The Tartar Steppe. Dino Buzzati

me, sir, are there any villages near at hand?’

      ‘No, not near. There’s San Rocco, but it will be twenty miles away.’

      ‘So I don’t suppose there’s much in the way of amusement?’

      ‘Not much, that’s right, not much.’

      The air had become cooler, the flanks of the mountains were becoming more rounded, announcing the final crests.

      ‘And don’t people get bored, sir?’ asked Giovanni more intimately, laughing at the same time, as if to say that it would be all the same to him.

      ‘You get used to it,’ answered Ortiz and added with an implied rebuke: ‘I have been there for almost eighteen years. No, that’s wrong, I’ve completed my eighteenth.’

      ‘Eighteen years?’ said Giovanni greatly impressed.

      ‘Eighteen,’ answered the captain.

      A flight of ravens passed, skimming the two officers, and plunging into the funnel of the valley.

      ‘Ravens,’ said the captain.

      Giovanni did not reply – he was thinking of the life that awaited him; he felt that he was no part of that world, of that solitude, of those mountains.

      ‘But,’ he asked, ‘do any of the officers stay on who go there on their first posting?’

      ‘Not many now,’ answered Ortiz, half sorry at having decried the Fort and noticing that the other was now going too far, ‘in fact almost no one. Now they all want to go to a crack garrison. Once it was an honour, Fort Bastiani, now it almost seems to be a punishment.’

      Giovanni said nothing but the other went on:

      ‘All the same, it is a frontier garrison. Speaking by and large there are some first class fellows there. A frontier post is still a frontier post after all.’

      Drogo kept silent; he felt a sudden oppression. The horizon had widened; in the extreme distance appeared the strange silhouettes of rocky mountains, sharp peaks rising in confusion into the sky.

      ‘Even in the army things are looked at differently these days,’ Ortiz went on. ‘Once upon a time Fort Bastiani was a great honour. Now they say the frontier is dead – they forget that the frontier is always the frontier and one never knows.’

      A little stream crossed the road. They stopped to water their horses and, having dismounted, walked up and down a little to stretch themselves.

      ‘Do you know what is really first rate?’ said Ortiz and laughed heartily.

      ‘What, sir?’

      ‘The messing – you’ll see how we eat at the Fort. And that explains the number of inspections. A general every fortnight.’

      Drogo laughed out of politeness. He could not make out whether Ortiz was a fool, whether he was hiding something or whether he simply talked like that without meaning it.

      ‘Excellent,’ said Giovanni, ‘I’m hungry!’

      ‘We’re nearly there now. Do you see that hillock with the patch of gravel? Well, it is just behind it.’

      They set off again; just beyond the hillock with the patch of gravel the two officers emerged on to the edge of a slightly sloping plateau and the Fort appeared a few hundred yards away.

      It did indeed seem small compared with the vision of the previous evening. From the central fort, which was like nothing so much as a barrack with a few windows, two low turreted walls ran out to connect it with the lateral redoubts, two on each side. Thus the walls formed a weak barrier across the whole width of the gap – some five hundred yards – which was shut in on the flanks by high precipitous cliffs.

      To the right, at the very foot of the mountain, the plateau fell away into a sort of saddle; there the old road ran through the pass and came to an end against the ramparts.

      The Fort was silent, sunk in the full noonday sun, shadow-less. Its walls – the front could not be seen since it faced north – stretched out yellow and bare. A chimney gave out pale smoke. All along the ramparts of the central building, of the curtain walls and of the redoubts, dozens of sentries could be seen, with rifles at the slope, walking up and down methodically, each on his own little beat. Like the motion of a pendulum they marked off the passage of time without breaking the enchantment of the immense silence.

      To right and left the mountains stretched out as far as the eye could see in precipitous and apparently inaccessible ranges. They too – at least at that time of day – had a parched, yellow colour.

      Instinctively Giovanni Drogo stopped his horse. Looking slowly round, he fixed his gaze on the dark walls without being able to read their true meaning. He thought of a prison, he thought of an abandoned palace. A slight breath of wind made a flag, which before had hung limply entangled with the flagstaff, billow out over the Fort. There was the indistinct echo of a trumpet. The sentries walked slowly to and fro. On the square before the gate of the Fort three or four men – at that distance it was impossible to make out whether they were soldiers or not – were loading sacks on to a cart. But over everything there lay a mysterious torpor.

      Captain Ortiz, too, had halted to look at the building.

      ‘There it is,’ he said, although there was no need to say so.

      Drogo thought: now he is going to ask me what I think of it, and was embarrassed at the thought. But instead the captain said nothing.

      It was not imposing, Fort Bastiani, with its low walls, nor was it in any sense beautiful, nor picturesque with towers and bastions – there was not one single thing to make up for its bareness, to bring to mind the sweets of life. Yet as on the previous evening at the foot of the defile Drogo looked at it as if hypnotised and an inexplicable feeling of excitement entered his heart.

      And beyond it, on the other side, what was there? What world opened up beyond that inhospitable building, beyond the ramparts, casemates and magazines which shut off the view? What did the northern kingdom look like, the stony desert no one had ever crossed? The map, Drogo recalled vaguely, showed beyond the frontier a vast zone with scanty names – but from the eminence of the Fort one would see some village, pastures, a house; or was there only the desolation of an uninhabited waste?

      He felt himself suddenly alone, and his soldier’s high spirits, which had come so easily till now – as long as the uneventful garrison life lasted, the comforts of home, the constant company of gay friends, at night the little adventures in the gardens – all his self-assurance were suddenly gone. The Fort seemed to him one of those unknown worlds to which he had never seriously thought he might belong – not that they seemed unpleasant, but rather because they appeared infinitely remote from his own life. A world which would make much greater demands of him, a world without splendour unless it were that of its rigid laws.

      If only he could turn back, not even cross the threshold of the Fort but ride back down to the plain, to his own city, to his old habits. Such was Drogo’s first thought; and, however shameful such weakness in a soldier, he was ready to confess to it, if necessary, provided they let him go at once. But from the invisible north a thick cloud was rising over the glacis and imperturbably the sentries walked up and down under the high sun. Drogo’s horse whinnied. Then the great silence fell once more.

      Giovanni at last looked away from the Fort and glanced to the side, at the captain, hoping for a friendly word. Ortiz too had remained quite still and was gazing intently at the yellow walls. He, too, who had lived there for eighteen years, looked at them as if bewitched, as if once more he witnessed a miracle. It seemed he could not tire of looking upon them once again, and a vague smile, half joyful, half sad, slowly lit his face.

       Chapter Three

      The first thing Drogo did was to report to the adjutant, Major Matti. The orderly officer,