Among gray moss was the empty spiderweb, beyond it your copper casket's fragments shaking and rattling upon the membranes of your panting heart!
Remembering that the Pope was killed in Callisto CXX, I wondered whether you'd done it, wondered when you'd eat me, who'd seal me behind this rough wall, this dusty hedge of darkness whose leaves were bones.
So I swept back your hair, but you said: I'm not here.
Where are you then?
When D. and I went to Burma we went by horse. I was not so very sick then. The guide did not have a horse. He was, however, his own horse — his legs being long, bony and brown; his sandalled feet small yet heavy like hooves, his wide eyes set abnormally far apart, almost in his temples. From my mount I gazed down at his wide shoulders cutting through the beginnings of dusk. Often I have been around shy people, and I know that timidity takes many different guises, among them a stolidness or sullenness which some people are deceived into categorizing as a bad disposition. This was my first characterization of the man. He could not understand my speech at all, nor I his; as for D., she hailed from the south, which for him must have been as mysterious as another country. There were many rivers in which he waded knee-deep, then mucky places full of flies and pale yellow butterflies. Wet ferns kept slapping me in the face. The guide, soaked and stained, walked almost at a run, leading D.'s horse whenever there was a difficult place. I could not believe how strong he was. I had just been to Burma a few days before with some Karenni insurgents, and then I had been the strong one because I was tall and well-fed with long legs and so many years of vitamins and meat inside me. This man never quickened his breathing. He was lean and all-enduring and he scarcely said a word.
Bill, I so sad for him, whispered D. when her horse was beside mine. He is just like animal, only working, working all his life, no thinking. I so sorry. I want to give him something.
I understood now that the man was not shy at all, simply unconscious. He rushed along with extraordinary confidence, superbly fitted for what he was doing. I longed to gaze into his face to search for signs of happiness because his strange narrow excellence was so perfect that I wanted it to give him pleasure. But he never looked back at me.
Sometimes the horses lowered their heads to drink from the streams they splashed in, and he stopped patiently. He never drank, although his neck and shoulders had long since darkened with sweat. In her pack D. had a can of soda which she had been keeping for herself. She called the man's name. He did not seem to hear. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she shouted as loudly as she could. Then the man halted and turned back toward her, his eyes incurious, not bewildered or annoyed; he seemed to be looking at her only by accident. She gave him the soda, and he drank it down in one breath, threw the can into the jungle, turned wordlessly and strode on.
I so sad! D. wept.
At the thickening time of dusk the path was frighteningly high and steep. Actually it was not much of a path at all — or maybe too much of a path: —so many refugees, guerrillas, smugglers, and their pack animals had trodden it for so many years that the earth was worn shiny like polished wood. It undulated with ridges of harder dirt and craters made by the hooves of horses, where our own horses now stumbled. Imagine a hand's spread fingers, enlarged and endless, thousands of fingers, going on for many kilometers, and they are made of dirt. The gullies beneath them are knee-deep and sometimes waist-deep. These were the depressions made by the hooves of many horses over the years. My hone was tired now. He refused to go on. He was a wiry little horse, almost like a pony, and when I took my feet out of the numbing rope loops that served as stirrups I could practically touch the ground. I slid off him and led him up the hill, clinging to roots with my free hand, tripping and sliding into those eroded traps. The guide had never stopped. He was long gone with D. and her horse, high above me in the darkness.
When my horse recovered his wind, I got back into the saddle.
