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Show 53 was a small cave which had been dug into the mountainside long before Hamelin was a city. Father Johann said that ancient shepherds had carved out the cavern as a shelter for themselves and their animals. It was to this shelter that my mother had been carried to give birth to me. I climbed to the cave and when I saw that inside was a scattering of old straw, I decided to enter it and rest for a while. I had to lower my head to fit through the entrance. Inside the cave smelled musty and of the faint stale odor of animals. Its earthen roof was shored up by timbers, but the timbers looked old and rotten and when I tested the thickest one, it groaned and creaked. Bare roots hung down overhead where soil had fallen from the roof to the floor, with the roots dripping moisture in a rapid seepage. After so many months of rain, the earth might be loosened enough to be unsafe, I thought, so I backed out again into the open. I want back down to the path and walked aimlessly just to keep myself awake. When I had gone the better part of a mile along the mountain pass, I came upon a shepherd boy sitting in the shade of a tree watching a small band of sheep. He was whittling a piece of wood with a thin-bladed, very worn knife. Knotted in the hem of my shirt I still had one of the coins Gast had given me. I went up to the boy, who was about eight years old, and asked him, "Do you want to sell that knife?" He stared at me with his mouth open and his eyes wide. When I held out the small coin, he wiped the palm of one hand on the grass and then picked up the money with the tips of his dirty fingers. He |
