The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [77]
But the man, beaten and covered with sand, vaguely thought that everything, after all, had gone as it was written it should. The idea was in a corner of his consciousness, like a sodden undergarment, where only the beating of his heart was painfully clear. The woman’s arms, hot as fire, were under his armpits, and the odor of her body was a thorn piercing his nose. He abandoned himself to her hands as if he were a smooth, flat stone in a river bed. It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body.
31
MONOTONOUS weeks of sand and night had gone by.
“Hope,” as before, lay neglected by the crows. And the bait of dried fish had become not even that. Although spurned by the crows, it had not been spurned by the bacteria. One morning when he felt the end of the stick, he found that only the skin remained; the fish had turned into a black, almost liquid pulp. As he was changing the bait, he decided at the same time to check on the contraption. He scraped away the sand and opened the cover; he was thunderstruck. Water had collected at the bottom of the bucket. There were only about four inches, but it was more clear by far—indeed it was almost pure—than the water with the metallic film which was delivered to them daily. Had it rained some time recently? he wondered. No. Not for a half month at least. If that were true, then could it be the rain that was left from a half month ago? He would like to think so, but what puzzled him was that he knew the bucket leaked. And when he raised it up, as he had expected, water at once began to fall from the bottom. At that depth there could be no underground spring, and he was obliged to recognize that the escaping water was being constantly replenished from somewhere. At least, that must be theoretically so. But wherever could the replenishment come from in the midst of this parched sand?
He could scarcely contain his gradually rising excitement. There was only one answer he could think of. That was the capillary action of the sand. Because the surface sand had a high specific heat, it was invariably dry, but when you dug down a little the under part was always damp. It must be that the surface evaporation acted as a kind of pump, drawing up the subsurface water. When he thought about it, everything was easily explained—the enormous quantity of mist that came out of the dunes every morning and evening, the abnormal moisture which clung to the pillars and walls, rotting the wood. In short, the dryness of the sand was not due simply to a lack of water, but rather, it would seem, to the fact that the suction caused by capillary attraction never matched the speed of evaporation. In other words, the water was being constantly replenished. But this water circulated at a speed unthinkable in ordinary soil. And it had happened that “Hope” had cut off the circulation some place. Probably the chance placing of the bucket and the crack around the lid had been enough to prevent evaporation of the water that had been sucked up in the bucket. He could not yet explain exactly the placing and its relationship to the other elements, but with study he would surely be able to repeat the experiment. Moreover, it should not be impossible to construct a more efficient device for storing the water.
If he were successful in this experiment he would no longer have to give in to the villagers if they cut off his water. But more important, he had found that the sand was an immense pump. It was just as if he were sitting on a suction pump. He had to sit down for a moment and control his breathing in order to quiet the wild beating of his heart.