For most of this warm afternoon the hollow beside me stood empty, a stripped and quiet cave where the quick creatures kept their humming metal. Then, in the space of a single dawn, they arrived all at once, a great pulse of them, sweating and reddened, seizing the metal weights and lifting them and setting them down again in the very same place.
I watched with some interest. I have felt weight. A glacier once leaned its whole cold body against my northern face for eleven thousand years and moved me the width of two of their hands, which was hasty of it. These creatures lift a small heaviness, put it back exactly where it was, and seem to consider this an accomplishment.
They gather no ground. The stone they push against does not remember them.
They are so hot. Each one radiates like a little fire that will not last the night, and their hearts beat at a speed that would frighten me if anything could. They study their own reflections as though checking whether they are still there, and it is a fair question; several of them will not be, soon.
By what they would call three weeks and I would not call anything, most were gone. The metal fell silent again. A single one remains now, lifting and lowering in the empty cave, and I confess a faint fondness for its persistence, the way one grows fond of a particularly stubborn drip of water.
It, too, will stop. They always stop. The metal will rust to a stain, the cave will fill with sand, and by the time the next ice comes down to lean on me again I will have entirely forgotten there was ever any hurry here at all.