Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

“I smell it too.” The insect dealer likewise tilted his head back and sniffed the air. “I’ve smelled it somewhere before.”

“It’s the smell of the wind,” I said. “It blows down through that hole in the ceiling.”

“That doesn’t lead to a Chinese restaurant, does it?” she asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I had my own explanation for the odor. But I was not duty-bound to tell them, nor did I think it was at all necessary. “Even fifteen seconds is longer than you think. A woman can do the hundred-yard dash in that length of time.”

The girl started walking straight toward the lift. From around her feet, shadows stretched out in all directions, light and dark, like the spokes of a fan. She put both hands on the bottom of the scaffolding and hung from it, suspending her full weight. “It’s perfectly strong,” she said. “Somebody climb up.”

“Forty-two feet in the air?”

“Well, you had training for a rescue squad, didn’t you?”

“After I left them, I got acrophobia.” The insect dealer spoke glumly, lifting his shirt and scratching his belly. “Captain, how about leveling with us? Is there some reason you don’t want him wandering around in here? Something you don’t want him to find out?”

“No, nothing in particular. It’s just that it turns into a real maze; I haven’t finished surveying it yet. Once I made it all the way to the tangerine grove on the other side of the mountain. I carried a lunch, and it took nearly all day. The inside of the mountain’s full of other, smaller mountains, and valleys, and rivers.”

“Yeah? Any fish?” asked the insect dealer, his forehead wrinkling — a sign of serious interest.

“Not a chance. The only living creatures in there are snakes and beetles and centipedes.”

“Then he won’t make it,” said the girl. “He’s terrified of snakes.” She looked at me and the insect dealer in turn. Was she worried about the shill’s safety after all?

“A bigger problem would be finding the way back,” I said. “I had a heck of a time, believe me. It took me all morning just to get over to the other side, and then coming back I tried to follow the same route and got lost. A compass isn’t worth a damn underground. The going was dangerous and I was hungry, and so tired my knees were knocking. Before I knew it, it was the middle of the night. Frankly, I thought I was done for. You know, like those stories you hear about people who wandered in the wind holes under Mount Fuji and died there without ever finding their way out. ”

“So what happened?”

“So there I was, camping out with nothing but a bar of chocolate and what little water came seeping out of the rocks, no sleeping bag — not even a flashlight, since the batteries had given out. I never felt so forlorn in my whole life. But when the sun came up—”

“How could you tell the sun came up?”

“That’s it, you wouldn’t believe it. I’d retraced my steps back to the other side of the mountain — the north entrance, I call it, or the tangerine grove entrance — and spent the whole night there. When I woke up, the morning light was pouring in.”

“That is unbelievable.” The girl’s tone was stinging, but her eyes emanated sympathy. “People’s instincts don’t amount to much, do they?”

“In the dark, your senses are numbed.”

“So,” said the insect dealer, stretching and narrowing his eyes. “You’re saying he’s the only one who’ll suffer; you have nothing in particular to lose if he’s in there. Right? Then who cares — let him go. Let it teach him a lesson.”

“You have a point there,” said the girl, falling in easily with his opinion. For some reason, this sudden switchover seemed entirely natural. “It’s just silly to waste time worrying about him. Last December, when we were at a fair near a ski slope, a truck came sliding down a steep hill. It must have been doing at least forty miles an hour. Right then he was crossing the street, and he slipped and fell in the truck’s path. What do you think happened? After the truck rolled on by, he got up and walked away, not a scratch on him. He’s invulnerable.”

“He is, huh?” I said, thinking, Another six months and he’ll be a goner. I started to say the words but caught myself in time. She didn’t react. Didn’t it seem ironic to her that a man with only six months to live should have such great reflexes that he was “invulnerable”? I was the only one who felt abashed. Inwardly I tendered an apology to the shill. Heroes fated to die untimely deaths have an inescapable air of privilege. I began to think it was high time to drop my unwarranted hostility toward the guy and issue him a special complimentary boarding pass.

The insect dealer gave his belly a couple of resounding slaps. “Let’s eat.”

The girl glanced up at the top of the lift. It still seemed to weigh on her. Never mind if it was a stunt worthy of an acrobat — there did remain the small possibility that he had somehow clambered up to the ceiling. I, however, was more concerned about the shadow behind that far right pillar. Before we ate, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t lurking in there.

“This is a long shot, but I just want to be sure. Behind those old bikes over there, there’s a small storage space with a trapdoor. This’ll only take a minute.”

The twenty-eight old bicycles piled in a triangular heap between the stone pillar and the wall were a tangled mass of handlebars and wheels that formed an ingenious barrier: not only did they make entry difficult; they kept one from suspecting anything was there. It looked as if nothing but wall was behind them. Light was particularly dim, as if the overseer (me) set no great store by the area. But it was all a trick. Of all the shipboard traps, this one was the most elaborately camouflaged: the entire triangle formed by these tangled old bikes was in fact a door. The “key” was the front wheel on the far right bike. All you had to do was twist the handlebars sharply and pull out the pedal that was embedded in the spokes of the neighboring bike.

“Now it’s unlocked. Mind aligning the wheels of the bikes in the front row?”

A slight pull, and the triangle of all twenty-eight bikes swung around to reveal, alongside the pillar, a gaping wedge-shaped passageway. At the far end lay a section of dirty canvas, roughly six feet by three. In the dim light it looked like something to throw over the bikes, but it was in fact camouflage for a trapdoor, backed with plywood and fastened with hinges.

“Isn’t there some kind of bug that makes a nest like this, covering it over with leaves?” asked the girl.

“I think you mean a fish.”

“No, a bug.”

The construction inside was worthy of the camouflage outside. Just beyond the door was a small room with a low ceiling, just over six and a half feet high. Tunnels had been dug out in three levels — top, middle, and bottom — each leading to yet another small room, all interconnected by irregular narrow stone steps. It was rather as if several playground monsters, the kind whose labyrinthine innards children love to climb around in, had been lined up and joined together.

“This is just a guess,” I said, “but I suspect these were all trial borings. They tried digging in different directions, but the quality of the stone here fell short of their expectations, and so they gave up. All these tunnels are small, and the excavation is rough. But they’re handy for storing materials according to type.”

A largish, high-ceilinged room at the top of the right-hand stairs was where I kept food supplies, sorted by kind. Thirty dozen cans of hardtack. Seventeen cartons packed with eleven-pound vacuum-packed bags of uncooked rice. Two hundred meals’ worth of dried noodles. Assorted dried vegetables. Miso, soy sauce, salt, sugar. Five big cartons of canned foods, including stewed beef, tuna, sardines, and so on. There was also a complete kit for cultivating vegetables by hydroponics, and an assortment of seeds.