The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [329]
It was a stairway, but not a convenient one. They carried the weight of a suitcase on their backs, and they had to climb what amounted to forty flights of stairs. To give an added fillip, the stairs were not of equal height. Sometimes 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 it. And the stairway, of 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 up. The men struggled behind him like a wounded caterpillar. They never traveled all at once. A few would advance over a rock and wait for the others to catch up. They 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 impulse. Often they would halt while Croft or Martinez hacked slowly through a tangle of bamboo. In 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 livable. With no surprise they felt their legs become numb, trail after them like a toy which a child drags on a string. Now the men no longer stepped from one high rock to another. They dropped their guns on the shelf above, flopped over and dragged their legs after them. Even the smallest rocks were too great to step over. They 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 grief. In 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 nausea. One or another of them was always retching. When they moved they were always falling. The 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 torment. The men groaned and cursed, stumbled on their faces, reeled and skidded from rock to rock.
It was impossible to see more than ten feet ahead, and they forgot about Croft. They had discovered that they could not hate him and do anything about it, so they hated the mountain, hated it with more fervor that they could ever have hated a human being. The stairway became alive, personalized; it seemed to mock and deceive them at every step, resist them with every malign rock. Once more they forgot about the Japanese, forgot about the patrol, almost forgot about themselves. The only ecstasy they could imagine would be to stop climbing.
Even Croft was exhausted. He had the task of leading them, of cutting trail whenever the foliage became too thick, and he prostrated himself trying to pull them up the mountain. He felt not only the weight of his own body but the weight of all their bodies as effectively as if he had been pulling them in harness. They dragged him back, tugged at his shoulders and his heels. With all his physical exertion his mind fatigued him as greatly, for he was under the acute strain of gauging their limits.
There was another strain. The closer he came to the crest of the mountain the greater became his anxiety. Each new turn of the staircase demanded an excessive effort of will from him. He had been driving nearer and nearer to the heart of this country for days, and it had a cumulative terror. All the vast alien stretches of land they had crossed had eroded his will, pitched him a little finer. It was an effort, almost palpable, to keep advancing over strange hills and up the flanks of an ancient resisting mountain. For the first time in his life he started with fear every time an insect whipped into his face or an unnoticed leaf tickled his neck. He drove himself onward with the last sources of his endeavor, dropping at the halts with no energy left.