Jean Giono - Hill

“Let’s go.”

•

After he lost his grip on Jaume’s jacket, Gagou ran frantically through the smoke. He was wailing with fright. Now all at once he’s come to a standstill, wonderstruck and trembling with joy. A long strand of saliva drools from his lips.

The dense curtain has parted. Right in front of him, ten junipers are burning all at once. It’s over quickly. The flame continues to leap skyward, but now it’s like ten golden candelabras glittering. All the branches are glowing embers, even the twigs, even the fine netting of stems and veins in the leaves. They’re still standing upright like living trees, but instead of dark, motionless wood they’re fiery worms that undulate and twist, coil up, unwind with a light, clear, crackling sound. It’s pretty.

“Ga, gou…”

He comes nearer, holds his hand out, and, in spite of the fire that’s gripping his feet like a vise, he enters the land of a thousand golden candelabras.

•

The women weren’t ready for this. It was far away, this fire, and now, all of a sudden, here they are, the men, tumbling down on top of them: “Hurry, cover up the windows with wet sheets, and everybody get inside.” Next they set to hacking with all their might to open a ditch in front of the houses. Arbaud is slashing away at the dry grass and at the thatch of abandoned grain with big, rage-filled strokes of his scythe, off balance, as though he were drunk or crazed.

Babette is crying. Marguerite is sniffing back tears. Only Ulalie has disobeyed orders. She’s gone back outside and now, along with the men, she’s hacking at the grasses and the undergrowth with her sickle to help clear an open space in front of the Bastides.

Jaume looks like he has a hundred arms. The grayish, sticky air must be distorting appearances, because he looks gigantic and mobile, like a prehistoric lizard. He’s everywhere at once: He pounds with his pickaxe, he runs, he yells out words that the rest can’t understand but are glad to hear anyways.

“What a man!” thinks Maurras.

Yes, but if Jaume is battling with so much fury, the poor devil, he must have felt fear stirring deep within himself. In the midst of his activity he’s able to forget about it.

As long as he was at a distance from the Bastides, he was battling only against the blaze. A blaze — it’s something natural.

A short while ago, when he got back, the first thing he saw was Janet’s bedroom window, Janet’s bed, and the white mound marking Janet’s body.

Now he’s seen into the heart of the matter. The crux, the hub of the relentless wheel is this little heap of bone and flesh: Janet. All at once he’s seen earth’s life-force spurting up all around him in leaps of hares, sprays of rabbits, flights of birds. Right under his feet, earth swarms with wild things. The clicking of grasshoppers raises a clatter, clouds of wasps whine and drone. Over there, spread-eagled over that decayed mushroom cap, a praying mantis darts its long, saw-toothed proboscis toward the flame. A crazed dung-beetle puffs its wings up against a tree trunk. Streams of worms ripple under the grass. Any kind of creature that knows anything at all is taking flight.

“Before long we’ll be completely on our own. The whole hill has turned against us, the whole huge body of the hill. This hill that’s curved like a yoke that’s going to smash our heads. I see it. Now I see it. Now I know what I’ve been afraid of since this morning. Janet, hah, you dirty bastard, you’ve pulled it off.”

A burst of anger straightens him up.

“And what about us now, don’t we count?”

He grabs his flail. His fist tightens around the wooden handle. Power runs through his arm, in clearly defined ripples. Pins and needles run through his flesh.

He walks over the flame. Under his feet, the grass scorches.

“Ah, now I’ve found you out at last, you rotten swine.”

He strikes at the hill with his big flail. The flame shrinks back around him. A black patch smokes where the boxwood flail-head lands.

“Dirty good for nothing.”

The blows ring out. It looks like the bruised and battered hill is finally going to be defeated.

“Jaume, Jaume!…”

Maurras is running after him, grabs him by the shoulders, shakes him as if he’s trying to bring him back to his senses:

“Are you crazy? You mean you can’t see it?”

The time has come: the cunning flame has spun its opponent around. In another moment it will be closing its gaping, gold-toothed maw around him.

In one bound Jaume gets clear.

“Light the backfire.”

Ah, the lighting of the fire that’s our friend, not our foe. It’s ready to take off from our feet, crouching over the ground like a warrior preparing to charge. Look: It strangles our enemy, knocks it down, smothers it.

But ah, what rotten luck, now both fires are raging together and turning back on top of us.

A terrible rumbling makes the sky shudder. The earth monster is awakening. It’s making its massive, granite limbs grind to the very center of heaven.

Maurras throws his pickaxe to the ground and takes off on the run.

Arbaud’s scythe rings out as he hurls it full force onto the stones.

A door bangs. Windows crash down.

Behind all the uproar, the cries of women.

“Father, father…”

The leaves of the big oak are crackling.

So, is the whole world really falling to pieces?

Jaume, his legs worn out, his head sagging, collapses.

“You dirty whore!” he says as he falls. He pounds fiercely at the hill with his bare fists.

•

Honestly, he thought he was dead. He had glimpses of brimstone and cypresses.

He lay stretched out on his back, short of breath. The air, avoiding his lips, passed by his mouth like a wall. All the little life-bearing packets were dancing on the frantic currents of his blood. Big swirls of blood were stirring up sprawling seaweed: his wife, hanged in front of the attic skylight with a triangle of dawn planted on her wine-dark face; the movement of his daughter’s lips, so, so petite, ever so petite, when she mouthed “Papa” for the first time. Then a mass of smoke came pouring down on top of him and he thought: “It’s all over.”

Afterward, suddenly: silence and sunlight. And now he’s found himself alive.

He wasn’t altogether certain of it. For a moment it seemed to him that death had hardly changed him at all, but then, right away, he realized he wasn’t really dead.

He’s gotten back up on his feet and he’s checked on the Bastides. They’re still standing. The oak is a bit singed. And the roof of one of the outbuildings is still smoking. But it’s sure to go out by itself.

In the blink of an eye, he figures out what’s happened: A tongue of the backfire, propelled by the main mass of the flames, must have leaped across the open ground and rushed down on top of the houses. The main river of fire, that did get diverted all the same, is now flowing away to the left of them.

They are saved.

Ulalie runs across the square. It’s still swamped in smoke. Only half her body emerges out of it.

“Nothing to worry about, father?”

“No, daughter.”

Maurras, laughing, with all his teeth bared, shouts out:

“It’s heading down the other side toward Pierrevert. We’re safe.”

“And once it’s over there, who cares,” says Arbaud, “it’s nothing but stones, it’ll do what it wants to. We’re done with it.”

Marguerite comes out of Les Monges. She’s wearing a red camisole with white polka dots, the underarms stained with sweat. With her flat feet and her big, fur-lined slippers, she walks as if she were pulling her legs out of two feet of mud. She comes toward them, preceded by the aroma of hot oil.