then (Georges) going down the ladder, gradually entering, feet first, the yellowish light of the lantern that mounted his legs to his chest, finally standing in it, blinking a little, feeling their eyes on him (there were only two now, Iglésia and Wack), and a moment later Iglésia saying: “What’s the matter with him Is he sick?” their two heads raised towards him, their eyes questioning and sullen, the two faces in the theatrical lighting of the lantern on the floor reminding him of scarecrows, Iglésia’s almost like a lobster claw (nose, chin, papery skin) if a lobster claw had eyes, and that look of permanent and incurable misery all the more incurable since he probably never knew what it was to be either miserable or happy, Wack with his long stupid face, his body frozen in his crouching monkey pose, his two enormous hands crackled and encrusted with earth, like split wood, like bark, like worn tools, hanging lifeless between his knees, and Georges shrugging, and finally Wack saying in his stupid voice: “Damn this war!. . .” without its being possible to know whether he was thinking of Blum being sick, or of the harvests, the hay lost, or of the furious lame man brandishing his rifle, or of the horse, or of the girl without a husband, or perhaps merely of the three of them there, in the night, round that lantern, round that dying animal with its terribly fixed gaze, full of a terrifying patience, and whose neck seemed to grow still longer, stretching the muscles, the tendons, as if the weight of the enormous head dragged it out of the litter in the dark kingdom where dead horses gallop tirelessly, the huge black herd of old nags sent into a blind charge, struggling to pass each other, thrusting ahead their empty-eyed skulls, in a thunder of bones and clashing hoofs: some ghostly cavalcade of bloodless and extinct horses ridden by their bloodless and defunct horsemen with their fleshless tibias rattling in their oversize boots with their rusty and useless spurs, and leaving behind them a wake of whitening skeletons that Iglésia seemed to be staring at now, fallen back into his eternal silence, his huge fishy eyes stamped with that dismayed, patient and outraged expression, apparently the only one he had, or at least the only one life had taught him, probably during the time he went from one country race to another, riding in challenge meets on vicious or wild horses for one man or another, on racetracks that were usually just fields with half-rotten symbols of wooden grandstands, and sometimes no grandstand at all, just a mound of earth, or even the hillside up which people climbed, and only three or four plank barracks like bathhouses with a window sawed through to take the bets, and a ring of policemen to keep the horse buyers, the butchers with their pockets full of bills and the farmers that composed the public from lynching the defeated jockeys, and usually racing in the rain, getting off the soaked horse muddy up to the eyes and feeling satisfied if he merely got out with his breeches dirty but intact which he washed himself that night in the washbasin of a hotel room, unless it was in the trough of a stable where they let him have an empty stall with a bale of straw to sleep on (which saved the hotel money)—or sometimes merely the hayloft—and if he had only a wrist or an ankle sprained, and only the insults of the betters and not their blows, dressing in one of the rotten wood shacks or when there was no shack then in just a van, wrapping an old strip of friction tape almost as black as a furnace wall and about as elastic round his wrist, a thread of blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth without his paying any more attention than he had to the (nor perhaps even felt the) fist that had managed to pass over or between the shoulders of the policemen without his (Iglésia) or their (the police) and probably still less the man the fist belonged to caring about the reasons or rather the validity of the reasons the aggressor might have, the only real and always valid one being that Iglésia had ridden a losing horse, and nothing else: