The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [250]
Martinez led the way like an arrow shot across the field. Most of the time the grass was too tall for him to see, but he directed himself by the sun, never pausing for a moment. It took them only twenty minutes to cross the valley, and then after a short break they trudged over the hills again. Here, the tall grass was welcome, for they grasped tufts of it to aid their ascent, and slowed their fall by clutching it on the downslopes of the hills. The sun continued to beat on them.
Their first fear of being observed by enemy troops had ebbed in the physical demands of the march, but a new and subtler terror began to obsess them. The land extended so far, was so completely silent, that they became acutely conscious of its unexplored weight, its somnolent brooding resistance. They remembered a rumor that natives had once lived in this portion of the island, and had died decades ago in a plague of scrub typhus, the survivors moving to another island. Until now they had never thought about the natives except to miss their labor, but in the vast buzzing silence of the sun and the hills the men forced themselves onward in nervous spasms, halting and starting, their limbs quivering with exertion. Martinez led them at a cruel pace as if pursued. Even more than the others, he was awed by the thought of the men who had lived on this island and died. It seemed sacrilegious to him to move through this empty land disturbing the long untrampled earth.
Croft experienced it in a different way. The land was foreign to him, and spawned a deep instinctive excitement at the thought that no one had trod this earth for many years. He had always known land well; he knew by heart every rock outcropping on every hill for miles about his father's ranch, and this country, unexplored, appealed to him deeply. Each new vista that the summit of a hill might furnish him was gratifying. It was all his, all terrain which he could patrol with the platoon.
And then he remembered Hearn, and shook his head. Croft was like a high-spirited horse, unused to the bit, reminded he was no longer free by an occasional harsh pressure on his jaws. He turned around and spoke to Red, who was behind him. "Pass this back. Tell them to snap it up."
The order passed through the column, and the men moved forward even more quickly. As they progressed farther away from the jungle their fear mounted, each hill behind them an added obstacle to their return. The platoon propelled itself with a nervous dread. They marched for three hours with only a few halts, lashed by the silence, forcing themselves onward in a tacit accord. At dusk, when they halted for their night's bivouac, the strongest men in the platoon were drained and overtired, and the weaker ones were close to collapse. Roth lay on the ground for half an hour without moving, his hands and legs twitching uncontrollably. Wyman lay hunched over, retching emptily. They had continued for the last two hours only through their fear of being left behind; their nerves had charged them temporarily with a spurious energy, and now that they had halted they felt too weak, their fingers were too numb, to undo the buckles on their packs and withdraw their blankets for the night.
None of the men talked. Grouped together in a rough circle against the coming night, those who could stomached their rations, drank their water, and spread out their bedding. They had bivouacked in a hollow near the crest of a hill, and before it was dark Hearn and Croft hiked through a small orbit from the bivouac to determine the best place to post a guard. Thirty yards above the men, at the top of the hill, they looked out at the terrain they would have to cross the next day. For the first time since they had entered the jungle, they were able to see Mount Anaka again. It was closer than they had ever seen it before, although the peak must have been twenty miles away. But past the valley beneath them, the yellow hills extended only a short distance before altering into darker tans and browns and the gray-blue of rock. In the evening a haze