Cobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

Suddenly he felt as though he were melting away from his feet upward into a landscape of flame. But something like a perpetual shaft of ice remained in the center of his body. He felt ashamed in some way. An animal-like woman… thinking only in terms of today… no yesterday, no tomorrow… with a dot for a heart. A world where people were convinced that men could be erased like chalk marks from a blackboard. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined that such barbarism still existed anywhere in the world. Well, anyway… if this was a sign that he was beginning to regain his composure and recover from his initial shock, his qualms of conscience were not a bad thing.

But he must not waste time. If possible, he would like to finish before it got dark. Squinting, he measured the height of the sand wall quivering behind a film of heat waves like molten glass. Every time he looked at it, it seemed to grow higher. It would be hard to go against nature and try to make a gentle slope abrupt — he only wanted to try to make a steep one more gentle. There was no reason to hang back.

The best way to do it, of course, would be to shave it down gradually from the top. Since this was impossible, he had no choice but to dig from the bottom. First he would scoop out a suitable amount of sand from below and wait for the sand above to cave in, then he would scoop more out and again let the top fall in. If he repeated this again and again, the ground level he stood on would gradually rise and ultimately reach the top. Of course, he might also be carried away by the flowing sand in the midst of the operation. But no matter how much sand flowed, it still wasn't water, and he had never yet heard about anyone being drowned in sand.

The shovel was standing with the kerosene cans against the outside wall that went around the earthen floor. The dented edge of the shovel gleamed white like a piece of cracked porcelain.

For some time he concentrated on digging. The sand was exceedingly tractable, and his work appeared to be progressing. The sound of the shovel as it bit into the sand, and his own breathing, ticked away the time. However, at last his arms began to grow weary. He thought he had worked for a considerable time, but his digging had apparently had no results at all. Only a little bit of sand had fallen from right above where he was digging. Somehow, it was working out very differently from the simple geometric process he had evolved in his head.

Rather than worry further, he decided to take advantage of a rest period and put his theory to the test by constructing a model of the hole. Fortunately, materials were plentiful. He chose a spot in the shade of the eaves and dug a hollow about a half yard wide. But the incline of the slope did not make the angle he had anticipated; it was only forty-five degrees at the most, about like a wide-mouthed mixing bowl. When he tried scooping sand from the bottom, the sand flowed down the sides, but the incline remained the same. There would appear to be a fixed angle for sand. The weight and resistance of the grains seemed to be in perfect balance. Supposing this were true, did the wall he was trying to overcome have about the same degree of incline?

No, that could not be. It might be an illusion, but it could not be true. When you looked at any incline from below it obviously appeared less than it actually was.

Then, shouldn't he perhaps consider it to be a question of quantity? The pressure would naturally change with different amounts of sand. If the pressure changed, a variation in the balance of weight and resistance would naturally occur. Perhaps it depended on the nature of the sand grains. Clay that has been packed down and clay from a natural deposit have completely different resistance to pressure. Furthermore, he had to consider the question of moisture. In short, another law was probably functioning, different from the one that applied to the model he had made.

Despite his failure, the experiment was not completely in vain. The very fact that he now realized that the slope of the wall was in what he might call a superstable state was an important find. Generally it is not particularly difficult to make a superstable state into a normally stable one.

A supersaturated solution, just by being shaken, at once produces a crystalline precipitate and moves toward the normal saturation point.

Suddenly he had the feeling that someone was near; he turned around. He had been unaware of the woman, who was standing in the doorway staring fixedly at him. He was understandably embarrassed and took a step back in confusion, glancing around as if in search of help. He raised his eyes, and there at the top of the east bank were three men, all in a row, looking down at him. They wore towels wrapped around their heads; as they were not visible from the mouth down, he could not be sure, but they seemed to be the old men of the day before. At once he straightened up, but just as suddenly he changed his mind and decided to ignore them and go on with his work. The fact that he was being watched spurred him on.

The perspiration ran into his eyes and dripped from the end of his nose. Since there was no time to wipe it away, he just closed his eyes and shoveled. Under no condition must he rest his arms. When they saw his unflagging pace, they would realize, unless they were dim-wits, how despicable they were.

He looked at his watch. He wiped it against his pants to remove the sand on its face; it was only 2:10. The same ten minutes after two as when he had looked before. He suddenly lost confidence in his pace. From a snail's point of view the sun probably moves with the speed of a baseball. He changed his grip on the shovel, and turning back again to the wall, he set frantically to work.

Suddenly the flow of sand grew violent. There was a muffled sound and then a pressure against his chest. He tried to look up to see what was happening, but he no longer had any sense of direction. He was only dimly aware of a faint milky light playing over him as he lay doubled up in the black splotch of his vomit.

«Jabu, jabu, jabu, jabu What sound is that? It's the sound of the bell. «Jabu, jabu, jabu, jabu What voice is that? It's the voice of the devil.»

The woman sang as if murmuring to herself, tirelessly repeating the same verses as she scooped the slime from the water jar.

When the song stopped, the sound of rice being ground came to his ears. He sighed gently, rolled over, and waited, his body tight with expectancy. Soon the woman brought a washbasin filled with water, probably to sponge off his body. His skin, which was puffy from sand and perspiration, was becoming inflamed. He lay there anticipating the cool, damp towel.

He had been in bed ever since he had fainted in the sand. For the first two days he had had a fever of around a hundred and had vomited constantly. But on the following day the fever had dropped and he had partially recovered his appetite. The basic cause was probably not the injury he had received in the sand avalanche, but the unaccustomed exertion he had kept up for so long, exposed to the direct rays of the sun. Anyway, in the long run, it hadn't amounted to much.

That was probably why he recovered so quickly. On the fourth day the pain in his legs and loins had almost gone away. On the fifth, except for a certain heaviness, no more symptoms were apparent. Nevertheless, he stayed in bed, giving an outward show of being seriously ill; but of course there was motive and calculation in this. Naturally, he had not for a moment abandoned his plans for escape.

«Are you awake?»

She was calling to him timidly. Out of the corner of his half-closed eyes he noticed the roundness of her knee through her work trousers. He answered her with a wordless groan. Slowly squeezing out the towel in the dented brass washbasin, she asked: «How do you feel?»