The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [297]
Why?
As if to answer him, he could hear faintly the sound of the artillery. It had been firing frequently all that day. Japs go back to help stop attack. This seemed reasonable, and yet he was perplexed. Somewhere farther up the pass there might or might not be some Japanese. Martinez shivered, holding the damp rotting cardboard wrapper of a ration in his hand. Somewhere. He had a vague rather frightening vision of soldiers moving in the darkness, stumbling from place to place. He would go groping into that. He shook his head like an animal bridling at an unexpected sensation. The silence and darkness of the grove were wearing upon him, eroding his courage. He had to move on.
Martinez wiped his forehead. He was sweating and he realized with surprise that his shirt was quite wet and very chill. His tension had subsided for a moment or two, and it made him aware of his fatigue and the nervous shock of being awakened an hour or two after he had fallen asleep. The hamstrings of his thighs felt taut, quivered a little. He sighed. But he did not consider at all the idea of turning back.
Carefully he followed the trail through the grove toward the pass. It extended for several hundred yards through brush and forest not quite thick enough to be jungle. Once his face brushed against a long flat leaf and a few insects darted in fright across his cheek. He flicked them off, his fingers moist with anxiety. But one of the insects held on to his fingers, and then began to slide up his forearm. Martinez flung it off, stood shivering in the darkness. For a few seconds everything was in balance; his will to move forward was frustrated by the irrational terror the insects had caused, the more concrete knowledge of the Japanese there must be ahead, and most of all by the increasing deadening weight of all this strange earth he must explore at night. He breathed deeply several times, moving his weight forward to his toes and then rocking back on his heels again. A dull sluggish breeze stirred the leaves slightly, caressed his face with a momentary breath of coolness. He could feel the perspiration coursing down his face in separate extended streams like the lines formed by tears.
Gotta go. He said this automatically but it released new currents of will. The resistance he had created inside himself mounted against it and then collapsed. He took a step forward, then another, and the effect was broken. He moved on down the crude footpath the Japanese had worn in the grove, debouched after a minute or two into a clearing beyond the forest. He was in the pass now.
The cliffs of Mount Anaka had taken a turn to the right, were parallel again to his route. On the other side, to his left, were some steep, almost precipitous hills which rose abruptly into the Watamai Range. The channel through the mountains was about two hundred yards wide, an ascending avenue lined by tall buildings. It was uneven with rolls and dips, great boulders and slattern mounds of earth, pocked here and there in the rock crevices with spates of foliage like the weeds that grow from the cracks in concrete. The moonlight was clearing the invisible peak of Mount Anaka, lancing downward into the pass and dappling the rocks and knolls with shadows. It was all very bare, very cold; Martinez felt a thousand miles from the stifling velvet night of the jungle. He moved out from the protection of the grove, advanced a few hundred feet and knelt in the shadow of a boulder. Behind him, near the horizon, he could see the Southern Cross, and instinctively he noted its direction. The pass ran due north.
Slowly, reluctantly, he moved up through the defile, proceeding cautiously along the rocky littered floor of the pass. After a few hundred yards the pass bore to the left and then to the right again, narrowing considerably. In places the shadow of the mountain covered the corridor almost completely. He progressed at an uneven pace, loping forward almost recklessly for many yards at a time and then