But there was no grandstand, no elegant public to look at us: I could still see them silhouetted ahead of us (Quixotic shapes diminished by the light that gnawed, corroded the outlines), ineffaceable against the blinding sunlight, their black shadows sliding beside them on the road like their faithful doubles, now foreshortened, hunched or rather telescoped, dwarfed and deformed, now stretched, spindly and distended, repeating in miniature and symmetrically the movements of their vertical doubles to which they appeared to be joined by invisible links: four points—the four hoofs—separating and rejoining in alternation (exactly like a drop of water separating itself from a roof or rather dividing, part of itself still attached to the edge of the gutter (the phenomenon occurring as follows: the drop stretching, becoming pear-shaped under its own weight, distorting itself, then pinching itself in two, the lower—larger—portion separating, falling, the upper part apparently moving upward, retracting as though sucked towards the top immediately after the break, then immediately swelling again with a new deposit, a second later what seemed to be the same drop hanging, swelling again, still in the same place, and this continuing endlessly, like an animated crystal ball moving up and down at the end of a rubber string), and, in the same way, the foot and the shadow of the foot separating and rejoining, ceaselessly brought back to each other, the shadow retracting into itself like the arm of a squid and the hoof rising, the foot describing a natural rounded curve while beneath and slightly behind it the shadow retreats only a trifle, foreshortened, and then returns to join the hoof—and because of the oblique slant of the sun’s rays, the speed with which the shadow returns to its goal increasing, so that, starting slowly, it seems to rush at the end like an arrow to the point of contact, of juncture) as though by a process of osmosis, the double movement multiplied by four, the four hoofs and the four telescoped shadows separating and rejoining in a kind of motionless oscillation, a monotonous trampling, the dusty ground the cobblestones or grass running underneath like an ink blot spreading and shrinking, leaving no trace on the rubbish, the dead, the scar, the stain, the wake of wreckage war leaves behind it, and that must have been where I saw it for the first time, a little before or a little after we stopped to drink, discovering it, staring at it through that kind of half-sleep, that kind of brownish mud in which I was somehow caught, and maybe because we had to make a detour to avoid it, and actually sensing it more than seeing it: I mean (like everything lying along the road: the trucks, the cars, the suitcases, the corpses) something unexpected, unreal, hybrid, so that what had been a horse (that is, what you knew, what you could recognize as having been a horse) was no longer anything now but a vague heap of limbs, of dead meat, of skin and sticky hair, three-quarters-covered with mud—Georges wondering without exactly finding an answer, in other words realizing with that kind of calm or rather deadened astonishment, exhausted and even almost completely atrophied by these last ten days during which he had gradually stopped being surprised, had abandoned once and for all that posture of the mind which consists of seeking a cause or a logical explanation for what you see or for what happens to you: so not wondering how, merely realizing that although it hadn’t rained for a long time—at least so far as he knew—the horse or rather what had been a horse was almost completely covered—as if it had been dipped in café au lait and then taken out—with a liquid grey-brown mud already half absorbed apparently by the earth, as though the latter had stealthily begun to take back what had come from it, had lived only by its permission and its intermediaries (in other words the hay and the oats the horse had fed on) and was destined to return to it, to dissolve again in it, covering it then, enveloping it (like those reptiles that begin by coating their prey with saliva or gastric juices before swallowing them) with that liquid mud secreted by it and which already seemed like a seal, a distinctive mark certifying its provenance, before slowly and definitely engulfing it in its breast probably with some kind of sucking noise: yet (though it seemed to have been there for ever, like one of those fossilized animals or plants that had returned to the mineral kingdom, with its two front feet bent into a foetal posture of prayer like the anterior limbs of a praying mantis, its neck stiff, its head stiff and thrown back so that the open jaw revealed the violet blob of the palate) it had been killed not long ago—perhaps only the last time the planes came over?—for the blood was still fresh: a large red spot, bright and clotted, shiny as varnish, spreading over or rather beyond the crust of mud and sticky hair as though it were gushing not from an animal, a mere murdered beast, but from some inexpiable and sacrilegious wound made by men (the way, in legends, water or wine springs out of the rock or gushes from a mountain struck with a rod) in the clayey flank of the earth; Georges looking at it while he mechanically made his horse describe a wide half-circle to avoid it (the horse obeying docilely without shying or hurrying or forcing its rider to hold it in, Georges thinking of the agitation, the kind of mysterious terror that gripped the horses when, leaving for exercise, they happened to follow the wall of the knacker’s yard at the end of the field of manoeuvres, and then the whinnying, the rattling of bits, the swearing of the men clinging to the reins, thinking: “And there it was only the smell. But now even the sight of one of their kind dead doesn’t mean anything to them, and probably they’d even walk over it, just because it would save three steps,” thinking: “And I would too . . .” He saw it slowly pivot beneath him, as if he had set it on a turntable (first showing its inner surface, the head thrown back, fixed, the neck stiff, then gradually, the bent feet coming in between, concealing the head, then the nearest flank, the wound, then the hind legs stretched out, pressed together as if they had been tied that way, the head reappearing then, everything else behind it seen in perspective, the outlines continually changing, in other words that kind of simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of lines and volumes (the bulges gradually collapsing while other protuberances seem to appear, rising then sinking and vanishing in their turn) as the angle of vision shifts, at the same time that the constellation all round it seems to move—and at first he saw only vague blurs—consisting of all kinds of objects (according also to the angle, the distances between them diminishing or increasing) scattered in confusion around the horse (probably the load of the cart it had been pulling but there was no cart in sight: maybe the people had harnessed themselves to it and had gone on that way?), Georges wondering how the war spread (then he saw the split suitcase spilling out like guts, intestines of cloth) that unimaginable quantity of rags, most often black and white (yet there was a faded pink one flung or hung on the hawthorn hedge, as if it had been put there to dry), as if what people regarded as most precious was rags, tatters, torn sheets scattered like ribbons, like lint over the green face of the earth . . .