Where Don Carotte, in the very rhythm of events, discovers—filled at once with wonder and terror—that what he believed himself to be observing has itself begun to observe him.
Don Carotte's Notebook
I had left the shore before sunrise, intending to reach one of the heights on one of those islands where one loses oneself. Not because I hoped to discover anything in particular. I had long since realized that the things which matter most almost never consent to reveal themselves to the one who seeks them. They prefer to surprise the one who, having given up pursuing them, finally allows them the possibility of coming toward him.
The sky possessed an almost unsettling clarity. The sea, ordinarily so quick to multiply its shades, seemed to have chosen to preserve only one, as though it had decided to hold all the others within itself. Nothing appeared likely to disturb that stillness.
And yet, before my gaze had even left the nearest cliffs, I felt that something had changed.
The island rising before me no longer resembled the one I had glimpsed the previous day. The basalt slopes, whose nakedness had until then seemed to defy time itself, were now covered with such abundant vegetation that it became difficult to believe a single night could have sufficed for its appearance. Grasses climbed as far as the screes. Ferns clung to the fissures of the rock. Vines were already cascading down the ledges. Here and there, young trees—whose age I could not have guessed, whether they had been born only hours before or several years earlier—gave the island a depth it had never before seemed to possess.
For a long while I remained motionless, without the slightest thought...
As though the flowering of the neighbouring island had brought about the desertion of my own mind...
I had ceased to think.
I merely tried to let my eyes accept what they were seeing.
I then remembered certain accounts I had come upon during my travels: incomplete manuscripts, abandoned journals, loose pages with no beginning, several of which mentioned, almost absent-mindedly, these sudden eruptions of vegetation. None of them lingered over the phenomenon. One spoke of ferns appearing before dawn; another described trees whose growth no one had witnessed; a third seemed to know nothing of any such thing and portrayed the same islands as though they had never borne anything but stone, wind, and seabirds.
At first I believed I was dealing with imperfect testimonies.
With time, another idea had begun to visit me.
Could it be that their inconsistency did not belong to the witnesses themselves?
Perhaps it belonged to the Archipelago.
That thought had never entirely left me when I noticed the smoke.
It did not rise from any single point.
It seemed to emerge from the entire thickness of that sudden vegetation, as though the flames had not spread from one tree to another but had been born simultaneously in a multitude of invisible places. I could still scarcely distinguish the fire itself, yet the smoke was already rising with such force that it seemed to support the sky itself.
I waited, my eyes already stinging and nearly burning, for the wind to carry it out to sea.
But the wind no longer did what it had always done.
I cannot say at what moment I realized that it was no longer the wind that governed the fire.
It was the fire that now seemed to govern the wind.
The gusts of air reaching me no longer possessed that steady breathing which the sea ordinarily imposes upon the islands. They changed direction abruptly, ceased altogether, returned, then fell away again, as though another atmosphere were slowly taking shape within the first.
I had no need to understand the reasons for such an upheaval in order to feel that something, upon that island separated from mine by several miles of sea, was already transforming even the air I breathed.
I raised my eyes.
The column of smoke continued to grow.
It was not merely rising.
It was drawing the entire sky toward itself.
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