The Sons of the Earth
The nomads, reduced to indigence, had fixed their field tent amid a plain corroded by fire. The horses, practical in the art of finding grass under the snow, were biting and crushing the blackened straw. They had been released from a few innoble carts. A fortuitous dust storm was coming in from the horizon to waste the efforts of the blacksmiths and the veterinarian surgeons, trades vindicated to satisfy the questions from the police.
The natives of the country, faithful to a tyrannical dogma, were guarding the pilgrim’s actions and accusing them of being impious and rapacious. I would not venture into their camp save on horseback and armed with a curved sword and after fitting myself down to my ears with a cylindrical cap, made of sheep’s hair.
The nomads claimed to be offended in their rudimental credo and were soliciting the help of some obtuse divinities, phantoms of the desolate chaos. They referred the origin of their race to the invasion of a comet, at the beginning of the centuries.
They decided to move on during the last oscillations of autumn. The crystals of the precocious snow were starting to fly. The gusts of wind from the pole were dissolving an unburied virgin’s shroud, in the stygian night, at the edge of the world.
They damaged, before their journey, the faith of the indigenous people with the sacrifice of a dog in the manner of the crucifix. In that way, they consulted the success of their thoughts and required immediate arrival and succor from the night. They invited it to mercilessly fustigate the pair of crows of their taciturn cart.
The famished host headed towards the encounter with a precipitated sun.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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