The Horseman on the Roof Read Online Free PDF

soul—perhaps merely a question of an intelligence so automatically efficient that it continues to function even in the corpse. In that case, not universal, but the prerogative of certain individuals, perhaps of certain races, who would thus have immortality of the soul as their privilege.” He was preparing little phials of laudanum, morphine in the form of opium extract, ammonium acetate, and ether, each with its own dropper; a hypodermic syringe for chlorohydrate of morphine; and a small bottle of oil of turpentine.
    Just as he corked the bottle with a firm and accurate thumb, in the little village where Angelo had earlier eaten melon the man shaking under the eiderdown bolted out of bed like a steel spring and rolled to the feet of the woman who was gasping for air. He stayed sprawling on the brick floor; the black skin of his face, pulled violently back in a terrible grip, made his teeth and his eyes stick out. The woman bent over him. She told herself that it was probably a serious illness, catching. She hastily munched a clove of garlic. She ran to fetch the neighbors. The sun still filled up the street with pure plaster, with no shade at all.
    Nor was there any movement in the east, toward which Angelo turned from time to time. He climbed knolls covered with gray chestnut trees, descended into gray ravines where the horse’s feet raised flakes of ash, followed the twists in valleys whose walls were quicklime, scaled little hills to the slow pace of his sleeping horse, crossed over their white-hot crests, skirted woods of chestnut and oak where the air was like fire. Each time he reached the top of a hill, he looked to the east to see if there were not some sign of twilight. The sky in the east was the same gray as overhead. He could look anywhere in the sky without being dazzled by the sun; the sun was not a blinding ball; it was a blinding dust spread over everything. The whole sky was dazzling. The east was dazzling. He looked northward, trying to find, on the slope of the big mountain, signs of the little mountain village of Banon, toward which he had set out. The mountain remained a uniform gray, almost as blinding as the gray of the sky, and it was impossible to distinguish there the least detail. Angelo had resumed his military soul. He was marching on Banon through this oily summer, as if on some important objective under volleys of fire. He had slight indigestion. Heavy pains, sometimes stabbing like fire, flung handfuls of plaster whiter than the sky into his eyes. He thought the woman who breathed with such difficulty had been right in warning him to beware of the melons and tomatoes. But if he had seen any melons by the wayside, he would have got down from his horse and eaten more of them. He kept telling himself: “It’s the air. This greasy air isn’t natural. There’s something in it besides the sun; perhaps a multitude of minuscule flies that you swallow as you breathe and that give you cramps.” He was gradually coming to the top of a slope higher than all the hills he had so far scaled. It was, in its cloak of misty heat, one of the main spurs of the mountain, which was now visible from a great distance.
    It was visible as well from Carpentras. It was visible to the Jewish doctor at his laboratory window, to which he had crossed drawn by the smell of rotting melon now beginning to fill the street. In the dazzle of the light and beyond the roofs of the town he could make out, ten or twelve leagues to the east, the spurs of the mountain and the somewhat higher eminence, looking from there like a grove of trees denting the long gray slope. He wondered if the infection could reach those heights; if he wouldn’t have done better to send Rachel off by the Blovac diligence. Had it not been for the dazzling sky and the gray dust fogging the horizon, he could have seen from his laboratory window, above the stench of rotting melon peel filling street and town, the small height