The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [353]
It was impossible to see more than ten feet ahead, and they forgot about Croft. They had discovered that they could not hate him and do anything about it, so they hated the mountain, hated it with more fervor that they could ever have hated a human being. The stairway became alive, personalized; it seemed to mock and deceive them at every step, resist them with every malign rock. Once more they forgot about the Japanese, forgot about the patrol, almost forgot about themselves. The only ecstasy they could imagine would be to stop climbing.
Even Croft was exhausted. He had the task of leading them, of cutting trail whenever the foliage became too thick, and he prostrated himself trying to pull them up the mountain. He felt not only the weight of his own body but the weight of all their bodies as effectively as if he had been pulling them in harness. They dragged him back, tugged at his shoulders and his heels. With all his physical exertion his mind fatigued him as greatly, for he was under the acute strain of gauging their limits.
There was another strain. The closer he came to the crest of the mountain the greater became his anxiety. Each new turn of the staircase demanded an excessive effort of will from him. He had been driving nearer and nearer to the heart of this country for days, and it had a cumulative terror. All the vast alien stretches of land they had crossed had eroded his will, pitched him a little finer. It was an effort, almost palpable, to keep advancing over strange hills and up the flanks of an ancient resisting mountain. For the first time in his life he started with fear every time an insect whipped into his face or an unnoticed leaf tickled his neck. He drove himself onward with the last sources of his endeavor, dropping at the halts with no energy left.
But each time the brief respite would charge his resolve again and he could toil upward a few yards more. He, too, had forgotten almost everything. The mission of the patrol, indeed even the mountain, hardly moved him now. He progressed out of some internal contest in himself as if to see which pole of his nature would be successful.
And at last he sensed that the top was near. Through the web of jungle foliage he could perceive sunlight as though they were approaching the exit of a tunnel. It spurred him on, yet left him exhausted. Each step he took closer to the summit left him more afraid. He might have quit before they reached it.
But he never had the opportunity. He reeled over a rock, saw a light-tan nest shaped something like a football, and in his fatigue he smashed into it. Instantly, he realized what the nest was, but too late. An uproar burst in it and a huge hornet, about the size of a half dollar, fluttered out, and then another and another after it. He watched dumbly as dozens of them flickered about his head. They were large and beautiful with great yellow bodies and iridescent wings; afterward he exhumed the memory as something completely apart from what followed.
The hornets were furious, and in a few seconds they raced down the line of men like a burning fuse. Croft felt one of them flutter at his ear, and he struck at it with a grunt, but it had stung him. The pain was maddening; it numbed his ear like frostbite, and traveled through his body with an acute shock. Another stung him and another; he bellowed with pain and struck at them frenziedly.
For the platoon this was the final unbearable distress. Perhaps five seconds they stood rooted, flailing dumbly at the hornets that attacked them. Each sting lashed through a man's body, loosing new frantic energies of desperation. The men were in delirium. Wyman began to bawl like a child, holding feebly to a rock, and swatting at the air in a tantrum.
"I can't stand it, I can't stand it!" he roared.
Two hornets bit him