The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [55]
In her sleep the woman breathed as if a paper wad had been stuck in her nose. Her respirations were deep and long; he tapped her heel lightly with his foot, but she showed almost no change. She was an old tube squeezed dry of all sex. He fixed the towel, which had almost slipped off her face, and pulled her kimono down around her knees, seeing that it had twisted like a rope around her waist. Fortunately he was completely occupied with the final arrangements of his plan and there was no time for sentimentality. When he had finished working on the device he had contrived with the old shears, it was just about the appointed moment. As he had expected, he felt a kind of lacerating pain as he looked at her for the last time.
A thin light played in a circle about a yard from the upper lip of the hole. It must be between six-thirty and twenty of seven. The time was just right. He forced both arms back with all his strength and turned his neck to and fro, stretching the kinks out of his shoulder muscles.
First he had to climb to the top of the roof. In grappling, the chances of success are greater the closer the angle of elevation is to forty-five degrees. He would have liked to climb up on the roof using the rope, but he was afraid the woman might be awakened by the sound of the shears striking the shingles. He decided to eliminate the testing and to circle around back of the house and climb up on the roof using as footholds the vestiges of a rain shelter that seemed once to have been used as a place for drying clothes.
The squared timbers were thin and half rotten, and they worried him. But what came next was even worse. The flying sand had polished the straight white grain of the roof, making it appear like new. But when he climbed up on it, it was as soft as a soaked cracker. If he were to put his foot through it, he would be in real trouble. He dispersed his weight, crawling slowly forward. Finally he reached the ridgepole and, straddling it, raised himself on his knees. The top of the roof was already in the shadows, and the faint honey-colored granulations on the west edge of the hole were signs that the mist was gradually beginning to come in. He no longer need concern himself with the lookout in the tower.
He tied the rope into a lasso and, holding it in his right hand about a yard below the shears, swung it in a circle around his head. His target was one of the sandbags that were used instead of a pulley when they raised and lowered the baskets. Since the bags could hold the rope ladder, they must surely be quite firmly buried. Gradually he increased the speed of the revolutions and, taking aim, let fly with the loop. It sailed off in a completely unexpected direction. His idea of casting was wrong. The shears had to fly in a tangent to the circumference of the hole, and so he would have to let go at the very instant the rope was at right angles with the target, or maybe a bare instant before. Yes, that was it! But the next time the shears unfortunately struck the middle of the cliff and fell to the ground. It would seem that the speed of the revolutions and the angle of elevation as he held the rope were not right.
After repeated tries, he managed to establish both the distance and the angle pretty well. But still there was a long way to go before a real strike. He would have been happy at any sign of progress, but still there was no evidence that the margin of error was lessening—indeed, to the contrary, his aim was becoming terribly erratic with fatigue and impatience. Perhaps he had oversimplified. He felt unreasonably angry and close to tears, as though someone had actually deceived him.
Yet there seemed to be some truth in the law of probability, according to which the chance of success is directly proportionate to the number of repetitions. With