THE PRISON
183
candles. . . . There was an ash-tray on the night table: in it were
three cigarette butts: my grandfather had smoked either before he
took the verona!, or before he fell asleep. On the edge of the ash–
tray, an ant was running. It had gone on following its course in a
straight line, climbed up on the revolver lying there. Except for a
distant automobile horn, and the clop-clop of a carriage in the street,
my father heard only the indifferent noise of the little traveling-clock,
still going. Mechanical -and living like that scratching, all over the
earth there stretched the order of the communities of insects, below
man's mysterious freedom. Death was there, in the troubling light
given off by electric bulbs when one has become aware of daylight
beyond the curtains, and the imperceptible trace that people leave
who dispose of corpses; from the side of the living came the continual
noise of the horn, the sound of the horse's steps receding, the morning
calls of birds, human voices-stifled, alien. At that hour, near Kaboul,
near Samarkand, the donkey caravans were slowly proceeding, hoofs
and stamping lost in Moslem tedium.
The human adventure, the earth. And
all
that, like his father's
finished life, could have been other.... He felt himself little by little
invaded by an unknown feeling, as he had been on the nocturnal
heights of Asia by the presence of the sacred, while around
him
the
padded wings of the little sand-owls beat silently....
It
was again,
but far deeper, the
a~onizing
freedom of that evening in Marseilles,
when he watched the shadows sliding in a tenuous odor of cigarettes
and absinthe,-when Europe was so foreign to him, and he watched
it, as freed from time he might have watched an hour from a distant
past slide by, with all its unaccustomed retinue. So now he felt all
of life itself become unaccustomed; and thereby he found himself
suddenly released-mysteriously foreign to the earth and surprised
by it, as he had been after his home-coming by that street where
the men of his race slid by in the green hour....
He had finally pulled the curtains. Beyond the classic scrollwork
of the great iron door the leaves were the bright green of early
summer; a little farther began the darker foliage, down to the almost
black lines of the spruce. He became conscious of imagining that all
that vegetation was violent.
Like a single human fate, the whole of life was an adventure.
He looked at the infinite multiplicity of that banal landscape, listened
to the long whisper of Reichbach's awakening, as in his childhood
he had looked beyond the constellations at the smaller and smaller
stars, until he could see no farther. And from the mere presence of
