Blood Meridian

Citation

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. 1985. Vintage, 1992. 9780679728757.

Abstract

“Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.”

Annotations

Frontmatter

Praise for Cormac McCarthy
“… a writer to be read… —Ralph Ellison”
“… a born narrator… —Robert Penn Warren”
“… the best kind of Southern style… —The New York Times”
“… a born storyteller … a literary child of Faulkner… —New Republic”
“… lyrical prose… —Times Literary Supplement (London)” (1)

“Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, fear blood more and more. Blood and time. —PAUL VALÉRY” (Epigraph, 1)

“It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness. —JACOB BOEHME” (Epigraph, 1)

“Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a reexamination of a 300,000year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped. —THE YUMA DAILY SUN June 13, 1982” (Epigraph, 1)

I

Childhood in Tennessee - Runs away - New Orleans Fights - Is shot - To Galveston - Nacogdoches The Reverend Green Judge Holden - An affray Toadvine Burning of the hotel Escape (3)

“[his father] quotes from poets whose names are now lost” (3)

“He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man” (3)

“he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before” (4)

“Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated” (4)

“His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay” (5)

“Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an imposter” (7)

“the tent began to sway and buckle and like a huge and wounded medusa it slowly settled to the ground trailing tattered canvas walls and ratty guyropes over the ground” (8)

“I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.
He raised his glass and drank.
There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink” (9)

“When he passed back through the town the hotel was burning and men were standing around watching it, some holding empty buckets” (15)

“The kid touched the mule and they went sucking out past the old stone fort along the road west” (15)

II

Across the prairie - A hermit - A ——’s heart - A stormy night - Westward again - Cattle drovers - Their kindness - On the trail again - The deadcart - San Antonio de Bexar - A Mexican cantina - Another fight - The abandoned church - The dead in the sacristy - At the ford - Bathing in the river (16)

“Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less” (16)

“He keeps from off the king’s road for fear of citizenry” (16)

“The sun that rises is the color of steel. His mounted shadow falls for miles before him. He wears on his head a hat he’s made from leaves and they have dried and cracked in the sun and he looks like a raggedyman wandered from some garden where he’d used to frighten birds” (16)

“This is a hungry country” (18)

“Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man” (20)

“The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he?
I dont believe he much had me in mind.
Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he liked better?
I can think of better places and better ways.
Can ye make it be?
No” (20)

“No. It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
You believe that?
I dont know.
Believe that” (20)

“Distant thunderheads reared quivering against the electric sky and were sucked away in the blackness again” (20)

“The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth’s end” (23)

“The kid turned to the old man. You speak american? he said” (24)

“He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescoes. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel” (27)

“He walked around the side of the church and entered the sacristy. Buzzards shuffled off through the chaff and plaster like enormous yardfowl. The domed vaults overhead were clotted with a dark furred mass that shifted and breathed and chittered” (28)

“The facade of the building bore an array of saints in their niches and they had been shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses and darkly mottled with leadmarks oxidized upon the stone” (28)

“He made his way down through the trees and stood looking at the cold swirling waters. Then he waded out into the river like some wholly wretched baptismal candidate” (29)

III

Sought out to join an army - Interview with Captain White - His views - The camp - Trades his mule - A cantina in the Laredito - A Mennonite - Companion killed (30)

“Was you the feller knocked in that Mexer’s head yesterday evenin? I aint the law.
Who wants to know?
Captain White. He wants to sign that feller up to join the army.
The army?
Yessir.
What army?
Company under Captain White. We goin to whip up on the Mexicans.
The war’s over.
He says it aint over” (31)

“Kindly fell on hard times aint ye son? he said.
I just aint fell on no good ones.
You ready to go to Mexico?
I aint lost nothin down there” (31)

“Hell fire son, you wont need no wages. You get to keep everthing you can raise. We goin to Mexico. Spoils of war. Aint a man in the company wont come out a big landowner. How much land you own now?” (32)

“I was a sorrier sight even than what you are and he come along and raised me Lazarus. Set my feet in the path of righteousness” (32)

“Grass and prickly pear grew on the roofs and goats walked about on them and somewhere off in that squalid kingdom of mud the sound of the little deathbells tolled thinly” (33)

“Where was it you were robbed.
I dont know. They wasnt no name to it. It was just a wilderness” (34)

“The captain nodded. He folded his hands between his knees.
What do you think of the treaty? he said.
The kid looked at the man on the settle next to him. He had eyes shut. He looked down at his thumbs. I dont know nothin about it, he said.
I’m afraid that’s the case with a lot of Americans, said the tain. Where are you from, son?
Tennessee.
You werent with the Volunteers at Monterrey were you?
No sir.
Bravest bunch of men under fire I believe I ever saw. I suppose more men from Tennessee bled and died on the field in northern Mexico than from any other state. Did you know that?
No sir.
They were sold out. Fought and died down there in that desert and then they were sold out by their own country.
The kid sat silent.
The captain leaned forward. We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didnt give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God’s earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government. A people so cowardly they’ve paid tribute a hundred years to tribes of naked savages. Mines shut down. Given up their crops and livestock. Whole villages abandoned. While a heathen horde rides over the land looting and killing with total impunity. Not a hand raised against them. What kind of people are these? The Apaches wont even shoot them. Did you know that? They kill them with rocks. The captain shook his head. He seemed made sad by what he had to tell” (35-36)

“The captain leaned back and folded his arms. What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than ——. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them” (36)

“The captain was watching the kid. The kid looked uneasy. Son, said the captain. We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land. That’s right. We are to spearhead the drive. We have the tacit support of Governor Burnett of California” (37)

“The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs” (43)

“How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right 5. again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back” (43)

IV

Setting forth with the filibusters - On alien ground - Shooting antelope - Pursued by cholera - Wolves - Wagon repairs - A desert waste - Night storms - The ghost manada - A prayer for rain - A desert homestead - The old man - New country - An abandoned village - Herdsmen on the plain - Attacked by Comanches (44)

“They crossed the del Norte by night and waded up out of the shallow sandy ford into a howling wilderness” (44)

“They rode well armed, each man with a rifle and many with the smallbore fiveshot Colt’s revolvers. The captain carried a pair of dragoon pistols in scabbards that mounted across the pommel of the saddle so that they rode at each knee. These guns were United States issue, Colt’s patent, and he had bought them from a deserter in a Soledad livery stable and paid eighty dollars in gold for them and the scabbards and the mold and flask they came with” (45)

“laughing and hacking in a welter of gore, a reeking scene in the light of the handheld lanterns” (46)

“And sleep that night on the cold plains of a foreign land, fortysix men wrapped in their blankets under the selfsame stars, the prairie wolves so like in their yammering, yet all about so changed and strange” (46)

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them” (46-47)

“The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night” (48)

“They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite” (48)

“In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature” (49)

“All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear” (49)

“The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream” (49)

“in the evening these elect, shabby and white with dust like a company of armed and mounted millers wandering in dementia, rode up off the desert through a gap in the low stone hills” (50)

“They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain, gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost rebate of space” (52)

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools” (55)

V

Adrift on the Bolson de Mapimi - Sproule - Tree of dead babies - Scenes from a massacre - Sopilotes - The murdered in the church - Night among the dead - Wolves - The washers at the ford - Afoot westward - A mirage - An encounter with bandits - Attacked by a vampire - Digging a well - A crossroads in the waste - The carreta - Death of Sproule - Under arrest - The captain’s head - Survivors - On to Chihuahua - The city - The prison - Toadvine (58)

“he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself” (58)

“The altars had been hauled down and the tabernacle looted and the great sleeping God of the Mexicans routed from his golden cup” (63)

“The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood” (63)

“They struggled all day across a terra damnata of smoking slag, passing from time to time the bloated shapes of dead mules or horses” (64)

“Nothing moved in that purgatorial waste save carnivorous birds” (66)

“Sproule sat without moving. The kid looked at him but he would look away. He was wounded in an enemy country far from home and although his eyes took in the alien stones about yet the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul” (69)

“he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world” (69)

“I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you” (69)

“Starlight in a mud street” (72)

“Their talk when they talked was of witches or worse and always they sought to parcel from the darkness some voice or cry from among the cries that o right beast. La gente dice que el coyote es un brujo. Muchas veces el brujo es un coyote” (75)

VI

In the streets - Brassteeth - Los heréticos - A veteran of the late war - Mier - Doniphan - The Lipan burialGoldseekers - The scalphunters - The judge - Freed from the prison - Et de ceo se mettent en le pays (78)

“Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague” (82)

VII

Black and white Jacksons - A meeting on the outskirts Whitneyville Colts - A trial - The judge among disputants Delaware indians - The Vandiemenlander - A hacienda The town of Corralitos - Pasajeros de un país antiguo Scene of a massacre - Hiccius Doccius - A naming of fortunes Wheelless upon a dark river - The felon wind - Tertium quidThe town of Janos - Glanton takes a scalp - Jackson takes the stage (85)

“Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning” (89)

“the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning” (90)

“the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny” (101)

VIII

Another cantina, another advisor - Monte - A knifing - The darkest corner of the tavern the most conspicuous - The sereño - Riding north - The meatcamp - Grannyrat - Under the Animas peaks - A confrontation and a killing - Another anchorite, another dawn (105)

“You are sociedad de guerra. Contra los barbaros.
Toadvine didnt know. He looked like some loutish knight beriddled by a troll” (107)

“This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing. He made a gesture toward the world beyond where all the land lay under darkness and all a great stained altars tone” (108)

“herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor” (111)

“Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth’s long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded” (111)

“Here beyond men’s judgements all covenants were brittle” (111)

“the black man’s eyes stood as corridors for the ferrying through of naked and unrectified night from what of it lay behind to what was yet to come” (111)

IX

An ambuscado - The dead Apache - Hollow ground - A gypsum lake - Trebillones - Snowblind horses - The Delawares return - A probate - The ghost coach - The copper mines - Squatters - A snakebit horse - The judge on geological evidence - The dead boy - On parallax and false guidance in things past - The ciboleros (114)

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawnbroached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below” (115)

“the calamitous advance of the sun” (117)

“Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?” (117)

“That night they sat at the fire like ghosts in their dusty beards and clothing, rapt, pyrolatrous” (117)

“this thing now stood in the compound with its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine ideation out of an Attic tragedy” (121)

“the judge … purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled.
Books lie, he said.
God dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools” (122-23)

“In a night so beclamored with the jackalyapping of coyotes and the cries of owls the howl of that old dog wolf was the one sound they knew to issue from its right form, a solitary lobo, perhaps gray at the muzzle, hung like a marionette from the moon with his long mouth gibbering” (123)

“Someone had reported the judge naked atop the walls, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning, striding the perimeter up there and declaiming in the old epic mode” (124)

“For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies” (126)

“these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys” (127)

Commentator’s Note: The evening redness — the calamitous advance of the sun — heliotropic plague — pyrolatrous — the will to deceive in things luminous. The destruction of transcendental IDEAL, in the tradition of Melville’s whale.

X

Tobin - The skirmish on the Little Colorado - The Katabasis [Oh boy!] - How came the learned man - Glanton and the judge - A new course - The judge and the bats - Guano - The deserters - Saltpeter and charcoal - The malpais - Hoofprints - The volcano - Brimstone - The matrix - The slaughter of the aborigines (128)

“There’s little equity in the Lord’s gifts” (128)

“The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. It’s no fair accountin and I dont doubt but what he’d be the first to admit it and you put the query to him boldface” (129)

“it may be the Lord’s way of showin how little store he sets by the learned. Whatever could it mean to one who knows all? He’s an uncommon love for the common man and godly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as lives in silence themselves” (130)

“I aint heard no voice, he said.
When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life” (130)

“He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he’d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego” (131)

Commentator’s Note: Poussin, “even in Arcadia there am I.”

“His is the first and only ever I seen with an inscription from the classics” (131)

“They’ve a secret commerce. Some terrible covenant” (132)

“he pointed to that stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself of an oration to what end I know not, then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother the earth as he said was round like an egg and contained all good things within her” (136)

“us behind him like the disciples of a new faith” (136)

“Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there’s no up nor down to it and there’s men in this company besides myself seen little cloven hoofprints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what little doe ever trod melted rock?” (136)

“someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other” (137)

“I thought the judge had been sent among us for a curse. And yet he proved me wrong. At the time he did. I’m of two minds again now” (137)

“The kid looked at Tobin. What’s he a judge of? he said.
What’s he a judge of?
What’s he a judge of” (141)

XI

Into the mountains - Old Ephraim - A Delaware carried off - The search - Another probate - In the gorge - The ruins - Keet seel - The solerette - Representations and things - The judge tells a story - A mule lost - Mescal pits - Night scene with moon, blossoms, judge - The village - Glanton on the management of animals - The trail out (142)

“the bear’s long muzzle swung toward them in a stunned articulation, amazed beyond reckoning, some foul gobbet dangling from its jaws and its chops dyed red with blood” (143)

“The bear had carried off their kinsman like some fabled storybook beast and the land had swallowed them up beyond all ransom or reprieve” (143-44)

“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts” (144)

“the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god” (145)

“Then he sat with his hands cupped in his lap and he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation” (146)

“A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man” (147)

“Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so” (147)

“But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.
My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all” (147)

“Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world” (147)

“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day” (153)

XII

Crossing the border - Storms - Ice and lightning - The slain argonauts - The azimuth - Rendezvous - Councils of war Slaughter of the Gileños - Death of Juan Miguel - The dead in the lake - The chief - An Apache child - On the desert - Nightfires El virote - A surgery - The judge takes a scalp - Un hacendado Gallego - Ciudad de Chihuahua (157)

“Crossing those barren gravel reefs in the night they seemed remote and without substance. Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse” (157)

“they traveled under the cape of the wild mountains upon a broad soda plain with dry thunder to the south and rumors of light” (157)

“Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds” (157-58)

“They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote” (158)

“For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds” (158)

“That night they were visited with a plague of hail out of a faultless sky and the horses shied and moaned and the men dismounted and sat upon the ground with their saddles over their heads while the hail leaped in the sand like small lucent eggs concocted alchemically out of the desert darkness. When they resaddled and rode on they went for miles through cobbled ice while a polar moon rose like a blind cat’s eye up over the rim of the world. In the night they passed the lights of a village on the plain but they did not alter from their course” (158)

“They moved like migrants under a drifting star and their track across the land reflected in its faint arcature the movements of the earth itself” (160)

“To the west the cloudbanks stood above the mountains like the dark warp of the very firmament and the starsprent reaches of the galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders’ heads” (160)

“Blood bubbled from the man’s chest and he turned his lost eves upward, already glazed, the capillaries breaking up. In those dark pools there sat each a small and perfect sun” (165)

“The horses and mules were ranged far out over the desert and they picked them up for miles to the south and drove them on. The sourceless summer lightning marked out of the night dark mountain ranges at the rim of the world and the halfwild horses on the plain before them trotted in those bluish strobes like horses called forth quivering out of the abyss” (169)

“In the smoking dawn the party riding ragged and bloody with their baled peltries looked less like victors than the harried afterguard of some ruined army retreating across the meridians of chaos and old night, the horses stumbling, the men tottering asleep in the saddles” (169)

“Small boys ran among the hooves and the victors in their gory rags smiled through the filth and the dust and the caked blood as they bore on poles the desiccated heads of the enemy through that fantasy of music and flowers” (172)

XIII

At the baths - Merchants - Trophies of war - The banquet - Trias The ball - North - Coyame - The border - The Hueco tanks - Massacre of the Tiguas - Carrizal - A desert spring - The Medanos - An inquest concerning teeth - Nacori - The cantina - A desperate encounter - Into the mountains - A village decimated - Mounted lancers - A skirmish - Pursuing the survivors - The plains of Chihuahua - Slaughter of the soldiers - A burial - Chihuahua - Westward (173)

“Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them” (179)

“Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all” (180)

“The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book to take away with him. They were of men and animals and of the chase and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that are in him” (180)

“In three days they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul” (180)

“they ran balls and cut patches as if the fate of the aborigines had been cast into shape by some other agency altogether. As if such destinies were prefigured in the very rock for those with eyes to read” (180-81)

“In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died” (182)

“Those riders seemed journeyed from a legendary world and they left behind a strange tainture like an afterimage on the eye and the air they disturbed was altered and electric” (182)

“A thin shell of a moon lay capsized over the jagged peaks” (189)

“Two nights later camped on a butte looking out over the broad central plain they could see a point of light out on that desert like the reflection of a single star in a lake of utter blackness.
They took council. On that raw tablestone the flames of their balefire swirled and circled and they studied the arrant blackness under them where it fell away like the sheer cloven face of the world” (191)

“in the evening the wind carried away the ashes and the wind blew in the night and fanned the last smoldering billets and drove forth the last fragile race of sparks fugitive as flintstrikings in the unanimous dark of the world” (192)

“They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted” (193)

“before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun” (193)

XIV

Mountain storms - Tierras quemadas, tierras despobladas - Jesús María - The inn - Shopkeepers - A bodega - The fiddler - The priest - Las Animas - The procession - Cazando las almas - Glanton takes a fit - Dogs for sale - The judge prestidigitant - The flag - A shootout - An exodus - The conducta - Blood and mercury - At the ford - Jackson restored - The jungle - An herbalist - The judge collects specimens - The point of view for his work as a scientist - Ures - The populace - Los pordioseros - A fandango - Pariah dogs - Glanton and judge (194)

“lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off” (194)

“in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood” (195)

“the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn” (195)

“they rode slouched under slickers hacked from greasy halfcured hides and so cowled in these primitive skins before the gray and driving rain they looked like wardens of some dim sect sent forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land” (195)

“they saw the silver filaments of cascades divided upon the faces of distant buttes that appeared as signs and wonders in the heavens themselves so dark was the ground of their origins” (195)

“they rode through a region of cloven rock where great boulders lay halved with smooth uncentered faces and on the slopes of those ferric grounds old paths of fire and the blackened bones of trees assassinated in the mountain storms” (196)

“At night the wolves in the dark forests of the world below called to them as if they were friends to man and Glanton’s dog trotted moaning among the endlessly articulating legs of the horses” (196)

“The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth’s heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside and bright and quick in the dry path of the storm channels and shaping out the sockets in the rock and hurrying from ledge to ledge down the slope shimmering and deft as eels” (203-204)

“The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.
Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (207)

“These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth” (207)

“What’s a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord.
Why not say keeper then?
Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgements.
Toadvine spat.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation” (207)

“Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everthing on this earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so” (208)

XV

A new contract - Sloat - The massacre on the Nacozari - Encounter with Elias - Pursued north - A lottery - Shelby and the kid - A horse lamed - A norther - An ambush - Escape - War on the plains - A descent - The burning tree - On the track - The Trophies - The kid rejoins his command - The judge - A desert sacrifice - The scouts do not return - The ogdoad - Santa Cruz - The militia - Snow - A hospice - The stable (213)

“They rode north onto the broad Sonoran desert and in that cauterized waste they wandered aimlessly for weeks pursuing rumor and shadow” (213)

“The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings” (222)

“He watched all this pass below him mute and ordered and senseless” (223)

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets” (224)

“Seated tailorwise in the eye of that cratered waste he watched the world tend away at the edges to a shimmering surmise that ringed the desert round” (225)

“The other heads glared blindly out of their wrinkled eyes like fellows of some righteous initiate given up to vows of silence and of death” (230)

“There were even guns among them with no locks at all that were fired by jamming a cigarillo against the vent in the barrel, sending the gunstones from the riverbed with which they were loaded whissing through the air on flights of their own eccentric selection like the paths of meteorites” (230)

“Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer clothes, the hide slickers and raw wool serapes and vests, and one by one they propagated about themselves a great crackling of sparks and each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam’s flank” (232)

XVI

The Santa Cruz valley - San Bernardino - Wild bulls - Tumacacori - The mission - A hermit - Tubac - The lost scouts - San Xavier del Bac - The presidio of Tucson - Scavengers - The Chiricahuas - A risky encounter - Mangas Colorado - Lieutenant Couts - Recruiting in the plaza - A wild man - Murder of Owens - In the cantina - Mr Bell is examined - The judge on evidence - Dogfreaks - A fandango - Judge and meteorite (233)

“They rode out onto the desert to camp. There was no wind and the silence out there was greatly favored by every kind of fugitive as was the open country itself and no mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against” (236)

“Each man scanned the terrain and the movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires of vigilance and advanced upon that landscape with a single resonance” (236)

“when Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with the Savages, they and their arms wired into a construction taut and fragile as those puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other and they in turn so that none can move for bringing down the structure entire” (239)

“Horseblood or any blood a tremor ran that perilous architecture and the ponies stood rigid and quivering in the reddened sunrise and the desert under them hummed like a snaredrum. The tensile properties of this unratified truce were abused to the utmost of their enduring when the judge stood slightly in the saddle and raised his arm and spoke out a greeting beyond them” (239)

“Even the horses looked alien to any he’d ever seen, decked as they were in human hair and teeth and skin. Save for their guns and buckles and a few pieces of metal in the harness of the animals there was nothing about these arrivals to suggest even the discovery of the wheel” (242)

“The judge translated for him latin terms of jurisprudence. He cited cases civil and martial. He quoted Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales” (250)

“[The farrier] had for anvil an enormous iron meteorite shaped like a great molar and the judge on a wager lifted the thing and on a further wager lifted it over his head. Several men pushed forward to feel the iron and to rock it where it stood, nor did the judge lose this opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of heavenly bodies and their powers and claims. Two lines were drawn in the dirt ten feet apart and a third round of wagers was laid, coins from half a dozen countries in both gold and silver and even a few boletas or notes of discounted script from the mines near Tubac” (251)

“The judge seized that great slag wandered for what millennia from what unreckonable corner of the universe and he raised it overhead and stood tottering and then lunged forward. It cleared the mark by a foot and he shared with no one the specie piled on the saddleblanket at the farrier’s feet for not even Glanton had been willing to underwrite this third trial” (251)

XVII

Leaving Tucson - A new cooperage - An exchange - Saguaro forests - Glanton at the fire - Garcia’s command - The paraselene - The godfire - The expriest on astronomy - The judge on the extraterrestrial, on order, on teleology in the universe - A coin trick - Glanton’s dog - Dead animals - The sands - A crucifixion - The judge on war - The priest does not say - Tierras quebradas, tierras desamparadas - The Tinajas Altas - Un hueso de piedra - The Colorado - Argonauts - Yumas - The ferry men - To the Yuma camp (252)

“[Glanton] watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them” (254)

“the vast abhorrence of the judge. Half naked, scribbling in his ledger” (254)

“they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be” (255)

“someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high God in his dismay at the proliferation of lunacy on this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction. And could he find some alter means by which the birds could mend their paths in the darkness he might have done with this one too” (255-56)

“The question was then put as to whether there were on Mars or other planets in the void men or creatures like them and at this the judge who had returned to the fire and stood half naked and sweating spoke and said that there were not and that there were no men anywhere in the universe save those upon the earth. All listened as he spoke, those who had turned to watch him and those who would not” (256)

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning” (256)

“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others” (256)

“The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons, coins, men” (257)

“Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality” (258)

“The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship” (258-59)

“Crouched under their hats they seemed fugitives on some grander scale, like beings for whom the sun hungered” (259)

War and Games

“The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black.
The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said.
The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there’s many a bloody tale of war inside it.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way” (259)

“War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it aint yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That’s your notion” (260)

“The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all” (260)

“Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate” (260)

“The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god” (260-61)

“Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man’s vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural” (261)

Commentator’s Note: This is a rendition of Nietzschean ressentiment.

“The judge searched out the circle for disputants. But what says the priest? he said.
Tobin looked up. The priest does not say” (261)

“The priest does not say, said the judge. Nihil dicit. But the priest has said. For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself” (262)

“Men of god and men of war have strange affinities” (262)

Commentator’s Note: Compare Melville again in Billy Budd, the chaplain standing by Billy’s executioner.

“All in that company had heard the judge on paleontology” (263)

“They nodded dully and reached to touch that pillar of stained and petrified bone, perhaps to sense with their fingers the temporal immensities of which the judge spoke” (263)

“The judge had been holding the femur upright in order to better illustrate its analogies to the prevalent bones of the country about and he let it fall in the sand and closed his book” (263)

“There is no mystery to it, he said.
The recruits blinked dully.
Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery” (263)

XVIII

The return to camp - The idiot delivered - Sarah Borginnis - A confrontation - Bathed in the river - The tumbril burned - James Robert in camp - Another baptism - Judge and fool (267)

“Cancer, Virgo, Leo raced the ecliptic down the southern night and to the north the constellation of Cassiopeia burned like a witch’s signature on the black face of the firmament” (273)

XIX

The howitzer - The Yumas attack - A skirmish - Glanton appropriates the ferry - The hanged Judas - The coffers - A deputation for the coast - San Diego - Arranging for supplies - Brown at the farrier’s - A dispute - Webster and Toadvine freed - The ocean - An altercation - A man burned alive - Brown in durance vile - Tales of treasure - An escape - A murder in the mountains - Glanton leaves Yuma - The alcalde hanged - Hostages - Returns to Yuma - Doctor and judge, —— and fool - Dawn on the river - Carts without wheels Murder of Jackson - The Yuma massacre (271)

“Soon they were operating a sort of procrustean ferry where the fares were tailored to accommodate the purses of the travelers. Ultimately all pretense was dropped and the immigrants were robbed outright” (273)

“She was sobbing and praying for mercy to Glanton and to God impartially” (282)

“The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite” (284)

“these people were no less bound and indentured and they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals” (288)

XX

The escape - Into the desert - Pursued by the Yumas - A stand - Alamo Mucho - Another refugee - A siege - At long taw - Nightfires - The judge lives - At barter in the desert - How the expriest comes to advocate murder - Setting forth - Another encounter - Carrizo Creek - An attack - Among the bones - Playing for keeps - An exorcism - Tobin wounded - A counseling - The slaughter of the horses - The judge on torts - Another escape, another desert

“They were twenty-four hours without water and the barren mural of sand and sky was beginning to shimmer and swim and the periodic arrows sprang aslant from the sands about them like the tufted stalks of mutant desert growths propagating angrily into the dry desert air” (291)

“There is hardly in the world a waste so barren but some creature will not cry out at night, yet here one was and they listened to their breathing in the dark and the cold and they listened to the systole of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them” (293)

“It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed” (294)

“Those who travel in desert places do indeed meet with crea tures surpassing all description” (294)

XXI

Desert castaways - The backtrack - A hideout - The wind takes a side - The judge returns - An address - Los Diegueños - San Felipe - Hospitality of the savages - Into the mountains Grizzlies - San Diego - The sea (307)

“The desert upon which they were entrained was desert absolute and it was devoid of feature altogether and there was nothing to mark progress upon it. The earth fell away on every side equally in its arcature and by these limits were they circumscribed and of them were they locus” (307)

“I know too that you’ve not the heart of a common assassin. I’ve passed before your gunsights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself?” (311)

“There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know?” (312)

“Brown and Toadvine? They are alive as you and me. They are alive and in possession of the fruits of their election. Do you understand? Ask the priest. The priest knows. The priest does not lie” (312)

“They would have died if the indians had not found them. All the early part of the night they’d kept Sirius at their left on the southwest horizon and Cetus out there fording the void and Orion and Betelgeuse turning overhead and they had slept curled and shivering in the darkness of the plains and woke to find the heavens all changed and the stars by which they’d traveled not to be found, as if their sleep had encompassed whole seasons” (312)

“They eked a desperate living from that land and they knew that nothing excepting some savage pursuit could drive men to such plight and they watched each day for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world and whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable they waited with a strange equanimity” (313)

“The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea” (316)

XXII

Under arrest - The judge pays a call - An arraignment - Soldier, priest, magistrate - On his own recognizance - He sees a surgeon - The arrowshaft removed from his leg - Delirium - He journeys to Los Angeles - A public hanging - Los ahorcados - Looking for the expriest - Another fool - The scapular - To Sacramento - A traveler in the west - He abandons his party - The penitent brothers - The deathcart - Another massacre - The eldress in the rocks (317)

“If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay” (319)

“Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met. Yet even so you could have changed it all.
You, said the kid. It was you.
It was never me, said the judge” (319)

“In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing” (322)

“The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end” (322-23)

“Of such corporal histories even as these he bore no tidings and although it was the custom in that wilderness to stop with any traveler and exchange the news he seemed to travel with no news at all, as if the doings of the world were too slanderous for him to truck with, or perhaps too trivial” (325)

“It was no country he had ever seen and there was no track to follow into those mountains and there was no track out. Yet in the deepest fastness of those rocks he met with men who seemed unable to abide the silence of the world” (326)

“they passed between the granite walls into the upper valley and disappeared in the coming darkness like heralds of some unspeakable calamity leaving only bloody footprints on the stone” (326)

XXIII

On the north Texas plains - An old buffalo hunter - The millennial herds - The bonepickers - Night on the prairie - The callers - Apache ears - Elrod takes a stand - A killing - Bearing off the dead - Fort Griffin - The Beehive - A stageshow - The judge - Killing a bear - The judge speaks of old times In preparation for the dance - The judge on war, destiny, the supremacy of man of man - The dancehall - The whore - The jakes and what was encountered there - Sie müssen schlafen aber Ich muss tanzen (329)

Commentator’s Note: “You have to sleep but I have to dance.”

“The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one” (330)

“The man sat holding the necklace in his hands” (334)

Commentator’s Note: The kid no longer.

“This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war” (335)

“Out there was nothing. They were simply bearing the body off over the bonestrewn waste toward a naked horizon” (337)

“Their voices were incoherent in the din. On the boards the bear was dancing for all that his heart was worth and the girl cranked the organ handle and the shadow of the act which the candlelight constructed upon the wall might have gone begging for referents in any daylight world” (339)

“Let me put it this way, said the judge. If it is so that they themselves have no reason and yet are indeed here must they not be here by reason of some other? And if this is so can you guess who that other might be?
No. Can you?
I know him well” (342)

“This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be” (342)

“An event, a ceremony. The orchestration thereof” (342)

“A ceremony then. One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals” (342)

“A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Dont look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?” (343)

“The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man’s jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward? Look at me” (343)

“What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail? To whom is he talking, man? Cant you see him?” (343)

“each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone” (344)

“There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name” (345)

“Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness” (347)

Epilogue

“they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather” (351)