He was eleven, a city child, and he enjoyed the long summer in the mountains. Every day he went hiking with his friends, tough sons of farmers who knew all the paths through the forest up to the rocky tops. He learned the names of the surrounding peaks, how you carved artful ornaments in wooden sticks and how you were supposed to hunt lizards. They had told him that lizards abandon their tails when caught, but that it would grow again. Not as nicely tapered as the old one, but still. A sacrifice: freedom in exchange for a mutilation.

He got his moment of triumph. The lizard had ceded its tail and when it touched the ground it quickly disappeared into a crevasse. He let go of the tail immediately; the thrill of victory was over in an instant. The tail had felt already dead in his fingers. While his friends praised him, he could only stare at the spoils in front of his feet. Within a minute a swarm of flies had taken possession of it. Their greedy buzz made him shiver.

Now he rolls painfully onto his side. He tries to support his left arm. A sharp rock drills into his palm. Slowly he turns his head. A few meters away the short, dusty olive tree. Four hours ago, a picturesque view, now the promise of shadow. The burning sun on his head is more painful than the fire of the poison in his body.

Nausea. The sound of crickets and cicadas. Half an hour ago a Mediterranean summer concert, now a vulgar noise.

His rucksack seems far. Light years away.

On his fiftieth birthday he had got a telescope and one night he had managed to get Jupiter and the moons of Galileo in sight. Suddenly he had been millions of miles into space. Simply by bringing his eye before the lens. And now he is too weak to overcome a few meters towards the rucksack and the water bottle. He wants to get up, but it feels like a carousel, which swings him past the olive tree and his rucksack. He tries to seize it, but the carousel rotates faster and faster and he is dizzy. Seasick. He starts vomiting, he is sweating, panting, he falls on his back and closes his eyes.

He had arrived yesterday. He had planned for just a short walk this morning, to get used to the rhythm of the landscape. His mobile phone is still on the nightstand back in the bungalow down in the valley.

He turns on his belly and manages to crawl to the rucksack near the olive tree and squeezes the bottle out of it. Not because he is thirsty, but to wash away the rancid taste and the vomit remnants.

He raises the bottle to the mouth, but the contact of tongue and uvula with the water make him gag. The bottle falls from his hand. Again he lies on his back. He sees a black sun coldly looking down on him. For how many hours?

"I am alone." A frightened child's thin voice, echoing in a cave.

"Not true, haven't you still got friends?" He replies.

That thin voice again: "But they are so far away, so long ago."

"One day you'll be with them."

It had not been worth the effort. The trunk of the olive tree in his back feels rough, there's hardly a shadow, too little leaves. And still the tireless insects. It seems as if from time to time the cicadas take over the lead from the crickets and vice versa. During the transitional phase, the noise increases. Only the rhythm is unpredictable.

Is it really over? He tries to evoke his favourite funeral music, but the cicadas take over. "Cee-cee-cee, cee-cee-cee." No more illusions.

His eyelids feel heavy and he looks at the cause of his pain, less than three meters away. A viper. Broken back, her head shattered, the stone beside her. She had been busy absorbing heat after a cool night, she was yet too slow to slip away, but too fast for him. Stupidly enough, he had not been able to suck the bite on his calf, at 61 his back was too stiff. The cross-cutting with the knife and squeezing poisoned blood out of the wound had not helped. Had he taken the right action? Ah, what the hell ... the pain makes him indifferent. Now he feels burning spots moving under the skin. He is in a cold sweat and he lets himself glide down along the stem of the tree, to be able to place his head between the roots.

Rustling.

A lizard is approaching his head, quick steps, the sound swells and swells to a magnified sound of splashing bare feet on a wet rock. Then this abrupt stopping of the body. This fascinating harshness of the locomotion, that stalwart truncated movement... So unlike the flexible or subtle phased stop of a mammal, no, to here and no further. Chack! Freeze frame!

The animal stopped in front of his face, sparkling in the sun, the little yellow eyes unaffectedly scanning the surrounding area. No eye contact, only a groping, tasting tongue. A flawless tail that would remain intact. The man is no longer game for a contest. Now it's the triumph of the lizard. The manifestation of the survival power of the reptiles, the older, quieter species. The power of being able to wait. The reptiles will survive; the mammals will fade to extinction.

He blinks and the lizard is gone.

Did he unconsciously want this? He had always imagined a grand finale in one of his beloved, wild landscapes. But now: no romantic gentle death during a finest moment. Pity. And yet...

Time is relative.

'Eternity', he thinks, 'is outside time. Time is a construct, as I am. I existed thanks to an environment that I noticed, that responded to me and that I could describe. Now this environment disappears, and so will I. Not uplifting, but it feels natural.'

He is so tired. " Cee-cee-cee-cee-cee", the cicadas sing. His best friend had died of cancer, slowly and painfully, three years of fighting to stay alive. It suddenly comes to him. "Lucky me", he mumbles.

It is calm. No breeze, no voices, no more adventures. Hush.

Suddenly, the sick smell of hyacinths. God? His breath? Too close.

Nauseating.

The black sun becomes bigger and bigger and descends on him.