THE RENEGADE
15
The shade here is good. How can anyone live in the city of salt,
in the hollow of that basin full of dazzling heat? On each of the
sharp right-angle walls cut out with a pickax and coarsely planed,
the gashes left by the pickax bristle with blinding scales, pale
scattered sand yellows them somewhat
except
when the wind dusts
the upright walls and terraces, then everything shines with dazzling
whiteness under a sky likewise dusted even to its blue rind. I was
going blind during those days when the stationary fire would crackle
for hours on the surface of the white terraces that all seemed to meet
as if, in the remote past, they had all together tackled a mountain
of salt, flattened it first, and then had hollowed out streets, the in–
sides of houses and windows directly in the mass, or as if-yes, this
is
more like it, they had cut out their white, burning hell with a
powerful jet of boiling water just to show that they could live where
no one ever could, thirty days' travel from any living thing, in this
hollow in the middle of the desert where the heat of day prevents
any contact among creatures, separates them by a portcullis of in–
visible flames and of searing crystals, where without transition the
cold of night congeals them individually in their rock-salt shells, noc–
turnal dwelJers in a dried-up ice-floe, black Eskimos suddenly shiver–
ing in their cubical igloos. Black because they wear long black
garments and the salt that collects even under their nails, that they
continue tasting bitterly and swallowing during the sleep of those
polar nights, the salt they drink in the water from the only spring
in the hollow of a dazzling groove, often spots their dark garments
with something like the trail of snails after a rain.
Rain, 0 Lord, just one real rain, long and hard, rain from your
heaven! Then at last the hideous city, gradually eaten away, would
slowly and irresistibly cave in and, utterly melted in a slimy torrent,
would carry off its savage inhabitants toward the sands. Just one
rain, Lord! But what do I mean, what Lord, they are the lords and
masters! They rule over their sterile homes, over their black slaves
that they work to death in the mines and each slab of salt that is
cut out is worth a man
in
the region to the south, they pass by, silent,
wearing their mourning veils in the mineral whiteness of the streets,
and at night, when the whole town looks like a milky phantom, they
stoop down and enter the shade of their homes where the salt walls
shine dimly. They sleep with a weightless sleep and, as soon as they
wake, they give orders, they strike, they say they are a united people,
