The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [4]
Air or water currents set up a turbulence. The smallest wavelength of this turbulent flow is about equal to the diameter of the desert sand. Owing to this peculiarity, only the sand is extracted from the soil, being drawn out at right angles to the flow. If the cohesion of the soil is weak, the sand is sucked up into the air by light winds—which, of course, do not disturb stones or clay—and falls to the ground again, being deposited to the leeward. The peculiarities of sand would seem to be a matter of aerodynamics.
Hence, we can add this to the first definition as “b”:
a particle of crushed rock of such dimension as to be easily moved by a fluid.
Because winds and water currents flow over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth.
This image of the flowing sand made an indescribably exciting impact on the man. The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.
Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn’t unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust—for example, the man’s beetle family.
While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.
3
HIS head bent down, he began to walk, following the crescent-shaped line of dunes that surrounded the village like a rampart and towered above it. He paid almost no attention to the distant landscape. An entomologist must concentrate his whole attention within a radius of about three yards around his feet. And it is one of the fundamental rules that he should not have the sun at his back. If the sun should get behind him, he would frighten the insects with his own shadow. As a result, a collector’s forehead and nose are always sunburned.
The man advanced slowly at a steady pace. With every step the sand splashed up over his shoes. Except for shallow-rooted weeds that looked as though they would shoot up in a day if there were any moisture, there appeared to be no living thing. Once in a long while, tortoise-shell-colored flies would flit around, drawn by the odor of human perspiration. However, precisely because it was such a place, he could expect to find something. Beetles are not especially gregarious, and they say that, in extreme cases, a single beetle will cordon off an area of as much as one square mile. Patiently, he kept walking round and round.
Suddenly he paused in his tracks. Something had stirred near the roots of a clump of grass. It was a spider. Spiders were of no use to him. He sat down to smoke a cigarette. The wind blew ceaselessly from the sea and, far below, turbulent white waves beat against the base of the sand dunes. Where the dunes fell away to the west a slight hill crowned with bare rock jutted out into the sea. On it the sunshine lay scattered in needlepoints of light.
He had difficulty getting his matches to light. Out of ten tries not one had caught. Along the length of the matchsticks he had thrown away, ripples of sand were moving at about the speed of the second hand of his