...of return

It is only a moment later that he hears the cuckoo. That is, the terrible racket of his breathing subsiding (now he is walking: at a regular pace but without hurrying, so that gradually his heart and lungs recover their normal functioning), sheltered now, the awareness of the external world gradually returning otherwise than through the elementary alternative of cover and exposure; he can then perceive the tiny sounds that constitute the silence of the dense, motionless woods: the faint hissing of the air in the treetops, the rustle of the foliage, his footsteps muffled by the spongy ground, the elastic carpet of accumulated humus, and reaching him at regular intervals, the double cry of the bird, echoed between the vertical trunks, as if after having been uttered it continued to exist by its very absence, as if to underline the silence, to make it even more evident, sounded with the regularity of a clock not to disturb but to emphasise it, to release one accumulation of time and to permit another quantity to accumulate in its turn, to thicken, until the moment when it will be liberated by the cry, until he stops walking, stands there motionless under the stinking carapace of broadcloth and leather weighed down by water (but he doesn't feel it, merely constitutes with it one compact mass of filth and fatigue, of a substance, so to speak, undifferentiated, earthen, as if his brain itself, bewildered by lack of sleep, was filled with a sort of mud, his face separated from the external world, from the air, by a scorching film, a kind of mask stuck to the skin), listening, waiting till the cry of the cuckoo reaches him again, then hearing that silence flow back, peopled now by a tremendous uproar not that of the war (at one very remote moment, as though coming from another world, anachronistic as it were, at once absurd, scandalous, and savage, echoed a series of explosions: not a sound strictly speaking (or else something that would be to sound what grey is to colour), not something human, that is, capable of being governed by man, cosmic rather, the air repeatedly shaken, brutally compressed and decompressed in some gigantic and furious convulsion, then nothing more), nor the rustle of branches gently rocked or the faint hissing of the breeze in the vault of the foliage, but more secret, more enormous, surrounding him on all sides, continuous, indifferent, the invisible and triumphant impulse of the sap, the imperceptible and slow unfolding into daylight of the buds, the corollas, the leaves with their complicated folds opening, smoothing themselves out, spreading, palpitating, fragile, invincible, and tender green.

[The Acacia, Simon, C.]