Could that be all, was that the end of all he had...

Posted at 10:08 AM, Sunday, January 31, 2010

Could that be all, was that the end of all he had done in his life? Did it always come to laying down a load? He fell into line and trudged along in the middle of the platoonHe looked at nobody, and no one looked at himAll of them felt a wretched embarrassmentEach man was trying to forget the way he had been tempted to shoot Croft and had failed As they walked, Polack cursed continually in a low sullen voice, filled with self-loathingHe was swearing at himself, frightened, a little shockedThe moment had been there, and he had let it go, had had his rifle in his hands, and had done nothing with ityellow! And Croft at this point was confident againThis morning they would cross the mountain peakEverything and everybody had tried to hold him back but there could be nothing left now, no obstacle at all The platoon climbed the slope, crossed another ridge, and descended over a stretch of scattered rocks into one more tiny valleyCroft led them through a small rock gorge onto another slope balenciaga bag and for an hour they toiled upward from rock to rock, crawling sometimes for hundreds of yards on their hands and knees in a laborious endless progression which skirted the edge of a deep ravineBy midmorning the sun was very hot, and the men were exhausted once moreCroft led them much more slowly, halting every few minutes They topped a crest-line and jogged feebly down a gentle slopeBefore them was a huge amphitheater, bounded in a rough semicircle by high sheer bluffs covered with vegetationThe cliffs of jungle rose almost vertically for five hundred feet, at least the height of a forty-story skyscraper, and above them was the crest of the mountainCroft had noticed this amphitheater; from miles away it looked like a dark-green collar encircling the neck of the mountain There was no way to avoid it; at either side of the amphitheater the mountain dropped for a thousand feetThey had to go forward and climb the jungle before themCroft rested the platoon at the base, but there was no shade chanel tote and the rest had little valueAfter five minutes they set out The wall of foliage was not so impossible as it had appeared from a distanceA crude stairway of rocks bedded in the foliage and zigzagged upward like a rampThere were bamboo groves and bushes and plants, vines, and a few trees whose roots grew horizontally into the mountain and whose trunks bent upward in an L toward the skyThere was mud, of course, from all the rains that had trickled down the rocks, and leaves and plants and thorns restricted their passage It was a stairway, but not a convenient oneThey carried the weight of a suitcase on their backs, and they had to climb what amounted to forty flights of stairsTo give an added fillip, the stairs were not of equal heightSometimes they would clamber from one waist-high rock to another, and sometimes they would scrabble up a slope of pebbles and small rocks; sometimes indeed each rock was of a different height and shape than the one that had preceded itAnd the stairway, of submariner rolex course, was littered, so that often they would have to push aside foliage or cut through vines Croft had estimated it would take an hour to ascend the wall of the amphitheater, but after an hour they were only halfway upThe men struggled behind him like a wounded caterpillarThey never traveled all at onceA few would advance over a rock and wait for the others to catch upThey advanced in ripples, Croft toiling ahead a few yards and the rest of the platoon filling the gap in a series of spasmodic lurches which traveled like a shock impulseOften they would halt while Croft or Martinez hacked slowly through a tangle of bambooIn a few places the stairway leaped upward in a big bound of seven or ten feet of muddy earth up which they climbed by clutching at roots Once more the platoon dropped from one layer of fatigue to another, but this had happened so often in the past few days that it was almost familiar, almost livableWith no surprise they felt their legs become numb, trail after them like a toy chanel replica handbags which a child drags on a stringNow the men no longer stepped from one high rock to anotherThey dropped their guns on the shelf above, flopped over and dragged their legs after themEven the smallest rocks were too great to step overThey lifted their legs with their arms, and placed their feet on the step before them, tottered like old men out of their beds for an hour Every minute or two someone would stop and lie huddled on the rocks, weeping with the rapt taut sobs of fatigue that sound so much like griefIn empathy a swirl of vertigo would pass from one to the other and they would listen with a morbid absorption to the racking sounds of dry nauseaOne or another of them was always retchingWhen they moved they were always fallingThe climb up the rocks slippery with mud and vegetation, the vicious thorns of bamboo thicket, the blundering of their feet against the jungle vines, all blended into one vast tormentThe men groaned and cursed, stumbled on their faces, reeled and skidded from rock to cambon chanel r