as they streaked through the air they took the place of telegraph wires.
Shoulders rolling, eyes fixed on the tips of his shoes, our leader was wholly taken up with his walking; his steps shook his whole body up to the bristly whorl on the crown of his head; in his preoccupation with his walking, he made one think of a blind man going his daily rounds and familiar with every bend and bump and pothole. Now he began to slow down and his shoulders grew broader. When we overtook him, he seemed entirely self-absorbed and yet on the alert, his ears wide open, receptive to the slightest bird sound or stirring of breeze. Apart from our steps there were no others far and wide.
Then his lesson began. Time and again he would stop, gather us together, and with a simple gesture call our attention one after another to the things of war and of peace, sometimes both in one. When he tapped on what looked like a woodpile, making it known to us as a wartime dugout; when he unmasked the line of brushwood zigzagging across
the hollow as a trench; when he bent down and picked a handful of raspberries out of the prairie grass; when he picked up a quailâs egg; when with one movement he plucked a whole bundle of herbsâa wave of fragrance, sunny-warm, and so strong that it went straight to our heads; when he pushed aside the curtain of bushes, revealing to the left of us a stone quarry that had only been deserted over the holiday and, to our right, a field of ripe corn as green as a mountain brook, its broad leaves waving in the wind; when with a wave of his arm he disclosed a treetop beheaded by lightning; when he made a golden eagle come sailing out of the empty sky and caused a streaky white cloud to grow out of the pure blue and then disappearâhe was merely continuing the process begun when he conjured up the inscription.
Suddenly he broke off, forgot those around him, and pulled out his notebook, the used part of which, blackened and bloated by his entries, was as thick as an imposing volume. The barely audible sound of the CUMBERLAND pencil fell in with the other persistent sounds that intensified the silence; its rhythm was that of a Morse transmitter. The pencil spoke, interfered, argued, asked questions; it was trying to make a point. Though we could not see what was being writtenâthe notebook was half hidden by the writerâs elbowâit must have been verbs which, when we looked up after a time, had acted on the landscape. Every part of it was shot through with a soundless whirring; so that the towering of the cliffs and the lying of the savannah were as much an action as the perching of the birds in the bushes. In the grass at our feet a perpetual greening, in the sky overhead a vibrant bluing, and in between, at eye level, the
forestâs constantly renewed marching-across-the-plain and climbing-the-slope, all its trees, even the dead ones, as though on duty, like streetlamps advancing in long rows, their branches swinging vigorously. What was happened again and again in the rhythm of the pencil, and became, time and time again, what it was.
We too were seized with undirected energy. Each for himself, we swarmed out over the barren land and the tilled fields. Actually, we did nothing, we just walked. We walked singly, rapidly, strung out at a distance from one another, seldom looking toward one another, but when we did, we could be sure that our glance would be answered with an immediate wave, even by a figure at the limit of visibility; no need to shout.
The only one of us to act like a harvester was the old man. He had dropped back, as though we had no need of his leadership for the present, and kept bending over, moving back and forth as though following furrows; retracing his steps as though gleaning; spinning around or taking a few steps backward, as though to make sure of missing nothing; or from time to time just standing there, with one hand on his hip and the other shielding his eyes. When he then