Then the captain holds his jackboot up in the air so that everybody can see its shiny leather and he taps it with his hand just above the heel and when they all get near enough they can see the big lion emblem burnt into the leather.
‘There we can see what a lion looks like,’ he says. ‘Is there any animal with such a simple outline as a lion?’
‘It would be just as good to take an iguana,’ maintains Lucas Egmont, ‘iguanas are also very easy. There’s one lying just down there: we could bring it here, remove its skin, and just press it into the rock.’
‘I think the lion’s better,’ says the captain, ‘and there’s something special about this particular lion even though it’s just a simple trademark lion. If you look really closely’ — and everybody looks really closely, but they don’t notice at first even so — ‘you’ll see the lion isn’t sitting on the ground or in the air; the lion’s sitting on a human being, on a freshly killed human being, and you can see from his stiff outline how surprised he is suddenly not to be alive any more. I’ve sat round many a camp fire and never ceased to be astonished at this trademark, at this painfully honest trademark, the lion’s vibrating solitude after slaying his last enemy, the only one to bar his way to solitude.’
‘Captain,’ Lucas Egmont suddenly shouts out, ‘you surely don’t mean we should also include that detail on your sadistic trademark. It’s quite enough with just a lion.’
‘Oh, it’s not difficult in the least, I can assure you of that, there’s hardly anything easier to draw than a freshly killed human being. There’s more of a firm outline than ever before, a monumental simplicity and clarity of contour which has always pleased and surprised me, and it’s often made me feel pain when I think that all that beauty, that delicious purity will soon be lost forever without having been captured by the hand of an artist. Therefore I have to say I felt extremely attracted to this trademark, no matter how sadistic you might think I am, and of course we shall have this man on the rock as well, since that’s what gives the picture its meaning, it interprets our situation so absolutely splendidly. Of course, there aren’t any lions on this island, if there were we’d certainly have heard them before now; but what there is here, for instance, is a silence, a silence so hideously ancient that every little tiny hole in it, even a hole as tiny as the one we’ve made during the four or five days we’ve been here, is such a terrible deed that once the perpetrators grasp the full extent of what they’ve done, they have no choice but to be horrified and try to obliterate all trace of their crime by taking the fastest possible steps to deprive themselves of any possibility of disturbing this silence in future, and in the end the silence weighs down upon our breasts with all the weight of its lion’s body, alone at last, alone again at long last — and everybody who comes here and finds the rock is bound to think: what courage, what heroic courage, accepting one’s solitude voluntarily and without the slightest quiver, by baring one’s breast to the claws of the lion!’
Then Lucas Egmont cries out in desperation, ‘Is there anyone else who wants to commit suicide? Anybody else who wants to carve a dead body under the lion?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Boy Larus.
‘I don’t know,’ says Madame.
‘I don’t know,’ says the English girl.
‘I don’t know,’ says Tim Solider.
‘In that case,’ says the captain, ‘I suggest we all go for a stroll round the island, and meanwhile think about what we want to do. We can assemble here again at dusk.’
But as they are on their way up the cliff, several of them turn and gaze down for quite a while at the beach with its graves, one of them desecrated and one not yet desecrated, its footmarks suggesting madmen have been dancing along the water line, its little grey hollow where a fire once burned, the battered ship leaning right down over the lagoon as if to drink, the ocean as blue and indifferent as the sky and the silence, and the tall strand of smoke from the vessel of their longing, which has engraved itself deep and indelible into the sky, a chink in the door to eternity; they stand there gazing for such a long time before continuing on their way up to the grass and the solitude, as if they would never return.
7
There’s a point in a person’s life which exists so as not to be intruded upon. It’s like a little, blue mountain peak which, bluer and sharper than the darkness, shoots up out of the darkness, and an invisible lighthouse which only operates occasionally during your lifetime and then for the shortest of times flings out a serpentine beam of dazzling light into the night, illuminating it for one dizzy second — just one second, but that’s enough. The darkness itself seems to be cloven by a terrible wall of light and you’re drawn implacably towards it like a moth and then suddenly it’s all over: the light goes out, but it’s still burning on your retina and with eyes burning with light, you grope your way forward to a particular spot whose existence you’ve only suspected before, ready for anything, ready to come up against both salvation and destruction, the whole truth or the whole lie. And fumbling through the darkness but with deep wounds of light, you fling your arms around that little mountain peak, that fortress of ruthlessness, where everything hounded, cast aside, silenced clings on like a leech, and you become nothing more than a giant leech sucked hard against the mountain, while everything you believed was prescribed bites on to the nipples of your terror. Nothing is prescribed, nothing can be prescribed: not a thought, not an action, not a word; that’s the terrible thing about living as you do, without fear in a darkness which you think is definitive but which is really just a respite before the lighthouse flares up. Just think how much you wish you’d been blind, so that you could have been spared this final light as well, this light which is so terrible because its ruthless edge cuts through even the most tightly shut of eyelids — and as you end up lying there in the night clamped to your blue stone and being breastfed by all the forgotten horrors, you’d scream if you weren’t the leech you are: why only now, why didn’t I come this way before, why didn’t I take the strokes I needed to swim into range of this invisible lighthouse? I knew all the time where it was and how the little mountain peak lay in wait, crouching like an animal, enticing with its claws and its leeches which only grew more savage the more time passed by. I’ve known about this for a long time, but I relied on flight as being the most crafty deceit of all; but as I was running away I was constantly aware of certain signposts whose enamel had been chipped away by flying stones, of certain snakeskins which had been nailed fast to the road by heavy vehicles, of certain glowworms crushed by some mad fury and piled up by the roadside, and hence knew I was getting closer and closer to the horrors. Then suddenly it was too late: one is transfixed by the violent shaft of light and in the darkness is a blue vortex which knows no mercy.