I was bitterly disappointed. I had so hoped that it would lead me somewhere, I’d forgotten that nothing made sense in that wilderness. Do people build roads that suddenly vanish? Yes, I told myself, yes, those people did. I felt like sitting down on the ground and weeping, but, luckily, my anger was the stronger and drove me on. I had to decide on a new direction. At first I’d chosen the east, then the road had made me deviate towards the south-west, and now I resolved to go due south.

I had less energy. The road and the bus, which had given me so much hope, had turned out to be insoluble mysteries like everything else, and from time to time I said to myself that it was a pretty meagre reward after two years’ walking. But gradually my natural resilience took over again and, as I made my way from one hilltop to another, it occurred to me to organise my route more cleverly than in a straight line. By going straight, I was only exploring a very narrow area, and perhaps I was missing things to the left or right. The fruitless semicircle gave me an idea: I would walk in huge parallel arcs, two or three hours’ apart, depending on how I felt, and on the appeal of the terrain. Of course, that was much harder to calculate than going straight ahead, when all I had to do was pick out the landmarks and walk towards them. I knew that if you followed the sun, you’d go round in a circle. I got involved in complicated reckonings and experiments on the ground: I needed to follow the sun for a while and then change direction at midday. At that time, I had no means of making a map of my journey, but in the evenings, I drew it on the ground with stones and gazed at it for a long time to ensure I had memorised it. I began to wonder whether the bunkers were dotted around at random, or whether their location was governed by a plan. On our first exploratory trip, it had been twenty-six days before we’d found one, but sometimes I walked for barely a week before being able to stock up afresh. I walked in several semicircles, then, when I was certain I could orientate myself, I made big zigzags along the arcs of the circle: after a few weeks, I realised that the bunkers were arranged in groups of five, one at each corner of a rectangle and one in the centre. By keeping to a straight line, naturally, I missed some. I soon became able, on arriving at a cabin, to work out which way to go to find the next one, and could go to them or avoid them as I chose. I never avoided them and, whether I needed food or not, I’d go down to pay my respects to the dead. I never came across an open prison door.