solemnity and reverent worship, there was a display in the heavens that had not occurred within the memory of man. An evening came that was dry, windy, and rather cool. The sky was crystal clear except for a few restless small clouds which floated at a very great height, holding the rosy light of the setting sun for an unusually long time. They looked like loose and foamy bundles of light drifting in cold, pale cosmic space. For several days past Knecht had sensed something that was stronger and more remarkable than the feeling he had every year at this time when the days began growing shorter: a seething of the powers in the sky, a sense of alarm in earth, plants and animals, a nervousness in the air, something inconstant, expectant, frightened, lowering in all of nature. The small clouds with their lingering, quivering flames formed part of the strangeness. Their fluttery movements did not correspond with the direction of the wind on the ground. After a long sad struggle against extinction, their piteous red light grew cold and faded, and suddenly they were invisible.
It was quiet in the village. The circle of children before the tribal mother’s hut had long scattered. A few boys were still chasing about and tussling, but all the rest of the tribe were in their huts. Everyone had eaten. Many were already asleep; scarcely anyone but the Rainmaker observed the twilit clouds. Knecht walked back and forth in the small garden behind his hut, pondering the weather, tense and restive. At times he sat down for a brief rest on a stump that stood among the nettles and served him for splitting wood. As soon as the last glimmer of cloud was extinguished the stars suddenly appeared against the greenish glow of the sky, and rapidly grew in number and brightness. Where there had been only two or three visible a moment before, there were now ten, twenty. The Rainmaker was familiar with many of them individually and in their groups and families. He had seen them many hundreds of times; there was always something reassuring about their unvarying reappearance. Stars were comforting. Though they hung so high, remote and cold, radiating no warmth, they were reliable, firmly aligned, proclaiming order, promising duration. Seemingly so aloof and far and opposed to life on earth, seemingly so untouched by the warmth, the writhings, the sufferings and ecstasies in the life of man, so superior in their cold majesty and eternity that they seemed to make mock of human things, the stars nevertheless had a relation to us. They guided and governed us perhaps, and if any human knowledge, any intellectual hold, any sureness and superiority of the mind over transitory things could be attained and retained, it would resemble the stars, shining like them in cool tranquility, comforting with chilly shivers of awe, looking down eternally and somewhat mockingly. That was how they had often seemed to the Rainmaker, and although he felt toward the stars nothing like the close, stimulating, constantly changing and recurring relationship he had toward the moon, the great, near, moist orb, the fat magic fish in the sea of heaven, he nevertheless revered them and attached many beliefs to them. To gaze at them for a long time and allow their influence to work upon him, to expose his intelligence, his warmth, his anxiety to their serenely cold gaze, often laved and assuaged him like a healing draft.
Tonight, too, they looked as they always did, except that they were very bright and seemed highly polished in the taut, thin air; but he could not find within himself the repose to surrender to them. From unknown realms some power was tugging at him; it ached in his pores, sucked at his eyes, quietly and continually affected him. It was a current, a warning quiver. In the hut nearby the warm, dim light of the hearth-fire glimmered. Life flowed small and warm inside: a cry, a laugh, a yawn, human smells, skin warmth, motherhood, children’s sleep. All that innocent presence seemed to deepen the night, to drive the stars still further back into the incomprehensible distances and heights.
And now, while Knecht heard Ada’s voice inside the hut crooning and humming a low melody as she quieted a child, there began in the sky the calamity that the village would remember for many years. A flickering and glimmering appeared here and there in the still, glittering network of stars, as if the usually invisible threads of the net were suddenly leaping into flame. Like hurled stones, glowing and guttering, a few stars fell slantwise across the sky, one here, two there, a few more here; and before the eye had turned from the first vanished falling star, before the heart, stilled at the sight, had begun to beat again, the lights falling or hurled at a slant or a slight arc across the sky began to come in swarms of dozens, hundreds. A countless host, borne on a vast, mute storm, they slanted across the silent night, as if a cosmic autumn were tearing all the stars like withered leaves from the tree of heaven and flinging them noiselessly into the void. Like withered leaves, like wafting snowflakes, they rushed away and down, thousands upon thousands, in fearful silence, vanishing beyond the wooded mountains to the southeast where never a star had set since time immemorial.
With frozen heart and swimming eyes, Knecht stood, head tilted back, gazing horrified but insatiably at the transformed and accursed sky, mistrusting his eyes and yet only too certain of the direness of what they beheld. Like all who watched this nocturnal spectacle, he thought the familiar stars themselves were wavering, scattering, and plunging down, and he expected that if the earth itself did not swallow him first, the firmament would soon appear black and emptied. After a while, however, he recognized what others could not know — that the well- known stars were still present, here and there and everywhere; that the frightful dispersion was taking place not among the old, familiar stars, but in the space between earth and sky, and that these new lights, fallen or flung, so swiftly appearing and swiftly vanishing, glowed with a fire of another sort from the old, the proper stars. This was somewhat reassuring and helped him regain his balance. But even if these were new, transitory, different stars scattering through the air, still it meant disaster and disorder. Deep sighs came from Knecht’s parched throat. He looked toward the earth; he listened to find out whether this uncanny spectacle were appearing to him alone, or whether others were also seeing it. Soon he heard groans, screams, and cries of terror from other huts. Others had seen it too; their cries had alarmed the sleepers and the unaware; in a moment panic had seized the entire village. With a sigh, Knecht took the burden on himself. This misfortune affected him, the Rainmaker, above all others, for he was in a way responsible for order in the heavens. Always before he had known or sensed great catastrophes in advance: floods, hailstorms, tempests. Always he had warned the mothers and elders to be prepared. He had averted the worst evils. He had interposed himself, his knowledge, his courage, and his confidence in the powers above, between the village and consternation. Why had he foreknown nothing this time, so that he could take no measure? Why had he said not a word to anyone of the obscure foreboding he had, after all, felt?
He lifted the mat hung over the entrance of the hut and softly called his wife’s name. She came, her youngest at her breast. He took the baby from her and laid it on the pallet. Holding Ada’s hand, he placed a finger to his lips, enjoining silence, and led her out of the hut. He saw her patiently tranquil face grow distorted by terror.
“Let the children sleep; I don’t want them to see this, do you hear?” he whispered intensely. “Don’t let any of them come out, not even Turu. And you yourself stay inside.”
He hesitated, uncertain how much to say, how many of his thoughts he ought to reveal. Finally he added firmly: “Nothing will harm you and the children.”
She believed him at once, although her face and her mind had not yet recovered from the fright.
“What is it?” she asked, again staring at the sky. “Is it, very bad?”
“It is bad,” he said gently. “I think it may be very bad. But it doesn’t concern you and the children. Stay in the hut; keep the mat drawn. I must talk to the people. Go in, Ada.”
He pressed her through the opening, drew the mat carefully closed, and stood for the span of a few breaths with his face turned toward the continuing rain of stars. Then he bowed his head, sighed heavily once more, and walked swiftly through the night toward the tribal mother’s hut.
Half the village was already assembled there. A muted roar rose from them, a tumult half numbed by terror and choked by despair. There were women and men who surrendered with a kind of voluptuous rage to their sense of horror and impending doom. Some stood stiff, rapt. Others jerked about wildly with uncontrolled movements of their limbs. One woman was foaming at the mouth as she danced, alone, a despairing and obscene dance, at the same time pulling out whole handfuls of her long hair. Knecht realized that the effects were already at work. Almost all had succumbed to the intoxication; they were bewitched or driven mad by the falling stars, and an orgy of madness, fury, and self-destructiveness might follow. It was high time to collect the few brave and sensible members of the tribe, and support their courage.
The ancient tribal mother was calm. She believed that the end of all things had come, and that there was nothing to be done about it. Toward the inevitable she showed a firm, hard face that looked almost mocking in its pinched astringency. He persuaded her to listen to him. He tried to show her that the old stars, the ones that had always been, were still in the sky. But she could not grasp it, either because her eyes no longer had the strength to discern them, or because her conception of the stars was too unlike the Rainmaker’s. She shook her head and maintained her courageous grin, but when Knecht implored her not to abandon the people to their terror, she instantly was of his mind. A small group of frightened but not yet maddened villagers still willing to be led formed around her and the Weathermaker.
