William Vollmann - The Atlas

Every time the fever came back, hot sweat oozed from the insides of my ears like drops of boiling oil in a wok. When that happened I became very dizzy, but I knew it would do no good to call out. As for D., she was pregnant, and continually nauseous, so that the jolting of her horse agonized her, and she whispered that she had a great fear that she would fall. Sometimes the guide would be swiftly striding straight down some wall of scree so steep that the blood rushed to my head as my horse picked his way and sometimes stumbled. Ahead of me, I heard D. sobbing in pain and terror. If she screamed his name long enough and loud enough, he'd shake his head as if in surprise, then come running back to her solicitously. He was not callous at all. She'd tell him to please go more slowly for her baby's sake, and he'd nod. A moment later he would be striding just as rapidly into the mountain coldness, smoking a cigarette, with one hand in his pocket. He was not hostile or even intractable. It was only that there was something immovable about him. He was pure and good and wanted to please, but nothing could prick him through his animal dullness. — We are fashioned, so it's said, of dust and clay. And perhaps in abodes of poverty, where health, learning, shelter and security are not birthrights, the soul is not a birthright, either. Could it be that these men I've met who are just like animals own no self, contain nothing in their skulls but brutishness, possess no feelings for other human beings save fear and lust and greed; or, even if they feel love, experience it only as a dog or a horse does, without understanding? In these insensible ones do only dust and clay have life? — It was all that D. and I could do to stay on our mounts. Twice my weary horse grew ill-tempered and threw me. The first time I fell only about seven or eight feet and struck rock, tearing my left arm open. I could hear the guide striding rapidly on, while D. screamed his name. By the time she'd managed to stop him I was back on my horse. The second time, a couple of hours later, I fell about twenty feet and as I was falling I thought that I was going to be seriously hurt but I was caught by a treetop which gave way and dropped me into a thornbush. The thorns broke off inside my raw arm and began to burn right away with some quick-acting nettlish venom. Far down the mountain ahead, I could hear D. weeping and calling the guide's name. He returned at last with that surprised look and helped me back on my horse. D. asked how I was and I said I was OK and she screamed: Why why why you say that? You no OK! Oh, you make me very angry! You talk strong, talk stupid! — But by then her words had faded into a distant wail because she was already far down the mountain again, pulled behind the guide like a balloon on a string. My horse picked his way, carrying me down into the dark. I kept one hand tightly on the wickerwork pommel; the rope that served as reins was wrapped around that hand; my other arm, the one that was swelling now and filling me with warmth, I kept a few inches out from my face, to catch the branches and briers that sometimes leaped for my eyes.

Finally it was very cold and I saw stars far below me on my left and on my right, and then we reached the minefield warning and were inside Burma.

I closed my eyes, but the drops of sweat that oozed out of my skull were so painfully hot that they glowed right through my eyelids, hued like the brownish-orange license plates of Egyptian taxis.

The guide brought us to a dark cold safehouse where a man with a lacerated face sat smoking cigarettes, and then he turned to leave. He had not even asked us for his money. Clutching her belly, D. stood up and uttered his name, in a feeble voice which matched her pallor; and he turned toward her. That was when I knew that he was not deaf. D. told him that we'd return across the mountains with him in one or two days; would he kindly await us here? We'd pay him when we were back in Thailand. He nodded and left us wordlessly.

Our business in Burma, which was animated by propaganda, machine-guns, and other categories beyond the animal, was not completed as quickly as we had hoped. On the third day we returned to the safehouse and learned that our guide had left with the horses. We never saw him again.

D. remained ill from the ride, and was bleeding from her womb. She would likely have a miscarriage. As a special favor, the insurgents arranged to bring her back by truck, for which I was very grateful because I think walking would have killed her. It did not seem wise for me to accompany her since my white skin would attract notice at the checkpoints; and in fact the people who took her back were all arrested. — Since there were no horses, I set out on foot, with two brothers to guide me. I was quite a bit sicker then.

I cut a bamboo cane to help me, and wobbled along, hot and cold. White streamers of rain sped suddenly down from a cloud. At the Weekend Market in Bangkok I'd once seen a man rattling two sticks together as he wriggled a toy snake of many papier-mâché joints across the sidewalks. My fever was now like one of those snakes. It wormed burningly and freezingly up my spine and gnawed my brain. Long creepers reached into my sickness, bewildering me with immense skinny trunks like bars across the cliffs of greenness. Sometimes I succumbed, and slid down my pole to sit on the ground and let my teeth chatter until my mind began to unthink itself. Then I'd arise and continue up the hills of hot and mysterious forest. Past the minefield warning sign there was a steep cool meadow grazed down almost to sand, and then the true mountains started.

The elder brother ran far ahead. He circled widely like a dog, I think because he'd never gone this way before. I think I could have found the path alone but it was very nice to have company in case we were stopped. He gazed at me with reptilian indifference. Then he disappeared again. The young brother stayed with me. He was a different kind of animal, I don't know what — perhaps some kind of rodent, maybe one of those giant slum-rats which fear nothing and march out from beneath houses in a cold and lordly way. He glanced over the jungle as we went; possibly he was watching for mines. Neither of the brothers was as strong as the previous guide, but they suffered and endured in silence like animals, never speaking to one another, scarcely even looking at each other as they strode on bloody-footed in their wretched sandals. I thought of the driver of a bus which D. and 1 had taken from Mae Hong Song to Bangkok. Like so many of his colleagues, the man had begun the nineteen-hour journey by drinking a bottle of liquid speed. Then he drove the mountain road as rapidly as he could. He did not actually get to Bangkok any more quickly because the hairpin curves required him to decelerate almost to a stop whenever he tacked; what he did succeed in accomplishing was making poor D. and about half the other passengers vomit. The ticket-taker, a thin boy of perhaps ten years, smiled apologetically, bowing and clasping his hands as he passed out plastic bags for people to throw up in. Nobody said anything to the driver, who continued to nod happily as he gunned the bus into another high-speed lurch. Nobody moaned or changed expression. They vomited in silence (even the restaurant proprietress, even the bar girl, even that longlegged soldier whom I'd seen carry two suitcases through the hot brightness of the night), filling the humid air with stench. I don't think the bus driver was a cruel or malicious person. I believe that his soul had simply been compressed to the same meagerness as the horse-guide's. He was doing all that he knew how to do. He could have been an executioner, and doubtless would have dispatched his quota of shrieking or pleading victims with a calmness which had never known empathy; and if he could have been an executioner then somebody else could have been a judge, pronouncing death sentences without feeling any agitating impressions; and if we can judge we can do anything.