Read Cosmos for Free Online Page A

Roly-Poly? Katasia?—and it was conceivable that the one watching us was the same person who sneaked into our room, most likely during the morning hours, and gouged the line that created the arrow—what for? To poke fun at us? For a lark? To tell us something? No, it didn’t make sense! Well alright, indeed, yet irrationality is a stick that has two ends, and Fuks and I at the other end of this irrationality moved and acted quite rationally—and I, engaged in such laborious maneuvers, had to bear in mind (if I didn’t want to betray my action)the possibility of a gaze lurking behind the painfully glistening and blinding windowpanes.
    So I did bear it in mind. And Fuks’s gaze, looking from above, was helpful to me. I moved about cautiously so as not to arouse suspicion, I raked the grass here and there, dropped the rake as if worn out by the heat, then imperceptibly moved it with my foot in the desired direction. These precautions increased the intensity of my collaboration with Fuks more than I had intended, I moved about almost like his slave. We finally determined the direction of the arrow—the line led all the way past the tool shed by the wall where the lot, partially littered with rubble and bricks, ended as an extension of the little garden. We moved slowly in that direction, diverging here and there as if busy studying flowers and herbs, talking, gesticulating from time to time, and carefully looking for something significant. From furrow to furrow, from twig to pebble, our gaze lowered, we were absorbed by the ground that unfolded before us—gray, yellowish, rusty-dark, boring, complex, sleepy, monotonous, barren, and hard. I wiped the sweat off my face. It was all a waste of time!
    We came close to the wall . . . but here we stopped, helpless . . . it seemed quite difficult to conquer the remaining ten steps, we were too exposed! So far, our march through the little garden under the gaze of the windowpanes has been relatively easy—about fifty yards across level ground—and yet it became difficult because of a concealed difficulty that turned it almost into a climb—and now this same difficulty, brought about by the progressively steeper and more dizzying climb, increased sharply, as if we were reaching a summit. What an altitude! He squatted, pretending to look at a bug, and so, hunkering down and moving as though following the bug, he reached the wall; I veered to theside, meandering here and there in order to join him in a roundabout way. We were by the wall, at the far end, in the corner made by the shed.
    The heat. Grasses, some rather luxuriant and swaying in the breeze, a beetle marches on the ground, bird droppings by the wall—the heat, yet now somehow different, and a different odor, of urine perhaps, I daydreamed of remoteness, it was all remote as if we had wandered for months, a place thousands of miles away, at the ends of the earth—suddenly a whiff of warm decay, there was a pile of garbage nearby, rains had created a seepage by the wall—stalks, stems, rubble—clods of dirt, pebbles—yellowish stuff . . . The heat again, yet different, unfamiliar . . . yes, yes . . . our reaching this corner that lived apart, referred us to that other, the darkly-cool thicket with its little pieces of cardboard and sheet metal—with the sparrow—as if by the power of distance, the one echoed back to the other—and our searching here seemed to come to life.
    An onerous task . . . because, even if something were hiding here, to which the arrow, on the ceiling, in our room, was pointing, how would we find it in this entanglement, among weeds, among bits and pieces, in the litter, surpassing in number everything that could be happening on walls, on ceilings? An overwhelming abundance of connections, associations . . .How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet? How many meanings can one glean from hundreds of weeds, clods of dirt, and other trifles? Heaps and