I say there were forty of them: we had immediately had the impression that there were as many of them as there were of us, but no one had counted. I did that the next day, to discover that they were only thirty-nine, but there were forty mattresses. One of them had probably died before the day the siren went off and her body been removed. Later, when we discussed it, we still said forty, because they were our equals, our less fortunate doubles. I looked to see whether the bunch of keys had been dropped, we wanted to open the cage to remove the bodies and bury them on the plain, but I found nothing. We tried to force open the bars with the tools we’d brought, but either the bars were very sturdy or none of us knew how to go about it, because we failed. In the end, Anthea and I closed the big double door and that was the only ceremony we were able to give them. We would have liked to make a tomb, and seal it up, or to leave a message saying that, behind these wooden doors lay forty women who had died for some unknown crazy cause, but we had nothing with which to write and the wood was too hard for us to carve.

We made an inventory of the contents of the two rooms as we’d done in the other bunker, and we found the same things, including the boots, which was fortunate because our sandals were in a sorry state. Once again we had fresh meat and we stocked up with canned food.

After three days, we set off again. A sort of inertia had taken hold of my companions. They spoke little, the evenings were silent, except when Rose sang, and they joined in. I believe they didn’t want to think, so as not to have to face the inevitable, so as not to despair. They believed they’d find towns, civilisation. I expected never to encounter anything other than cabins, and I think they sensed it. I didn’t know the world they described to me, I couldn’t imagine it and, when after a long uphill climb I saw only another dip, I wasn’t surprised, because I had no clear picture of anything else. But their dejected mood must have affected me, because I lost interest in running on ahead, and it was Greta who spotted the third cabin. We only hastened our steps a little, held back by our apprehension and, as we descended, we didn’t hold out much hope that the cage would be open, that the occupants had managed to escape and that we’d meet them one day on the plain. We were greeted by the stench.

We were expecting to find women, but these were men. They too had attempted to escape. They’d tried to loosen one of the sinks and pull away the pipes to make instruments with which to prise open the locks. Everything had resisted their efforts: the pipes were twisted but not broken, the porcelain toilet bowls were lopsided, but they hadn’t been able to smash them. The bodies lay scattered everywhere, and were in the same condition as those of the thirty-nine women. The air conditioning was still working. Gradually the smell would fade and the corpses would still be there, mummified or reduced to skeletons, some naked, the others dressed in rags, shirts torn and trousers cut from the same flimsy cloth as our dresses. They’d collapsed all over the place, in all sorts of attitudes, without dignity, tragic witnesses to the incomprehensible. Rose, in tears, refused to come down, and we did not sing the music of the dead. We took everything that might come in useful from the store cupboards and left immediately, walking for as long as we could, so as not to make our camp near a mass grave.