'This is the surprise they told us about.'
'How nice.' When Hel scrambled up the
'It was forming as we came. We just made it.'
'What is it like lower down?'
They were all mountain men here; they knew what he meant.
'It's grayer.'
'Much?'
'Much.'
If the sheet of mist was grayer below, passing down through it would be folly in this Swiss-cheese mountainside dotted with treacherous cracks and steep
Alone, Hel could have made it down the mountain, despite the blinding mist with its sensory trickery. He could have relied on a combination of his proximity sense and intimate knowledge of the features of the mountain to move cautiously down over terrain hidden in the blinding haze. But he could not be responsible for Le Cagot and the four Basque lads.
Because it was impossible to see clearly farther than a meter and to see at all farther than three, they roped up, and Hel led a slow and careful ascent, picking the long and easy way around outcroppings of rock, across slides of scree, past the rims of deep
Then he heard another sound, Le Cagot's voice from below demanding, 'Are we to stand here forever? By the Complaining Balls of Jeremiah, you should have relieved yourself before we started!' And when he broke through the layer of mist, he said, 'Oh, I see. You were admiring the Basque spectacle all by yourself, while we dangled down there like bait on a line! You're a selfish man, Niko.'
The sun was beginning to sink, so they moved around the flank of the mountain with some haste, to arrive at the highest of the
There was an exchange of greetings and wine, and the eight of the 'fist' to the intruder, declaring that, if his will had power, that plane would fall from the sky like a wounded bird, littering Spain with the bodies of two hundred stupid vacationers on their way to Lisbon, and relieving the world of the burden of surplus population, for anyone who would fly through so perfect a moment was, by definition, an expendable being.
Le Cagot's gall up, he went on to extend his malediction to all those outlanders who defiled the mountains: the tourists, the back-packers, the hunters, and especially the skiers who bring vile machines into the mountains because they are too soft to walk up the hill, and who build ugly lodges and noisy apres-ski amusements. The filthy shits! It was for dealing with loud-mouthed skiers and their giggling bunnies that God said, on the eighth day, let there also be handguns!
One of the old shepherds nodded sagely and agreed that outlanders were universally evil.
Following the ritual of conversation among strangers, Hel matched this ancient
'True,' Le Cagot said.
Hel smiled. These were the first words of Basque he had learned, years ago in his cell in Sugamo Prison. 'With the possible exception,' he said, 'of that one.'
The old smugglers considered this response for a moment, then both laughed aloud and slapped their knees.
They sat in silence, drinking and eating slowly as the sun fell, drawing after it the gold and russet of the cloud layer. One of the young cavers stretched his legs out with a satisfied grunt and declared that this was the life. Hel smiled to himself, knowing that this would probably not be the life for this young man, touched as he was by television and radio. Like most of the Basque young, he would probably end up lured to the factories of the big cities, where his wife could have a refrigerator, and he could drink Coca-Cola in a cafe with plastic tables—the good life that was a product of the French Economic Miracle.
'It is the good life,' Le Cagot said lazily. 'I have traveled, and I have turned the world over in my hand, like a stone with attractive veining, and this I have discovered: a man is happiest when there is a balance between his needs and his possessions. Now the question is: how to achieve this balance. One could seek to do this by increasing his goods to the level of his appetites, but that would be stupid. It would involve doing unnatural things —bargaining, haggling, scrimping, working. Ergo? Ergo, the wise man achieves the balance by reducing his needs to the level of his possessions. And this is best done by learning to value the free things of life: the mountains, laughter, poetry, wine offered by a friend, older and fatter women. Now, me? I am perfectly capable of being happy with what I have. The problem is getting enough of it in the first place!'
'Le Cagot?' one of the old smugglers asked, as he made himself comfortable in a corner of the
'Yes,' said his companion. 'Let it be of old things.'
A true folk poet, who would rather tell a story than write one, Le Cagot began to weave fables in his rich basso voice, while the others listened or dozed. Everyone knew the tales, but the pleasure lay in the art of telling them. And Basque is a language more suited to storytelling than to exchanging information. No one can learn to speak Basque beautifully; like eye color or blood type, it is something one has to be born to. The language is subtle and loosely regulated, with its circumlocutory word orders, its vague declensions, its doubled conjugations, both synthetic and periphrastic, with its old 'story' forms mixed with formal verb patterns. Basque is a song, and while outlanders may learn the words, they can never master the music.
Le Cagot told of the
One of the old smugglers declared that he once found a man in the mountains who had died so, and in his dim staring eyes there was an awful mixture of fright and pleasure.
And the quietest of the young lads prayed that God would give him the strength to resist, should he ever come upon the
Le Cagot sniffed and stretched out on the ground. 'In truth, I cannot say from personal experience, child. These eyes have never seen the