‘We can’t very well make a statue out of this rock,’ says the captain morosely, brushing the sand off his jackboot, ‘and even if we could, what’d be the point, it would be a waste of effort here where nobody will ever see it.’
‘You’re forgetting the birds, captain, and the iguanas,’ says Lucas Egmont, who’s suddenly got such a burning desire to burst out laughing, he’d really like to lie outstretched on the ground, all alone with the sun and the cloud, and just roar with laughter, make fun of the ridiculous lunacy which makes six people already condemned to death, six people who have already got used to the hard padding of the electric chair, six people who have already got a thin, sharp line straight across the back of their necks because they’ve so often felt the axe tickling them, negotiating over a rock, worrying about how a useless bit of rock flung out at random somewhere or other in the world should be used. Pointless indeed, so pointless, so disgustingly pointless — but as he sits there looking down at the rock, he notices how the silence has suddenly become loaded with hostility, and all at once he realizes he’s hurt all of them by what he’s said, and he glances cautiously at them all in turn without letting go of his eyes and he realizes from the seriousness creeping into their expressions that the rock is a sacrament as far as some of them are concerned, the only firm foundation, the only fixed point in this world that’s rotating so madly. Peter — the rock. Maybe it’s Peter who’s turned into a rock and is offering his back to them as a firm foundation.
‘Would it really be as pointless as all that to make a statue?’ he says, therefore. ‘We could draw lots to decide who would be the model and then make one, always assuming of course that we had the chisels and sledge hammers and drills and crowbars necessary to enable us to break off a big enough piece, and it might only be enough for a bust come to that, assuming there’s a sculptor among us.’
‘It would be meaningless in any case,’ says the captain, ‘since nobody would ever come here no matter what. There’s no point in leaving a statue for the birds and the iguanas, as you just said.’
An icy silence ensues, freezing the air round about them, and their thoughts hang like stiff clouds of smoke from their mouths, even though it’s at least eighty in the shade, and snares of hoar-frost tighten round everyone’s neck — but there’s an unspoken word, an as yet unformulated truth or lie which could redeem them all, at least for a few moments. And Lucas Egmont has a completely new experience: without being the slightest bit interested, not even for a moment, since he doesn’t need to feel thirsty just now, in the kind of salvation which needs a rock in order to be realized, indeed, without being especially interested for a single moment in salvation in any shape or form, since he’s convinced or at any rate posits that the only thing which could make a human being seek a way out of the jungle that is this world is total, clearly acknowledged awareness that no salvation is possible on the grounds that a jungle is a jungle is a brutal jungle, that is, without having any sympathy at all for the hunger or salvation shining forth from the eyes of several others here present, he suddenly feels an irresistible desire to express the blessed opinion which everyone except the captain — that man with his perverted ideas about solitude — is longing to hear, he wants to be a medium, an anti-spiritualist medium, and suddenly he discovers the enemy that is his and everyone else’s. He leans over towards the captain and glares short-sightedly, and anyone who can’t detect the animosity in this gaze must have been blind for a hundred years, it’s like staring at an old suit of armour where four hundred years of solitude stare at you from under the rusty visor, while the memories of the knight’s hate-filled eyes during the battle are still glinting in the eye-slits.
Oh, captain, he thinks, what an old suit of armour you are, what an old, empty suit of armour. All your life you’ve been going around like a suit of armour without a knight. Someone wanted to stroke your brow and you said: One moment, I’ll just lower my visor; someone wanted to feel your heart beating, and you replied scornfully: you’ll need a sword for that, and someone fetched a sword and thrust it through you and it just came out of the back-plate without doing you any harm at all, well, maybe it would rain in through the hole, but that’s not much of a risk as rain doesn’t often fall horizontally when all’s said and done. You couldn’t bleed because suits of armour have some trouble in doing that and you were proud of it and you were happy to be an empty suit of armour, since empty suits of armour have such a good time: they’re lonely and they’ll always be so, and in their solitude empty suits of armour can hear all the singing inside them and round about them. Old hunting horns are tooting away, and the ancient cries of falconers, long since forgotten, are once more echoing through the air and suddenly the whole suit of armour is filled with the noises that used to be heard in the days when the armour was alive, in the days when the armour was full of life, of flesh that could bleed, of limbs that could writhe in agony, of rattles and screams of terror, and the shrieks and the old noises rise and fall through the empty suit of armour and there is such a marvellous singing and vibrating inside it. It has no heart, you see, it can only feel vibrations as if they were wonderfully beautiful music, and it misses out completely on all the angst in them, the fear of death and the hatred of life: there’s nothing more stupid than the solitude of an empty suit of armour.
But above all it’s through your severe eyeslits, captain, that we can see you’re proud of being an empty suit of armour; an empty suit of armour can’t be afraid, for instance, it can wander through any forest you like without being worried, without being afraid that a snake might wriggle up through the heather and wrap itself around its leg. You think it’s an advantage, an enormous advantage not to be able to feel afraid, and in your emptiness you are laughing away at all the many people who are terrified at the prospect of dying of hunger, dying of thirst, dying of loneliness, dying of paralysis, dying of wounds, but if you pause and think about it then maybe it’s not as much of an advantage as you think. Your lack of fear isn’t in fact due to your store of courage, but rather to your inability to feel anything at all, to your not being able to feel anything because you haven’t had anything to feel with for the last four hundred years, and your memories of the time when the armour was bristling with life just fill you with ridicule and sterile defiance.
That’s why it’s right to say to you what someone once said to somebody else: I say unto you, the man who fears not life shall not love life, the man who does not harbour fear, neither shall he harbour courage, the man who fears not death shall not be enabled to die with dignity, the man who fears not himself, neither shall he love another. But let’s not talk about that, captain, you can’t be opened up with words, you can only be opened up with a tin opener or a five-inch nail, and when you have been opened up, people will only wonder why they bothered.
Perhaps the suit of armour heard what he’s been thinking, for suddenly the captain looks him in the eye, thrusts his gaze into Lucas Egmont’s eye like a lance and breaks it and leaves it sticking there and suddenly they’re united by a warm current of animosity. Lucas Egmont would like to sit close up to him and clutch his arm and his hands and thank him for giving him his animosity. After all, it’s so comforting to know one has a steadfast enemy in this vacillating world. And eventually, the next minute or in an hour’s time or some time before darkness falls, they’ll face up to each other and they both feel that strange feeling of dull gratitude and fear that grips you just before a terrible confrontation.