32
ROBERT MUSIL
alone in the sky, so it'll keep fine." But he forgot to ask what she
meant by this, for they were already intent on groping their way
further into darkness, which seemed to be closing around them.
Grigia went ahead, and when after a while the passage opened
out into a small chamber, they stopped there and embraced. The
ground underfoot seemed pleasantly dry and they lay down without
Homo's feeling any of the civilized man's need to investigate it first
by the light of a match. Once again Grigia trickled through
him
like
soft, dry earth, and he felt her tensing in the dark, growing stiff with
her pleasure. Then they lay side by side, without any urge to speak,
gazing towards the little far-off rectangle beyond which daylight
blazed white. And within him then Homo experienced over again
his
climb to this place, saw himself meeting Grigia beyond the village,
then climbing, turning, and climbing, saw her blue stockings up to
the orange border under the knee, her loose-hipped gait in those merry
clogs, he saw them stopping outside the cavern, saw the landscape
with the little golden field, and all at once in the brightness of the
entrance beheld the image of her husband.
He had never before thought of this man, who was in the com–
pany's employ. Now he saw the sharp poacher'S face with the dark,
cunning eyes of a hunter, and suddenly remembered too the only
time he had heard him speak: it was after creeping into an old mine
shaft where nobody else had dared to go, and the man's words were:
"I got into one fix after another. It's getting .back that's hard."
Swiftly Homo reached for his pistol, but at the same instant Lene
Maria Lenzi's husband vanished and the darkness all around was as
thick as a wall. He groped his way to the entrance, with Grigia clutch–
ing his sleeve. But he realized at once that the rock that had been
rolled across the entrance was much heavier than anything he could
shift unaided. And now too he knew why her husband had left them
so much time: he himself needed time to make his plan and get a
tree trunk for a lever.
Grigia knelt
by
the rock, pleading and raging. It was repulsive
in its futility. She swore that she had never done anything wrong and
would never again do anything wrong. She squealed like a pig and
rushed at the rock senselessly, like a maddened horse. In the end Homo
came to feel that this was only in accordance with Nature, but he
himself, a civilized man, at first could not overcome
his
incredulity,
