Chapter 18 They rode through the very town where hunger lived. There they recruited a man from Van Diemen’s Land. The Van Diemen Lander had been by a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk and he lived in regions where he’d gone to hide from God. He fell sick two days in and they rode with him in the wagon with blankets over him to keep him from the sun and they rode with the slamming and jarring of the wagon half shirring the meat from his bones so that he cried out to be left and he was and then he died. His name was Turtledove. *** They halted and camped. They sat near the fire in their wind scared clothes. The fire burned long in the cold and they slept rabid with pyrolatry. The fire died and the coals were swept away in the wind the void. In the morning some of the horses began to scream, and afternoon found many of them blind from the sun that reflected on the land and so insane with pain that they were shot through the head and fell dead and their blood became puddles and dried and turned black and was swept away. Hartford gathered as many twigs as there were horses and broke as many twigs as their were murdered horses. He gave them to Jacobs, and Jacobs had all of the party draw the twigs. The boy drew a long stick. They left several of their group behind and they starved to death in the desert. They spoke of their demise first, though, but the words of dying men are not always so, and this is likewise for the living. *** That next day the pier of horses moved onward. The heat of the sun in time would leave neither root nor leaf. Concepts of fate are of obsession to men in endeavors such as these and all paths traveled abolish ultimately in dust as shown in the merging of such trajectories in the ruins where the fortitude of nations has been consumed, these civilizations swallowed up and carried off whole by the hand of that wrathful God of all being Whom the firmament itself has not power to puzzle and Who has shown traces of His hand, and what heretic could not see that hand of this God Who in extreme anger has carried off these enterprises of empires and swallowed them up while composing with such severity and such mocking so lethal an occurrence after which there is no soul left to utter voice at what had passed and whatever tales told of it must have come down orally so altered are they from their origins. *** For every civilization that there has ever been has crumbled. *** The sun’s declination gave to the atmosphere a bloodied tint which dripped up past the cusp of the earth and vanished and day shone not and the company moved in utter darkness which befitted them. They spaced out and camped. At length the stars shone submerged in the darkness of the vault. A lone asteroid from the belt of them fell from the stars burning like a lamp and was pulled into the earth’s atmosphere and was as a torch blazing in its path through the vault and its gaseous vapors scattered as it exploded. It collided with the land and mingled with fire, a sign of the things which are, the things which shall be hereafter. It is so that the wrath of God is dormant in the coming of Armageddon. None in the gang of scalp-hunters thought that this wrath might yet be evidence for the hand of God, nor that any miracle of ruination ought to be inquired into. For unknown to them God must contain every least thing within Him even the reasoning and the causes of the blasphemer and the heretic and the pagan else He is not He. Could they then say, such men, that there was no ultimate thing set against them? That there was no power and no force? What kind of heretic could doubt that such wreckages of their existence had gone by un-autographed? That salvation or revenge both alike did not lie sleeping just beyond their crypt? Things that can be touched go away forever. No one knows what that means. None know what it means that things exist and then exist no more. In what sense does one speak of the dead? No one speaks of them. They are simply enslaved to them. What final avatar? That God before He has yet created anything at all, naked and alone in the universe, with hands similar to all of mankind, hands to make the world, to make it again and again, to make it even in the maelstrom of its undoing, the Creator thereby perhaps not unlike the architect to his cell, or the carpenter to his cross. The calculations necessary to live are not in the mind but in the blood. And the legends that say that stone is laid with blood are meaningless as the only blood ever needed is the blood of the redeemer. This company thought that labor devoured the man and devoured their lives and they thought that in the end they somehow must be justified thereby. They did not wonder how God would lean down toward them with a sentiment akin to wonder looking for something to help Him the better understand that which is His own labor. And then ask: Where are the others? Where are the others? But there were no others here in this company that rode barren, silent, without witness. Why could they not know that they, too, were blessed? Why could they not see the worth of all that which they set aside and the poverty of all they hungered for? Because the dead are thought of in death more than they ever were in life. And will be so thought of yet. The weight of the dead makes a great burden in this world. And all is known about them that will ever be known. Like watching the wind cross the world, already beyond wind or world or anything at all. In books never seen by this company it was written that in the dichotomy of the master and the slave the master stagnates and suffers the inner impoverishment of the idle while the slave by his labors grows daily in knowledge and in wisdom. These riders had lost their way. They’d thought by their labors to stand outside of the true arc of gravity that is the world’s pain. They’d lost their way and if any of them could tell the hour or the day or how it came to be then they should not have lost it at all. There are those who seek proof of God find irrefutable proof only to see it scourged from the face of existence in brimstone and ash so that it is as though it has never been at all and of its ruin there is only the salt of the earth.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 11:32:03 +0000
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