With the prince he climbs up the perpendicular rockface. There are steps and twisting tracks hacked from the façade. Where no other way could be found tunnels and chimneys were cut in the rock itself, higher, ever higher. This road-making — brilliantly conceived and executed — still continues endlessly. From all over there are the sounds and the reverberations of rock drills, small explosions, pickaxes, crowbars, spades and trowels, the squeaking of ropes over pulleys hoisting buckets of gravel and letting down buckets of mortar. The slope with its ledges, niches, rocky outcrops, crannies and holes, is alive with labourers. Simultaneously however it serves as the favourite nesting and breeding place of several kinds of seabird. These birds are incessantly chased off but they remain hanging from the sky above their nests, or where their nests were supposed to be, with gaping beaks and poisonous beady eyes and the gullets full of horrible scissor-cries. It has happened that some workers were attacked. Usually the birds only peck out the eyes of the people. Several day labourers have bandages over their eyes, or dark glasses. Some of them, tougher than most, aren’t at all concerned about their appearance; their eye sockets are yawning raw wounds like overripe figs left on the branch for the go-away birds. The workers who can still see lead their blind comrades by the hand to their work stations. Many have been posted here since such a long time and now know the inclines so thoroughly that they can find their way on their own despite their want of sight. The whole scene is flooded by a tremendous din: that of the workers and their tools, the yodelling of the eyeless ones, the gnashing and croaking and hissing of gulls, and above all the lowing of the wind through crags and hollows and alleys and around corners. The workers have a supplementary task too, namely to whitewash the smooth pebbles at the foot of the wall. And this duty must be fulfilled once every twenty-four hours (the small stones of Sisyphus!) as the incoming tide rubs off the paint just as the outgoing ebb will suck in most of the pebbles or bury them under a filthy goo. . Day and night the labour continues. At night lamps and torches and lanterns are made to stand in every available hollow or hung from nails and wedges driven into the rock. Then it has the air of a festively decorated pleasure boat struggling to rise above the waves.
For lunch the labourers partake of tomatoes from brown paper bags. When the prince moves up or down the labyrinth all must get out of his way. Like monkeys they scatter up the steepest slopes or go to squat on the ledges; they hate these interruptions and with bared gums they snarl the most awful curses and imprecations at the prince and his retinue. Luckily the contents of their words are entirely blown away by the thundering elements. Some of them moan like birds of the sea.
With difficulty he climbs upwards all behind Albert. In front of them the men clamber out of their path. One worker has large shoulders and jade-black eyes. His name is Angelo Giovanni and he is of Polish descent. Angelo Giovanni glowers at them with eyes like torn-open ant-heaps before climbing nimbly up the rockface along an uncharted route running parallel to the path whilst holding on fast to his bag of tomatoes. When, several metres higher, they emerge from a pot-hole, Angelo is already sitting on his heels on a traverse off to one side and slightly higher, staring at time. The black-eyed labourer takes aim and then throws an overripe tomato very precisely. The missile whistles over Albert’s shoulder and explodes in his face where he follows in Albert’s steps with bent knees. The red meat and the gluey pips spread over his eye and cheek. Thirty metres along to the right a blind slave with neither headcloth nor blinkers gets up from where he was haunched on an outcrop, thrusts his two clenched fists in the air and crows triumphantly: “Holy! Holy! Thus he got his eye back!” Then, with a graceful plunge, he dives into space, and is smashed to pieces in the dizzy distance on the slimy beach down below. Light, which was a skein over the sand, is now blotched. Immediately the seabirds descend in screeching flocks. From up here they seem to be scarcely bigger than gnats around a scarecrow. White wings flapping over the ragged cadaver. Expression.
Above, on the plateau, it is altogether silent. The wind still strains but since there is nothing opposing it or holding it up there is also no sound. You see nothing except this table-landscape which is flat and limitless and yellow. No mountain chain or cloud-castle, neither smoke-column nor leaf-tree nor any other irregularity: just nothing.
With Albert he sits at a chess table while the wind keeps plucking inaudibly at their clothes and their hair. The chess table is made of clear glass but it has no legs. It is only a transparent block placed on the plateau. They execute their moves with intense concentration, without exchanging a single word. He can feel the watches ticking in his trouser pocket. He imagines that he can sense the little hands moving like a caress over the tender flesh of his inner thighs. A streaming silence. Albert has pinned his watch to the crown of his silver hat where it now shows off like a spare eye to indicate the flow of time. There is no one — neither angel nor bird nor fly nor labyrinth-maker — to look at the time on the face of the watch. Nothing. You would have been able to see the fly-wheels shuddering with movement but not to hear their throbbing. A reduced wrist suspended there, which has not yet deciphered the message that it is dead. A scare-time. When a piece — pawn, bishop, knight or rook — is eliminated, it sinks through the board into the glassy depths of the table. Then it shrinks, slowly at first and gradually ever faster, but it remains part of a game with the other pieces. The two players also are moves in the ritual. Invisible threads of correlation entangle everything. All go down in the game. There are different layers of volatilization amplifying and tied into each other, and all dimensionless. The two contestants are manoeuvred. Arrive at a position of tension or aggression or defence in the relation to the pieces on the board and those again to the pieces moving in the glass depths. From the result of each move hang life and death. A game endlessly renewed. Mate, opening, Polish defence, Berlin counter-attack, check. Smaller and smaller. In this way and at this distance there is no difference between life and death.
Then there was the court case. There they all sit, man and mouse, in the sanctified courtroom. The largish room is paneled in a dark, varnished wood. High up one wall are the stained-glass windows (with vulgar motives, he reflects: vine-leaves, grape-bunches, owls with dead feathers, sheep’s heads with glass eyes — the multiple adornments of death; even as those against the walls of the place of ashes outside P — where Wella was cremated long ago, he remembers) which permit coloured light-staves to grope through the musty interior. The judge, an old man with little grey feathers of hair over a shiny skull — the Old One he is called — sits fretfully wrapped in a red gown, cushioned on a kind of enclosed dais built into one wall of the hall. This hierarchical construction resembles a roomy pulpit. It is shadowed by a baldachin similarly decorated with patterns carved in the wood, of the same vulgarity as those of the windows. There the Old One perches, lofty, malicious, as if he could be an auctioneer. The rest of the hall is just the dock. No public, no legal representatives. The accused pack the space from door to doom.
He knows not why he is there. He doesn’t know yet of what he will be accused. It may turn out to be of the theft of a string of jewels, of underhandedness in chess-playing, of terrorism or some such nefarious act. Or perhaps because of what he attempted to describe in the first couple of paragraphs. Or because of a blue streak of which he no longer knows the lapsed meaning. For the time being it doesn’t really matter either since the group of people amongst whom he finds himself (his izintanga?) are seated right at the back of the hall. The benches on which they sit are sunk at various levels into the floor. Some, therefore, can truly be said to be in the well.