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By Root 254 0

they had dared involve themselves in such a mad venture. It would be easy to fool a couple of country policemen. They must have taken some precautions to prevent them from coming around on trifling matters. But this kind of smoke screen was necessary and effective only so long as he was healthy and able to stand the work of shoveling sand. It was not worth the risk of hiding a seriously sick person who had been laid up a week as he had. If they decided he was useless, it would be advisable for them to dispose of him at once before it became too troublesome. At this point, they could cook up a story. They might say that he had been seized by strange hallucinations caused by the shock of having fallen by himself into the hole, and this explanation would be far more acceptable than his own fantastic complaints that he had been trapped and imprisoned.

Somewhere a cock crowed and a bull lowed shrilly. But in the sand hollow there was neither distance nor direction. The ordinary normal world was outside, where children played, kicking stones along the roadside, and where roosters proclaimed the end of night at the proper time. The colors of dawn were beginning to mingle with the fragrance of cooking rice.

And the woman was ardently scrubbing him. After a rough wiping with a wet towel, she scoured him as if she were polishing window glass, twisting the towel tightly until it was like a piece of wood. In addition to the sounds of morning, the rhythmical sensation of the rubbing brought him little by little to an irresistible drowsiness.

“By the way …” He stifled a yawn which seemed to be forcibly wrenched from within him. “It’s been such a long time.… I would like to see a newspaper. What do you think …? Do you suppose there would be any way of getting one?”

“Well … I’ll ask … later.”

He realized very well that she was trying to show she was sincere. He was distinctly sensitive to her concern lest she hurt his feelings, which showed in the diffident tone of her voice. But it also irritated him profoundly. Would she really ask? Didn’t he have the right to read a newspaper if he liked? He pushed her hands away, railing against her, carried away by an impulse to upset the washbasin and its contents.

But getting angry at this point would spoil things. A seriously ill person would hardly get so excited over a newspaper. Of course, he did want to see a paper. If there was no scenery to look at, it was only natural to want to see pictures of scenery at least. He had read in various books how landscape painting had developed in naturally spare country and how newspapers had come out of industrial areas where human relations were anonymous. Moreover, he might have the luck to find announcements of missing people; or, better yet, an article on his own disappearance might even grace a corner of the social columns. Of course, the villagers could not be expected to pass him willingly a newspaper which carried an article like that. In any case, patience was the most important thing now.

Certainly, pretending to be ill was no fun. It was like holding a taut spring enclosed in your hand. You couldn’t stand it indefinitely. He could not let things go on as they were. He must really make them realize how responsible they were for him. He would see to it, starting this very day, that one way or another the woman would not get a wink of sleep!

(Don’t sleep …! You mustn’t go to sleep!)

He stretched and gave a long, drawn-out groan.

12

UNDER the umbrella that the woman had set up for him he sipped a tongue-burning soup containing bits of seaweed. A precipitate of sand remained in the bottom of the cup.

His memory had completely stopped functioning. Then it had gotten confused with a long, oppressive dream. In the dream he was astride an old, used chopstick, floating down some unknown street. It was not bad on the chopstick, rather like riding a scooter, but when he relaxed his attention he suddenly lost his buoyancy. The street was a dull red near at hand, and in the distance a hazy green. Something in the combination of colors disturbed