Chapter 23 The company galloped passed a village here and there in ruins. They rode past rocks and ridges running down the chines and onto the plains like the rubble of old walls, such forewarning everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any thing that lived. The land seemed to sleep, like dreams of wild men with clubs, as if they yet might be there beyond the darkness. Carving in stone with teeth and stones these resemblances of the living world they would have to endure, and the world dead at their hands. The riders were solemn like storied warriors, nameless in granulating temperature. They looked as if given up entirely to an undertaking, primitive, void of empathy. Like riders cajoled out of the very stone placed enraged to wander hopeless and unknowable while navigating the brutal waste in a time before names were and each was all. *** They rode on, the riders with the reins, the horses in harness. Much of the world was unseen by these men and it shimmered in mystery, as it was boundless and could not be measured, and within it were animals more cruel than they, and humans of different colors, and things which none have beheld, and still not estranged, nothing there more than their own human hearts were estranged inside them, whatever wide open spaces included therein and whatever carnivores. *** They rode for a long while. The orb of the sun burned through the day. There was a solitary tree on fire in the desert. Exploded aflame by a dust storm. The air around it rippled with heat in the boiled air. They rode past, and a few of them chanced to glance at it as they rode. A branch fell from the tree and died to ash, though it did seem as though it might burn forever, such things as this not unseen in Judea, in Gomorrah. There was near that tree a lonesome pilgrim who walked across the stone of the desert toward some end, and he regarded this tree as if it were the very voice of fire, and then went on. *** Far away to the west the sun was setting and the last glow of fleeting day lingered then vanished. They rode past two dead babies on the plain, millions of dreams in their decayed hearts. Dreams in the legions of nights such as a child would dream them, realms beautiful or painless, worlds which one may bequeath to oneself, but can never make be. *** That night they made a fire which pulsed like the heart of a living creature. They gazed into the flames which had within them a part of man himself, such as they are depleted if it were not there. As one fire is every fire there was, the original fire and the final fire there ever shall be. *** The gang rode across the desert with a drive which predated them, blood beneficiaries of an organization at once burning and crucial and distant. Each member was individual by himself, yet consolidated they were something that before had never been, and inside this conjoint soul were great desolations impossible to navigate, even more than those tattered remains of ancient and destroyed maps where demons dwell and there is nothing of the recognizable world save assumed currents and fires. The mountains were pale in the first dwindling dark of dawn, and birds flew and the sun made its right ascension over the apex of the world and lined up with the moon which shown in the west, so that sun and moon lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun burning and the moon a duplicate, as if they were the ends of a mutual terminal beyond whose boundaries were flaming worlds past all approximation. *** They rode up the rim of a canyon a thousand feet above the clouds, the earth all stone reaching to the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost remission of space, and the clouds hung above the mountains like the black fold of the cosmos themselves, and the limits of the universe were suspended in vast day-break above the riders. One horse in the ascending column clopped its hooves on the unsure stone beneath, then scurried for more level ground as the rider attempted to rear the horse, and the horse tumbled screaming from the cliff and the rider along with it, and they dropped wheeling into the void below and slammed onto a rock and the packs saddled to the horse burst open, and rider and horse both went twirling down into darkness absolute that absolved them forever from their origin and from the memory of any living thing there was, and they vanished like a shout into the chasm. If ruin is not the word of God the will of God was not spoken.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:46:08 +0000
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