His dirty hands were tanned and dotted with small scars, veins bulging and crisscrossing their backs. His fingers were thick and creased with wrinkles and marked with callouses. They gripped the handle of a sturdy spade as he churned the soil from the hole. The land around him was a monastery, dark and empty, and the strange meditative silence that enveloped him was somehow appropriate. The only sounds were the blade of his spade scuttling through the earth and the rhythm of his heavy breaths.

“Why do you dig in this rolling wasteland?” I asked him, my voice rasping through the calm like a rusted dagger.

He glanced up, his shovel never ceasing its motion.

“I search,” he grunted. He stopped, only for a moment, to wipe the sweat from his ancient dirt-streaked face. He returned to his work, his seemingly aimless hole widening. The silence, only broken his exertions, returned.

I observed his digging, hoping to divine his purpose. He would dig intently in one place and then suddenly abandon the area and begin to dig somewhere else. His hole was a snake-like maze of trenches of varying depths.

Bemused, I broke the quiet again, “What do you search for?”

“I search,” he repeated, the words coming out as a curse.

“Did you lose something?” I queried.

His knotted arms continued their interminable motion, as soil flew into a section of the hole he had previously dug so intently in. “Yes,” he spat, “I know it’s here.”

“You lost it here?” I ask, “what is it that you lost?”

One hand continued to grip the spade and redistribute the dirt, as the other hand gestured with gangly nonchalance toward a distant hill. “Over there, outside the city wall.”

I gazed at the far off green hill, “why do you search here if you lost it over there?”

He laughed grimly, “it no longer suits my purpose, I need another.”

“And you know the other one is here? What does it look like?”

His shovel ceased, and he turned to me, his eyes betraying a hardened sorrow, “I don’t know.”

The shovel scraped against the soil once again as he returned desparately to his labour.