The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [211]
Arriving at the top, he spies Moreira César, surrounded by officers, standing on something, looking down the mountainside through field glasses. Round about him, enormous confusion reigns. The white horse, saddled and ready, rears amid soldiers and buglers who bump into officers coming or going on the run, shouting phrases that the journalist, his ears buzzing from his sneezes, barely catches. He hears the colonel’s voice: “What’s happening with the artillery, Cunha Matos?” The reply is drowned out by the blare of bugle calls. Ridding himself of his pouch and writing desk, the journalist steps forward to have a look at Canudos below.
He has not seen it the night before, and the thought crosses his mind that within minutes or hours no one will ever see it again. He hurriedly wipes the fogged lenses of his glasses on the tail of his undershirt and observes the scene that lies at his feet. The light, of a hue between dark blue and leaden, suffusing the mountain peaks, has not yet reached the hollow in which Canudos lies. He finds it hard to make out where the hillsides, the fields, and the stony ground end and the jumble of huts and shacks, huddled together one atop the other over a wide area, begins. But he immediately spies two churches, one of them small and the other very tall, with imposing towers, separated by a quadrangular open space. He is squinting, trying to make out in the half light the area bounded by a river which appears to be at high water, when a cannonade begins that makes him start and clap his hands over his ears. But he does not close his eyes, staring in fascination as flames suddenly appear below and several shacks are reduced to a shower of planks, bricks, laths, straw mats, unidentifiable objects that fly to pieces and disappear. The cannon fire grows heavier and Canudos vanishes from sight beneath a cloud of smoke that ascends the hillsides and opens up, here and there, to form craters from which there come flying out bits of rooftops and walls blown to pieces by exploding shells. The stupid thought crosses his mind that if the cloud of smoke continues to rise it will reach his nose and send him into another fit of sneezing.
“What is the Seventh waiting for! And the Ninth! And the Sixteenth!” he hears Moreira César’s voice say, so close to him that he turns around to look, and finds the colonel and the group around him practically at his side.
“The Seventh is charging down there, sir,” Captain Olímpio de Castro answers just a few steps away.
“And the Ninth and the Sixteenth,” someone hastily adds from behind him.
“You are witness to a spectacle that will make you famous.” Colonel Moreira César claps him on the back as he passes him. He is left no time to answer, for the colonel and his staff leave him standing there and proceed to station themselves a bit farther down the mountainside, on a little promontory.
“The Seventh, the Ninth, the Sixteenth,” he thinks. “Battalions? Platoons? Companies?” But the light dawns immediately. From three directions on the mountainsides round about, regimental corps are descending—bayonets gleaming—toward the smoke-filled hollow in which Canudos lies. The cannons have ceased to roar, and in the silence the nearsighted journalist suddenly hears bells pealing. The troops are running, slipping, leaping down the hillsides, shooting. The slopes, too, begin to be covered with smoke. Moreira César’s red-and-blue kepi nods approvingly. The journalist picks up his leather pouch and his portable writing desk and walks down the few yards that separate him from the commander of the Seventh Regiment; he settles down in a cleft in the rock, between the colonel and his staff and the white horse that an orderly is holding by the bridle. He feels strange, hypnotized, and the absurd idea passes through his mind that he is not really seeing what he is seeing.
A breeze begins to dispel the lumpy leaden-colored clouds that veil the