the placid surface of the lagoon and this eye is the only happy eye on the whole island. They can’t see the shadowy ruins of the stranded ship which has sunk to the bottom of the lagoon, nor the graves on the beach over two hopes which no one had expected anything of and which are therefore mourned all the more deeply, nor the fire which is slowly going out because no one has felt cold for such a long time, nor the images of terror which keep on flitting like bats across their field of vision, images of what each of them fears most grinning scornfully down at them even though they persist in gazing down at the sand and the water.
Suddenly the rock rises up quite steeply, just at the point where land and water meet, and at the same time it gets thinner and shoots off almost at right angles and about three feet across, towards the cliff; it’s only a few inches into the sand now, so shallow that everyone’s surprised they haven’t stumbled over it at some time during the few days they’ve been on the island. The women come up from out of the water and stand behind the men and gaze down on their naked backs, burnt brown by the sun and glistening as hard as an iguana skin, and the men’s hands are working like pistons as they brush away the sand which is steaming in the heat, and the rock emerges more dazzlingly white and clearer and smoother and more polished than ever, like a woman’s back.