Cobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

Monotonous weeks of sand and night had gone by.

«Hope,» as before, lay neglected by the crows. And the bait of dried fish had become not even that.

Although spurned by the crows, it had not been spurned by the bacteria. One morning when he felt the end of the stick, he found that only the skin remained; the fish had turned into a black, almost liquid pulp. As he was changing the bait, he decided at the same time to check on the contraption. He scraped away the sand and opened the cover; he was thunderstruck. Water had collected at the bottom of the bucket. There were only about four inches, but it was more clear by far — indeed it was almost pure — than the water with the metallic film which was delivered to them daily. Had it rained some time recently? he wondered. No. Not for a half month at least. If that were true, then could it be the rain that was left from a half month ago? He would like to think so, but what puzzled him was that he knew the bucket leaked. And when he raised it up, as he had expected, water at once began to fall from the bottom. At that depth there could be no underground spring, and he was obliged to recognize that the escaping water was being constantly replenished from somewhere. At least, that must be theoretically so. But wherever could the replenishment come from in the midst of this parched sand?

He could scarcely contain his gradually rising excitement There was only one answer he could think of. That was the capillary action of the sand. Because the surface sand had a high specific heat, it was invariably dry, but when you dug down a little the under part was always damp. It must be that the surface evaporation acted as a kind of pump, drawing up the subsurface water. When he thought about it, everything was easily explained — the enormous quantity of mist that came out of the dunes every morning and evening, the abnormal moisture which clung to the pillars and walls, rotting the wood. In short, the dryness of the sand was not due simply to a lack of water, but rather, it would seem, to the fact that the suction caused by capillary attraction never matched the speed of evaporation. In other words, the water was being constantly replenished. But this water circulated at a speed unthinkable in ordinary soil. And it had happened that «Hope» had cut off the circulation some place. Probably the chance placing of the bucket and the crack around the lid had been enough to prevent evaporation of the water that had been sucked up in the bucket. He could not yet explain exactly the placing and its relationship to the other elements, but with study he would surely be able to repeat the experiment. Moreover, it should not be impossible to construct a more efficient device for storing the water.

If he were successful in this experiment he would no longer have to give in to the villagers if they cut off his water. But more important, he had found that the sand was an immense pump. It was just as if he were sitting on a suction pump. He had to sit down for a moment and control his breathing in order to quiet the wild beating of his heart. Of course, there was no need yet to tell anyone about this. It would be his trump card in case of emergency.

But he could not suppress the natural laughter that welled up in him. Even if he were able to keep silent about «Hope,» it was hard to conceal the elation in his heart. He suddenly let out a cry and put his arms around the woman's hips from behind as she was getting the bed ready. And when she dodged away he fell over on his back and lay kicking his legs and laughing all the while. It was as if his stomach were being tickled by a paper balloon filled with some special light gas. He felt that the hand he held to his face was floating free in the air.

The woman laughed reluctantly, but it was probably only to be agreeable. He was thinking of the vast network of water veins creeping up through the sand, but the woman, on the contrary, was surely thinking that his actions were sexual advances. That was all right. Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.

The fact that he was still just as much at the bottom of the hole as ever had not changed, but he felt quite as if he had climbed to the top of a high tower. Perhaps the world had been turned upside down and its projections and depressions reversed. Anyway, he had discovered water in this sand. As long as he had his device the villagers would not be able to interfere with him so easily. No matter how much they cut off his supply, he would be able to get along very well. Again laughter welled up in him at the very thought of the outcry the villagers would make. He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already outside. Turning around, he could see the whole scene. You can't really judge a mosaic if you don't look at it from a distance. If you really get close to it you get lost in detail. You get away from one detail only to get caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not the sand but grains of sand.

He could say precisely the same thing about the other woman and his former fellow teachers. He had been concerned up until now only with curiously exaggerated details: nostrils in a thick nose, wrinkled lips or smooth, thin lips, spatulate fingers or pointed fingers, flecked eyes, a string of warts under a collarbone, violet veins running over a breast. If he looked very closely at those parts alone he would feel like vomiting. But to eyes with magnifying lenses everything seemed tiny and insectlike. The little ones crawling around over there were his colleagues having a cup of tea in the faculty room. The one in this corner was the other woman, naked, on a dampish bed, her eyes half closed, motionless although the ash of her cigarette was about to fall. Moreover, he felt, without the slightest jealousy, that the little insects were like cookie molds. Cookie molds have only edges and no insides. Even so, there was no need to be such a dedicated cookie maker as to be unable to resist making unneeded cookies just to use the mold. If the chance occurred for him to renew his relationship with them, he would have to start all over again from the very beginning. The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in the sand, he had found a new self.

Thus, work on a water trap was added to his daily occupations. Figures and diagrams began to accumulate — the place to bury the bucket, the shape of the bucket, the relationship between daylight hours and the rate of water accumulation, the influence of temperature and barometric pressure on the efficiency of the apparatus. But it was incomprehensible to the woman why he could be so enthusiastic about anything so insignificant as a crow trap. She recognized that no man can get along without some sort of plaything, and if he was satisfied with that one, it suited her. Moreover, she did not know why, but he had begun to show more interest in her own craft work. It wasn't at all a disagreeable feeling. The question of the crow trap aside, she had still benefited considerably. But he too had his own reasons and motives. His work on the device was unexpectedly troublesome, for it was necessary to combine many elements. The number of materials increased, but it was hard to find a law that would govern them all. If he wanted to make his data more precise, he needed a radio in order to tune in the weather reports. The radio had become their common objective.

At the beginning of November he had recorded the daily intake of water at one gallon, but after that the quantity began to fall off every day. It was perhaps because of the temperature, and it appeared that he would have to await spring to try a full-scale experiment. The long, hard winter had at last come, and bits of ice were blown along with the sand. In the meantime, in order to get a somewhat better radio, he decided to give the woman a hand with her craft work. One good point was that the inside of the hole was protected from the wind, yet it was unbearable with the sun scarcely visible throughout the day. Even on days when the sand froze over, the amount that blew along in the wind did not decrease, and there was no respite from the work of shoveling. Many times the chilblains on his fingers broke and began to bleed.