William Vollmann - The Atlas

Catacomb, honeycomb of the slow bees of souls, the slow crowd in the halls, where do you keep my little sister?

Not in Saint Cecilia's tomb, where the marble corpse lies on her side, offering three fingers in remembrance of the Trinity. You won't find her there.

Tell me, catacomb, and I'll leave fresh flowers in the webbed niche around your daylight.

No, I'll never say.

Then I'll raid your fossae, dark shelves and side-chapels; I'll sweep the dust from your shallow ledges where babies turned to bone.

But I got no answer save the smell of earth and breath. Although I lit oil lamps shaped like fishes, the round eyes of Pope Urban's fresco would not speak to me; the pale cell of Saint Sebastian's burial was empty. I lit an oil lamp with a whale carved on it (Jonah in the whale, Christ in the tomb, both three days, I think it meant). I said: I've been in this tomb for three decades; now tell me, where's my sister?

No sound, nor glimmer from any of these dull crumbling gray rooms of darkness where they still celebrate Mass! — Very good then, said I, I quit; I'll now be coming up from the darkness into the day!

But upstairs there rushed no sun, only long weird dark corners, dark under low arches; above that a marble-floor Roman mausoleum with flower-inscribed circles on the ceiling, faded fresco-strokes like the petals of dried flowers; steps twisting back down, white like Roman tombs; upstairs still, a church on top of that Roman tomb— the ceiling seventh-century, they said, and grave marble personages blooming from the walls.

No shard of brick stamped with the Roman seal knew your whereabouts; below me were too many receding halls of darkness (some areas still to be excavated, they said, still secret places underneath).

Nonetheless, my fond young skull, I must praise myself as only a king can crown himself: I sniffed you out behind the smell of stone, nosing down stone's barred wells and chambers! For you I frightened my eyes with blisters of torchlight on the restoration seal, crying: I'll wrap you in linen, then close you away with stones!

So then I heard a bone-clack; then when your leathery mummy-heart began to pump reddish and yellowish stains across dying frescoes, I thought I knew you, and ran down tiered, narrow, high-arched halls, your heart-drum thudding louder through those volcanic walls which crumbled under my fingernail-scratch; and the sweat of your rotting body bathed my forehead — no matter whether the ceiling was flat or arched, no matter that its plaster sparkled as if with mica— what tragedy and waste and uselessness! But I found your stone.

Among gray moss was the empty spiderweb, beyond it your copper casket's fragments shaking and rattling upon the membranes of your panting heart!

Remembering that the Pope was killed in Callisto CXX, I wondered whether you'd done it, wondered when you'd eat me, who'd seal me behind this rough wall, this dusty hedge of darkness whose leaves were bones.

So I swept back your hair, but you said: I'm not here.

Where are you then?

Clack-clack clack , you laughed — then: Ask the girls from Firenze who drink the sun. Ask the girls who sing ah-la-la- la ! and "Ciao, Maria."

When D. and I went to Burma we went by horse. I was not so very sick then. The guide did not have a horse. He was, however, his own horse — his legs being long, bony and brown; his sandalled feet small yet heavy like hooves, his wide eyes set abnormally far apart, almost in his temples. From my mount I gazed down at his wide shoulders cutting through the beginnings of dusk. Often I have been around shy people, and I know that timidity takes many different guises, among them a stolidness or sullenness which some people are deceived into categorizing as a bad disposition. This was my first characterization of the man. He could not understand my speech at all, nor I his; as for D., she hailed from the south, which for him must have been as mysterious as another country. There were many rivers in which he waded knee-deep, then mucky places full of flies and pale yellow butterflies. Wet ferns kept slapping me in the face. The guide, soaked and stained, walked almost at a run, leading D.'s horse whenever there was a difficult place. I could not believe how strong he was. I had just been to Burma a few days before with some Karenni insurgents, and then I had been the strong one because I was tall and well-fed with long legs and so many years of vitamins and meat inside me. This man never quickened his breathing. He was lean and all-enduring and he scarcely said a word.

Bill, I so sad for him, whispered D. when her horse was beside mine. He is just like animal, only working, working all his life, no thinking. I so sorry. I want to give him something.

I understood now that the man was not shy at all, simply unconscious. He rushed along with extraordinary confidence, superbly fitted for what he was doing. I longed to gaze into his face to search for signs of happiness because his strange narrow excellence was so perfect that I wanted it to give him pleasure. But he never looked back at me.

Sometimes the horses lowered their heads to drink from the streams they splashed in, and he stopped patiently. He never drank, although his neck and shoulders had long since darkened with sweat. In her pack D. had a can of soda which she had been keeping for herself. She called the man's name. He did not seem to hear. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she shouted as loudly as she could. Then the man halted and turned back toward her, his eyes incurious, not bewildered or annoyed; he seemed to be looking at her only by accident. She gave him the soda, and he drank it down in one breath, threw the can into the jungle, turned wordlessly and strode on.

I so sad! D. wept.

At the thickening time of dusk the path was frighteningly high and steep. Actually it was not much of a path at all — or maybe too much of a path: —so many refugees, guerrillas, smugglers, and their pack animals had trodden it for so many years that the earth was worn shiny like polished wood. It undulated with ridges of harder dirt and craters made by the hooves of horses, where our own horses now stumbled. Imagine a hand's spread fingers, enlarged and endless, thousands of fingers, going on for many kilometers, and they are made of dirt. The gullies beneath them are knee-deep and sometimes waist-deep. These were the depressions made by the hooves of many horses over the years. My hone was tired now. He refused to go on. He was a wiry little horse, almost like a pony, and when I took my feet out of the numbing rope loops that served as stirrups I could practically touch the ground. I slid off him and led him up the hill, clinging to roots with my free hand, tripping and sliding into those eroded traps. The guide had never stopped. He was long gone with D. and her horse, high above me in the darkness.

When my horse recovered his wind, I got back into the saddle.

The night was very black and cold. I had to trust my horse because I could not see. The way was almost terriryingly steep and narrow. I felt the presence of invisible precipices on either side of me. The poor animal panted and snorted and shivered, the sweat on his shoulders now as cold as dew. After a long time I saw the silhouettes of D. and the guide on a high ridge illuminated by starlight. D. called to me lovingly. Before I could answer, the guide continued on, leading her horse away. My horse saw or smelled D.'s mare and cantered to join her, which afforded me some comfort; it seemed to me that I had been travelling alone in the darkness for a very long time, although probably it had been less than an hour. The guide strode so briskly that the horses had to trot, never slowing even when he went up and down cliffsides in that pitch-darkness. D. kept calling his name in terror; but it was as she had said, he was just like an animal. He rushed on without drawing a rapid breath, drawing us along the naked backbones of those unpleasant mountains by habit and instinct. He was one of the strongest men I ever met, and among the least moved by other human beings.