Chapter 17 At one funeral for the dead in that country, the minister had a sermon. “Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me,” he said. “And horror hath overwhelmed me. And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove, then would I fly away and be at rest. Lo then would I wander far off. I would lodge in the wilderness. I would hast me to a shelter from the stormy wind and tempest.” He paused and looked up. “Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongue: For I have seen violence and strife in the city. Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof. Iniquity also and mischief are in the midst of it.” He paused. Then said: “For it was not an enemy that reproached me. Then I could have borne it.” *** Five days later the squad reached the Colorado. The waters coming down steady into the desert. Two birds rose from the shore and flew away and the horses at their venture watched uneasily. They rode up the sheer stone mountains set endwise in the earth and the wind coming from nowhere. Like in The New Testament, The Iliad, The Inferno. *** The squad rode with their faces turned away from the rock and the baked air which it enhanced, their shapes outlined across the stone like shapes capable of violating their piety with the flesh that authorized them, and going on sovereign without association to sun. Their eyes beheld the country that they were passing but they did not mark it. Like visions of Pyrro, The Devil, Dante. *** In the days to come they would travel up through a country where the stone would cook the flesh from the hand and where other than stone nothing was. The western land crimson red and smoking. This plain upon which so many have been broken was enormous but it was also ultimately desolate. They passed the azimuth in the rising heat, and they rode through that shimmering waste and through the greatest desert any of them had ever seen, barren stone quaking in the heat of that hallucinatory void, life-forms that seemed meant for mediums other than the earth. Mid-morning they watered at a stagnant pothole. *** The stars set near the sun, their black iron shapes against the sky. The heavens changed forever but all was as before. The dawn shown over the cusp of the earth and contained therein one final flame. The riders journeyed across the enflamed mountains against the windblown sand, the desperados each riding in this universal tragedy of blood, apprentice to the order divided up that separated them among those who fought and those who did not, having taking up decisions of what will be and what will not. --(Working Title) Joe Churchwell
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 09:46:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015