The wall of the cave (Reprinted)

In this article old and new relations between gauge fields and strings are discussed. We add new arguments that the Yang-Mills theories must be described by the noncritical strings in the five-dimensional curved space. The physical meaning of the fifth dimension is that of the renormalization scale represented by the Liouville field. We analyze the meaning of the zigzag symmetry and show that it is likely to be present if there is a minimal supersymmetry on the world sheet. We also present the new string backgrounds which may be relevant for the description of the ordinary bosonic Yang-Mills theories. The article is written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the IHES.