And after a moment or so he recognized it: what was not a rough mass of dried mud but (the bony legs joined and bent back in an attitude of prayer, the carcass half-covered, absorbed by its matrix of clay—as if the earth had already begun digesting it—with, on the hard, crumbling crust, its aspect, its morphology of both insect and crustacean) a horse, or rather what had been a horse (whinnying, snorting in the green fields) and reverting now, or already reverted to the original earth without apparently having had to pass through the intermediate stage of putrefaction, that is, by a kind of transmutation or accelerated transubstantiation, as if the margin of time normally necessary for the passage from one kingdom to the other (from the animal to the mineral) had this time been crossed at once. “But,” he thought, “maybe it’s tomorrow already, maybe there’ve even been days and days we’ve spent here without my knowing it. And he still less. Because how can you say how long a man is dead since for him yesterday tomorrow and just now have definitely ceased to exist, that is to preoccupy him, that is to bother him . . .” Then he saw the flies. No longer the wide pool of clotted and shiny blood he had seen the first time, but a kind of dark swarm, thinking: “Already,” thinking: “But where do they all come from?” until he realized that there weren’t so many (not enough to cover the pool of blood) but that the blood had begun to dry, had darkened now, more brown than red (apparently this was the only change that had occurred since the first time he had seen it, so that, he thought, only a few hours could have passed, or perhaps only one, or perhaps not even that, and just then he noticed that the shadow cast by the corner of the brick wall along the road covered the hindquarters of the horse that had been in full sunlight, the shadow cast by the part of the wall parallel to the road constantly widening, thinking: “But then our shadows were on our right, so now the sun has crossed the axis of the road, so . . .” then no longer thinking, or rather no longer trying to calculate, merely thinking: “But what difference does that make? What difference can it make to him now where he is . . .”), the big blue-black flies crowding round the edge, the lips of what was more a hole, a crater than a wound, and where the gashed skin was beginning to look like paper, reminding him of those amputated or broken children’s toys that show the yawning cavernous insides of what had been only a simple shape surrounding emptiness, as if the flies and the worms having already finished their work, that is having eaten all there was to eat, including the bones and the skin, nothing was left (like the carapaces of those creatures despoiled of their flesh or those objects whose insides are eaten away by termites) except a fragile envelope of dried mud, no thicker than a layer of paint, neither more nor less empty, neither more nor less inconsistent than those bubbles rising to break at the surface of the mud with an indecent noise, releasing, as though ascending from unsoundable and visceral depths, a faint exhalation of rottenness.