Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

When he was tired of walking he stopped and sat down on a milestone to watch the cars go by. He could see them coming a long way off, wavering in the air when they hit a patch of heat-mirage. Then they came tearing past Besson at a tremendous lick, some of them sounding their horns as they came, and dwindled away to the horizon again, with a glitter of metal before they finally vanished for good.

Further on still, Besson passed a filling station. At the top of a sort of cement tower was a large sign on which was written the one word: AZUR. The garage itself, below the tower, was a sprawling, all-white edifice, as beautiful as a church. There were lots of signboards swinging in the wind, with red and blue stars on them. Pot-geraniums were much in evidence, and at the entrance to the workshop a wolf-hound lay asleep. Beneath a concrete roof four petrol pumps stood enthroned: square-cut, blue and red, each with its rubber hose neatly folded away, and a glass-fronted panel at the top for reading the figures on the dials, but not in use now, unattended. Not a soul was to be seen anywhere — man, woman, or child. The ground had been sluiced down with water, but the smell of petrol and oil still clung to it. The sun beat down fiercely on all exposed areas, white light striking white stucco.

Besson walked right through the service station. When he passed near the garage workshop, the wolf-hound pricked up its ears, still with its eyes closed, and growled. Besson retreated to the road.

A few yards further on, close to a stream which much resembled a blocked sewer, Besson found a beaten earth track, and turned off on it. He proceeded across country in this way, stumbling as he negotiated the old path, struggling up steep rises, catching his clothes on thorn-bushes, lizards scattering at his approach. The track led heaven knows where, between high thorn hedges, twisting, turning, meandering, sometimes even doubling back the way it had come. He had his back to the sea now. In front of him were the hills with their rough, arching backs. A few houses were scattered here and there among the trees, surrounded by vineyards and olive-groves and terraced slopes. Spirals of smoke curled up into the sky, and animals crowded into the shade behind half-demolished walls. Behind, the sun continued to climb towards its zenith, reaching a maximum intensity of heat and brightness. Light and shade were sharp and clear-cut, as though sliced out with a razor, and there were thorn-bushes everywhere. Grass covered the earth like a furry pelt, letting the heat smoulder damply beneath it. All odours were strong and acrid, clinging to the ground like a second atmosphere. Little by little, as he strode along the track, feet crunching over prehistoric pebbles, Besson made a surprising discovery: there were no men on earth . The landscape was vast, indisputably there , its whole weight pressing down on the outer surface of the soil. It was a mask, a curious celluloid skin which had melted over the countryside’s contours and could no longer be unstuck. He could see it quite clearly now. He examined it as though from the vantage-point of a dirigible balloon, observed mile upon square mile of solitude and brutishness spreading out to all four points of the compass. Towns, squared-off apartment blocks, streets, stations, cars, highways, airports, stadia — all these had suddenly vanished, absorbed by the soft-textured skin of the landscape, lost in those shades of brown, those reddish striations, that fine still graining. And the inhabitants had disappeared with them, had been swallowed up by the sand, reduced to dust once more, not wiped out of existence, simply turned into microscopic entities like any other. Trees, mushrooms, mosses, lichens; grasshoppers and millipedes; crocodiles, oxen, horses, even elephants — all were dissolved now, their substance thinned out in mud and alluvial deposits, written in the soil, brought low by this tyrannous and ghostly hand, tiny spiders in their grey webs, ridiculous parasites burrowing into the pink and bristly skin, and drinking, with their small repulsive mouths, two or three drops of all those millions of pints of blood!

Besson sat down on a large stone by the roadside. He was no longer so occupied by the scene around him. In the bright sunlight swarms of tiny insects began to dance on the spot, like mayflies: he could distinctly hear the beating of their wings, and see the bluish gleam from their backs. The air was still fresh, especially when the wind got up, but here and there the sun’s rays struck home with burning intensity. It occurred to Besson that he would have enjoyed sitting here and smoking a cigarette. He would have smoked it unhurriedly, legs stretched out over the sandy soil, from time to time dropping a little ash on the ground. Then, when he had finished the cigarette, he would have stubbed it out with his heel, right beside the big stone he was now sitting on. In this way some record of his passing would have been left there, a tiny, scarcely visible black smear, topped by the eviscerated dog-end, with strands of yellow tobacco still escaping from it.

Every point in this landscape was worth stopping for. Each little patch of mud and bushy undergrowth was worth one’s building a hut there, and staying for at least a day and a night. Here one could make vast and endless journeys, in stages of fifty yards or so, travelling from one stone to another, from tree to a well, from a ruined cottage to a thyme-bush. One could set off on one’s adventures through the hills, living off the land, picking brambleberries in the tangled thorn-bushes and wild strawberries from the arbutus trees, gathering windfall black olives. Here was a vast continent, scored by rivers a few inches long, with torrid deserts and sheer mountains and forests of knife-edged grass, through which there scuttled lithe and monstrous creatures all bristling with paws and antennae and mandibles. No doubt about it, the earth was limitless. There was no end to the process of exploration and reclamation and conquest. Every inch of these territories was guarded by vigilant creatures ready to fight for their own. They had authorized men to hack paths and roads here and there through the area. They had ceded them plots of land on which to build their houses and towns. But all the rest was well and truly theirs , and woe betide anyone who tried to take it from them. They would raise their savage armies, by the million, indeed by the billion, and commence hostilities on their own account. Night and day they would keep up the assault, wave after invincible wave, swarming over the houses, nibbling, destroying, endless winged battalions that darkened the sky from one horizon to the other, their minuscule bodies eclipsing the light of the sun. You could try anything you liked on them, fire, insecticides, bombing, it would all prove useless. They were sure to win in the end. They’d appear from every corner, marching over corpses, putting out fires, swimming across oceans, devouring, gnawing, stripping back to the bone. At all costs you had to avoid provoking them. At all costs you had to avoid arousing their anger.

Besson lay back in the grass and stared up at the sky. He could feel the densely-packed stems pricking his skin through his clothes. There were certain small protruding stones, too, shaped — or so it felt — like pyramids, which pressed hard against his body. Lying there close to the ground he could hear everything distinctly: all the strange and myriad noises of life vibrated in his ears, yet each remained clear-cut, individual, standing up like a separate twig in the brushwood. The rattle and whirr of insects, seed-pods bursting in the sunlight, the displacement of stones and sand, little crumbling and crackling noises — there were millions of such sounds, no one could ever count them all, however hard he listened. Existence was located here, at ground level: a mist, a kind of warm, milky cloud in constant motion.