Chapter 7
About the woodcutter and the work of his axe
THE BRICKS AND MORTAR were gone. Now there was rough bark under Adam's fingers. He was in a tree trunk, in front of him a vaulted hole, beyond which lay shady forests. Leaves fell and descended in slow spirals to the forest floor. Thorny bushes and stinging nettles offered low shelter, but there were no flowers for Adam to see. It was a landscape of green and brown. Everything seemed lit by a strange half-light, as if dawn was just approaching or the day was finally drawing to a close.
Adam stood still in the darkness of the trunk, not moving. His mother's voice was gone, and now there was only the barely audible sound of leaf upon leaf and the distant rush of water over rocks. There was no trace of the German plane, no indication t
