14
ROBERT MUSIL
Yet not the slightest doubt occurred to him whether the project
was a sound one. He sent off two telegrams, one to tell his wife that
he was, after all, leaving instantly and would send his address, the
other accepting the proposal that he should join the company as its
geologist and perhaps even invest a fairly large sum in the reopening
of the mines.
In P., a prosperous, compact little Italian town in the midst of
mulberry groves and vineyards, he joined Hoffingott, a tall, handsome,
swarthy man of
his
own age who was always enormously active. He
now learned that the company was backed by immense American
funds, and the project was to be carried out in great style. First of
all a reconnaissance party was to go up the valley. It was to consist of
the two of them and three other partners. Horses were bought, instru–
ments were due to arrive any day, and workmen were being engaged.
Homo did not stay in the inn, but-he did not quite know why–
in the house of an Italian acquaintance of Hoffingott's. There he was
struck by three things. The beautiful mahogany beds were indescrib–
ably cool and soft. The wallpaper had an indescribably bewildering,
maze-like pattern, at once banal and very strange. And there was a
cane rocking chair. Sitting in that chair, rocking and gazing at the
wallpaper, one seemed to turn into a mere tangle of rising and falling
tendrils that would grow within a couple of seconds from nothingness
to their full size and then as rapidly disappear into themselves again.
In the streets the air was a blend of snow and the South.
It
was
the middle of May. In the evening the place was lit by big arc lights
that hung from wires stretched across from house to house, so high
that the streets below were like ravines of deep blue gloom, and there
one picked one's way along, while away up in the universe there was
a spinning and hissing of white suns. By day one looked out over vine–
yards and woods. It was still all red, yellow and green after the winter,
and since the trees did not lose their leaves, the fading growth and the
new were interlaced as in graveyard wreaths. Little red, blue and pink
villas still stood out very vividly among the trees, like scattered cubes
inanimately manifesting
\0
every eye some strange morphological law
of which they themselves knew nothing. But higher up the woods were
dark, and the mountain was called Selvot. Above the woods there was
pasture land, now still covered with snow, the broad, smooth, wavy
lines of it running across the neighboring mountains and up the steep
