The Lost Army by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Author:Valerio Massimo Manfredi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2009-03-07T06:00:00+00:00

17

THERE’S NOTHING all that strange about entering a cloud. From far away it looks like something that has a shape and a consistency, but the closer you get, the more its shape goes away and it just becomes a mass of denser air, a kind of fog that envelops and surrounds you. Sounds are muted, voices are lower, figures fade into one another and become confused. Sometimes you can’t tell things apart. Our men looked like shadows come up from the Underworld. The swaying of their cloaks seemed a natural phenomenon like the rustling of the leaves or the waving of the tall grass on the mountain’s slopes.

When we finally arrived at the crest, we heard shouting and the clanging of weapons coming from the rearguard and I felt panic-stricken. Xeno was always out there, ahead of all the others. How would he be able to fight off the enemy hidden in the fog, lurking among the trees or behind the rocks? Would I ever see him again?

The clouds opened in front of us, revealing a terrain which was even steeper and more impervious than what we’d left behind: a rocky ridge crossed by a path that rose towards the top of the mountain. I realized that on this kind of terrain you can never be sure of arriving anywhere. After one peak you find another, even higher than the first. What looks close can be very far and what seems far away can in reality be relatively near to you. You had to continuously adapt your gait to the ever-changing ground.

Luckily, the storm had calmed and only a few occasional drops were falling. But you still could be pelted suddenly when the stiff wind shook the tree branches above you. All at once, something happened that really alarmed me: the speed of marching suddenly picked up. The men were advancing faster and faster, for no reason that I could understand. Although you could never know what was happening at the head or at the end of such a long column, each one of us had to adapt to the movement of the army as a whole, in front and in back of us, just as every muscle in the sinuous body of a snake contributes to making him glide forward.

The path was rising steeply and walking was very strenuous, and yet the army was moving faster. We women wouldn’t have been able to keep up such a fast pace for long and I was stupidly making it even harder for myself to breathe by urging on the pregnant girl, encouraging her not to give up. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the awkward, desperate jerks of her body as she strove to keep her balance; I could hear the yelps of pain escaping her at every step. Wasn’t there anyone at all who could help me? We were invisible to them, all they cared about was the mules. The mules were precious, we didn’t even exist.

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