Three Arched Bridge Read Online Free Page B

then fill his hands again and again with river mud, letting it trickle through his fingers. Everyone realized that this could be none but the designer, or as they said now, the projector of the future bridge.
    He stayed two consecutive weeks in the rough little hut, gloomy and not keeping company with anybody.
    People came from all parts to see him, and not only the curious or the idle, who are never in short supply at such times, but folk of all kinds. Men who had set out for market came, women with their cradles in their arms, cheese-makers who smelled of brine, and hurrying soldiers.
    They stood on the banks near the black stones and the old jetty and watched the man moving to and fro, wading into the water and climbing out again, then returning to the water with his strange tools, then back to the sandbank where he would bend down and vigorously, almost furiously, scratch figures and sketches in the sand itself.
    Even though it was clear from a distance that he was excitable (it sometimes seemed that he could hardly keep one of his own hands from pestering the other), he paid not the slightest heed to the people who watched him for hours on end. He did not even occasionally turn his head toward them. He treated old Ajkuna, the only person who had the courage to go up to him and threaten him, with total unconcern. She struck the ground in front of him two or three times with her stick to make him listen, and when he lifted his head from the scrawls, she cried, “What are you doing here? Are you not afraid of Him above?” And she lifted her staff to the sky. Perhaps he did not understand a word she said, or perhaps he did not care. Nobody knows. What we do know is that he bent his head over his figures once more and did not raise it again.
    When people realized that nothing ever distracted him, they talked loudly and expressed their opinions about him and his work under his very nose. “Ah, now he’s passing the mud through his hands, and hell find out what sort of land this is,” explained someone. “Because land is like a human being, and can be strong or weak, healthy or sick. It can look fine from the outside but still have an invisible disease. And the land itself can’t tell whether what it will carry will be for good or ill, and so he’s running it through his fingers, to learn all its secrets.”
    On they talked, approaching now quite close to him, while he went on as indifferent as before, Nobody exchanged a word with him. The only person who kept company with the new arrival was mad Gjelosh. Without telling anybody, and without anybody understanding how, he silently put himself in the stranger’s service, He would wait for him to leave his hut at dawn, and carry his stakes and other implements, taking them to the river-bank and back again. Gjelosh was under his feet all day, and this taciturn redhead, who seemed ready to gnaw off his own fingers whenever work did not go well, accepted the mad boy’s company in silence. Gjelosh gazed at him in adoration and cleared away anything that stood in the way of his scribbles in the sand, uttering not a sound in the man’s presence. His tongue was unleashed only when the designer returned to the hut. “Eh, Gjelosh,’ people said, “Show us how your master works.” And a delighted Gjelosh would seize a stick and scribble in the ground so furiously that mud and pebbles flew twenty paces off. “That’s how he works, vu, vu, vu,” he went, wildly scratching the ground.

10
    T HE DESIGNER LEFT just as he had arrived^ unseen by anyone* One mornings mad Gjelosh scurried around the hut, again sealed with its padlock. He brought his head close to the cracks, peered inside for a long time, and then ran around the hut again, He apparently could not believe that the man was not there’ and so was looking for some other hole or chink in order to find him,
    This went on almost all day, The idiot’s eyes had