...of mineral inactivity

On the third day, Francois Besson had a date with this woman called Josette, at six o’clock, on the corner by the Prisunic. He got there a little early, and waited standing by the kerbside, smoking a cigarette. It was just dark, and the street-lamps were shining out, sharp and clear-cut points of light. The crowd were still swarming inexhaustibly down the street: not one day’s respite, not an hour’s rest. Even on Sundays and public holidays, they were still there, out in the street, moving ot and fro, idling, ogling, picking up and purchasing goods. In the evening they went to the cinema, came out of cafes, banged car doors. In the morning they went to work, queued in pork-butcher’s shops, or stood gossiping on doorsteps. No, they never rested, never stopped moving.
But only a few yards above the ground it was utterly deserted. The houses reared their tall silent facades, and there was nothing in the air save empty solitude. The trolley-bus wires crossed and recrossed continually, but nothing happened. The walls, the branches of the trees, the cowls of the street-lamps, roof-tops interspersed with garretts - it was all so still and quiet that no one could have deduced what a crawling ant-hill existed down below. The same thing applied underground. Beneath that carapace of tarred asphalt, hammered by marching feet, worn away by tyres, the desert began again: an immense, pitch-black, softly opaque desert, with every ten years or so a gravelly rattle - stopped almost before it had begun - as a mass of fine, close-packed scree shifted its position, after which things returned to that state of boundless mineral inactivity which represented the world’s true dominion.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]