Chapter 19 Beneath the hoop-ironed hooves of the horses the sand and the stone shaped itself in strange symmetries like iron rungs, and these shapes resonated on the earth, as if the passage of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granite of reality. Contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a marking that will pass. *** They went for a long time without ceasing, and the sun shown and the rain fell, and they rode through sun and rain and sun and rain again. In that dark beneath the light of the storm they routed the plain where it had flooded, and the horses and they themselves reflected on the pools amid the mountains and the flashes of lightning, and they held themselves high and were skeptical of those rippling kingdoms on the far away edge of the sea upon which they moved wondrous. The weathers calmed. They worked the warhorses upwards among the bones of things where the silhouettes of birds chased the escaping sun. In that outstretched crimson sunset the puddles on the desert beneath were like lakes of primeval blood. *** The mountains were etched against the shadowy skyline under the cold steal colored dusk, and herds of desert wolves moved west where it seemed as though the company had been followed. At length, in the twilight hour, the parched desert wolves moved again, and they were the color of the rock out of which they seemed to be chiseled. Jacobs righted his horse to gaze long upon these happenings. The sands slashed in the dry wind, as though they were echoes of the earth, echoes vibrating with the spear and the blade of old skirmishes undocumented forever. The sky seemed as if besought and the night arrived very fast and the birds sped toward the sun as it fled. The moon hung in the night like the blind eye of a cat. Jacobs turned back his steed. He rode onward and so rode all of them onward into the problematic demise of the dark. *** They crossed the broad volcanic plain bounded by a rim of hills. As if the darkness had a soul that was the sun’s assassin, hurrying to the west as once men did believe, as they may believe again. As they rode Hartford spoke. He said: “Between the action and the ceremony is hid the world and herein are great storms and lashing trees. A warrior seeks his own fate. Any who strive to discover his personal fate and therefore decide some other path by which it should take would at last find only that same discovery at that designated time.” He gestured to the satchels of scalps and said that the universe is not a small thing, and the complexity within it is not bound by any longitude nor diameter. He said: “Beneath the order of the stars any who approaches chaos dances. The desire of your heart is to be told a secret. The secret is that there is no secret.” *** They rode on. Long nights, long days. Sunlight and unforgiving silence and shadow elongate on the plain where the wind had moved, once, over the dark water. There was space, the sky, stars, the sun, and how old is anything today? Today, cloudless and past the moon the coarse of the plain and by the way there were those things which seemed hidden. *** What is so of one man is so of all, and this was unknown to the squad. Those who had lived here were the old ones, and of them there are no records there are only ghosts, and those are much feared. These ancient people vanished. The stone structures, the tools, the art, they loom with judgment on all that came after. The scalp-hunters rode through the former habitat of the old ones accompanied by an invisible rage and a primordial laughter resonating off the very stone. *** They did not know who followed them in this place. Any of those among these men that scurried fearful into the shelter of the land did give their souls over to it without a whimper, but the rest, the boy among them, did seek to continue, so that civilization might build with stone and alter the structure of the universe. This desire to lie that is illuminated will show itself likewise in reminiscence.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:47:29 +0000
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