Chapter 28 They rode toward the cataclysmic advance of the sun. The wind in the desert like sand in a glass. They rode up a range of granite where they triangulated from known points of landscape, and reckoned anew their course. The morning light was ablaze on that terrain where the earth drained up into the sky. They rode out of that vanished sea like phantoms and they persisted the plains. The distant mountains as black as the caverns of hell. A pillar of stone stood like a prophet in the earth’s long chronicle, a shapeless prophesy for the age to come, or the last prophesy on earth called up from its ruin. They rode down from this country, and there was no sound, not wind or bird, and their tracks across the land reflected the arcane movements of the earth itself. *** They camped and saw to their arms, drawing the charges from their pieces and reloading them. They cut the throats of the remaining pack-animals and divided the meat. They rode by day and by dark and moved like migrants. Nothing grew on that endless plain where men have died or would die, gathered by the last wagon shouting out to the deepening darkness. The sun rose in a cremation, and burned in a holocaust, and dust storms stood on the horizon of that cooking world like the smoke of distant fires, and the smoke blew in the conjectural winds but of living things there were none, as told in the vectors of such a waste where hearts and endeavors have been swallowed. That night a polar moon rose, and they were like a thing surmised out of the blackness with the dry thunder to the south and rumors of light, and the voltage in the darkness making their shadows reel behind them, like some third aspect of their existence hammered down dismal and wild upon those badlands of dark. *** The light in the east expelled strokes of glow, then became a thicker dash of color like blood staining the plain where earth and sky met at the edge of conception. The sun ascended up from nothing like an eminent penis head until it rose above the rim of the earth, and pulsed and perched vengeful in their wake, and their wake died away in the dusk. Like the sooty artisan within the heart of man that hammers out the dawn thousands of times, for a single dawn so long due in the dark that its right use may never be. *** They rode on. They rode toward some final reckoning. Toward the place where God sits to contemplate the destruction of that which He is at great burden to create. On the eve of that day they crouched about the fire where it hissed in a softly falling rain, and they ran balls, as if they were part of some different corporation altogether. Smells of earth and wet ash in the rain. They rode out that day following and trotted their horses. The Negro turned his horse and rode away to the north, and had determined to quit them, and none in the squad were affronted. Nor were they quarrelsome amongst themselves. The memory of man is not certainty, and the past that has been is only slightly different from the past that never was. Tracks do not show in the ash. They said so themselves. And would that darkness into which they would dissolve then taste of them? The Americans rode away and diminished among the shadows of the west and were gone.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 05:16:17 +0000
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