...of eremitism

For a long time he lay on his couch watching the sky gradually close over, listening to the silence. It was this silence that had seemed difficult to him the first days of his arrival, after the war. He had requested a post in a small town at the base of the foothills that separate the high plateaus from the desert. There, rocky walls, green and black to the north, pink or mauve to the south, marked the frontier of eternal summer. He had been assigned a post farther north, on the plateau itself. In the beginning, the solitude and silence had been hard for him in these merciless lands inhabited only by stones. Sometimes the furrows seemed agricultural, but they had been dug to find a certain kind of stone useful in construction. The only labour here was harvesting pebbles. Otherwise, people scratched a few shavings of earth accumulated in the hollows to enrich the meagre village gardens. This is how it was, stones alone covered three quarters of this country. Towns sprang up here, flourished, then disappeared; men passed through, loved each other or cut each other's throats, then died. In this desert, no one, neither he nor his guest, mattered. And yet outside this desert, neither of them, Daru knew, could have truly lived.

[The Guest, from Exile And The Kingdom, Camut, A.]