the city continues and continues. They are heading towards a high ridge at the eastern edge, hours go by but they seem to get no closer, it begins to appear that they will spend their second night here too.
But then they are on the long dirt road that climbs the ridge and slowly the tin roofs and gardens drop away till they are ascending the final slope with brown rocks and scrub on either side. When they reach the top they pause for one last look back into the simmering miasmic pot from which they’ve climbed and then go on. There is another ridge behind the first and now they are in a different place.
Mountains go on and on, the world of right angles and rigid lines has been subsumed into one of undulations and dips, graphs that chart moods in striations of colour, browns deepening into shades of blue that almost blur into the sky. It is late afternoon. But hot. Objects at the roadside, a tree, a broken plough, wax and wane in the fuming air. At first the landscape is empty, untilled and unworked, but over the next rise, or perhaps the next, there are fields, maybe tiny human figures toiling, a hut or a house in the distance. They stop and rest in a shady spot, it is incredible to him, perhaps to both of them, that they are here, what was an unconsidered line in a letter months ago has come to pass.
They walk and walk, all the motion latent in the vast curves of the earth somehow contracted into the dynamics of this movement, one leg swinging past the other, each foot planted and uprooted in turn, the whole surface of the world has been trodden down just like this over time. The rucksack is heavy, the belt cuts into his hips and shoulders, his toes and heels are chafing in his boots, his mouth is dry, all the loose and disconnected thoughts of his brain cohere around the will and impulse to go on. Alone he would not. Alone he would sit down and not move again, or alone he would not be here at all, but he is here and this fact in itself makes him subservient to the other, who pulls him along in his wake as if on thin threads of power.
They do not talk. There is, yes, an occasional conversation, but about practical things, where will we sleep, should we have a rest, otherwise they walk, sometimes next to each other, sometimes apart, but always alone. It’s strange that all this space, unconfined by artificial limits as it spills to the horizon, should throw you back so completely into yourself, but it does, I don’t know when I was last so intensely concentrated into a single point, see me walking on that dust road with my face washed clean of all the usual emotions, the strains and strivings to link up with the world. Maybe deep meditation makes you feel that way. And maybe that is what Reiner means when he says that night that walking has a rhythm that takes you over.
What do you mean.
If you walk and walk for long enough, the rhythm takes over.
There is a vagueness to the way he says this that makes you want to leave the topic there, this is often the case with Reiner, he offers a thought that’s interesting or profound and perhaps not his own, and on the other side of it you sense a blankness that he can’t fill up, there are no further thoughts to follow on. He waits in silence for you to speak. Sometimes you do, but not tonight, I am too tired, they are sitting side by side in a small cave, an overhang in the rock.
It is almost dark. This is hours and hours after they left the city, he would have liked to stop long ago but Reiner wanted to continue, only after the sun has set does he finally concede that it’s time to pitch the tent, but now there is nowhere that looks hospitable, there are fields on one side and a bare ridge on the other, this is too exposed, it feels wrong, let’s just go over the ridge and take a look. And there by chance they find the cave, Reiner has the calm triumphant look of someone who knew all the time, what his look implies is that he is attuned to the rhythms of the universe,