Blood Meridian
The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies.
They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being.
***
All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men's minds.
***
They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague.
***
He sketched for the sergeant a problematic career of the man before them, his hands drafting with a marvelous dexterity the shapes of what varied pahts conspired here in the ultimate authority of the extant -- as he told them -- like strings drawn together through the eye of a ring. He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assesment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences.
***
The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possesion of the facts concerning the case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is constant with notions of right principle that these facts--to the extent that they can be readily made to do so--should find a repository in the witness of some third party. ... Words are things. The words he is in possesion of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
***
The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element. ...and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how 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 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.
They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being.
***
All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men's minds.
***
They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague.
***
He sketched for the sergeant a problematic career of the man before them, his hands drafting with a marvelous dexterity the shapes of what varied pahts conspired here in the ultimate authority of the extant -- as he told them -- like strings drawn together through the eye of a ring. He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assesment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences.
***
The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possesion of the facts concerning the case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is constant with notions of right principle that these facts--to the extent that they can be readily made to do so--should find a repository in the witness of some third party. ... Words are things. The words he is in possesion of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
***
The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element. ...and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how 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 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.
posted by David at 6:13 PM
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