William Vollmann - The Atlas

For the sake of this same sentimental archeology, Peter occasionally returned to Golgotha, ignoring the cries of the more lately crucified because they were not the ONE; so paying them witness could only erode his recollections of that Crucifixion which he was bound to consider final. — Water, water! moaned a man on a cross. — Oh, what a cursed place this was! — But Peter's occupation must now be to overcome such impressions. Kneeling with clasped hands, he lowered his head and began to search for beauty in the ridges below him, whose tan boulders were ridden with cracks so that they seemed to be stacks of half-melted bricks from some old time, and channels and canyons of the same rough rock ran between them, all edges sandblasted smooth, but their stone-flesh was grainy with sharp quartz crystals that could scrape hands to bleeding. Yucca plants grew in fractures or little beds of sand; their shadows were very sharp. Sometimes a sandbed led between two slanting boulders that gave like a gateway onto some plain or plateau bounded by ridges of again the same rock; those places were gray with brush. Immense squawbushes shone iron-gray like tumbleweeds forged in some smithy; they bore no red berries to refresh the Savages; they bore nothing but grayness; the only green things were piñon pines or the straight shaggy trunk-posts of Joshua trees, in whose green brushes crows sat. In sunny places the heat was burning; in the shade it was cold. — Peter could see nothing beautiful there. — Sighing, he proceeded up the Road of Tears, which wound monotonously upward, not steeply but steadily, and the wind gusted colder and the shrubs grew grayer and the Joshua trees smaller, while the way went from bowl to bowl in the rocks. In each bowl the horizon was very close, being bordered on every side by a ridge of the same tan stone, and in each bowl a cross was erected, on which a man hung dying while his guards played dice; and Peter averted his eyes and strode on to the summit, from which he could see many dead black hills below, fretted with shrubs and the silvery trails of flood-washes, and then the far flat plain of bluish enigma, stained by cloud-shadows, upon which the great whore Jerusalem walled herself in to her pleasures, and the plain stretched past Emmaus all the way to the Dead Sea, which was then the color of the sky; and a great dark range of dark blue mountains made the final horizon. But where Peter sat was only reddish dirt with the ant-hollowed flute of a man's thigh-bone sticking out, and flakes of quartz or feldspar, and feeble patches of grass huddled in shrub-shadows; — so all he saw was a great anthill of decay swelling above a world of iniquity, but I am sure it was only because he was not quite high enough; had the guards considerately raised him up to the fork of a Joshua tree and nailed him thereon, he might have seen what CHRIST saw: the lovely cacti, over which the delirious CHRIST murmured and waved His hand as He blessed them (but of course His hand was nailed fast to that cross of gray splintered ironwood, so that to those watching below it seemed only that He struggled feebly for a moment, tearing His wounds a little more so that another trickle of weary black blood ran down between the hard-baked clots already on him), and He smiled at the gardens of cholla cactus which only He saw, loving them for their spines, which were as intricately whorled as rose coral; he smiled upon their greenish-orange fruits, which were like hard raspberries; He sent His affection to them on account of the beautiful green they glowed beneath the gray bushes where woodrats lived; in His greater self, which was never maimed or fettered, He kissed the hale gray buckhorn chollas; He embraced the strawberry stems of calico cacti; He smiled in such delight to the rustling leaf-music of the creosote bushes, whose waxy leaves, though olive-green and soothing like stream-plants, were nonetheless almost as sharp-edged as those cholla spines which shimmered silvery and lavender like delicate down upon their lobes and joints, which twined caressingly about each other in that dry sand and they seemed softer than hare-fur until you got closer to them and saw that each joint was like a sea-urchin and their shimmering was a shimmering of barbed spines (but cactus wrens could nest in the chollas, and the Cahuilla Indians could gather and eat the cholla-fruit); so CHRIST married the fuzzy-soft chollas, and he took to himself the detached chollas lying in the sand like fallen gray stars; and He married the pencil-chollas, whose pale green cylindrical leaves were rolled tight like promises; they too were spine-studded, but every spine was precious, and so emerged from a diamond on the leaf; He resurrected the dead gray-white cholla skeletons that decay had reduced to hollow wind-tubes; nor did He neglect the others, the jojoba and the desert senna, the ocotillo, which rose, woody, split, and spined like fish backbones, to a height of fifteen feet or more, like the upright of His cross, and its gray wood was cracked and helically green-veined; but it glowed with orange cactus-flowers. .

Peter loved none of these weeds. But he loved to look down the mountain Golgotha at a certain ridge-fold where a single green tree rose; that was where he and the guards went to drink at a certain hour because there was a tiny oasis there; in the oasis it was cool and a wide shallow stream trickled through a muddy tunnel between the great cottonwood palms, whose bleached fronds stirred about their trunk-waists like the grass skirts of dancers, and the sky fluttered blue as turquoise between their green fan-fingers, and they spread ever so many happy green hands all around themselves in thankfulness, and cattails made a wall against the heat, and the water glittered in the darkness and the palm-trees rustled and between them it was so dim and cool; it was almost like being in a forest, but not quite, because there were not enough trees and their scales were sharp plates like reptile-scales; but at least the fronds were soft; they did not cut your hands. — Peter felt contented when he thought upon that grove. And he said to himself: My CHRIST is in the grove, not the grave. — And the guards made a covenant with Peter that neither party would molest the other, for each was but rendering service and allegiance as he was called upon to do.

The hills were like green breasts. In the vast mounds of forest blue and green rose skinny white birches so needy for someone to embrace them. Sky-blue massifs rose ahead and behind. The Baie Saint-Paul was wide and blue, pale blue like a sea. The far shore was but an uncertain congealment of haze.

The priests were Peter's sons. When they saw the immensi.y before them they whispered: We shall make no covenant with you.

Père Jean de Brebeuf made no covenants. But he followed the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and being thus directed (according to the limits of his strength) up the great river of prayer called Time, he came at last to the Seventy-Second Rapid— viz.; the Thirteenth Apparition of CHRIST, Who manifested Himself to Saint Paul, and also to the Holy Fathers in Limbo, from which state He freed them. Around this Rapid rose the blockily fractured cliff-faces covered by trees standing one below the other, thii crowns of those spruces and aspens shadowing the bases of those above them; they went down and down, until began the rock that dropped sheer to the brown river below. At first he saw the river flowing far down below him, between trees on which autumn and evening already shone with a pale yellow light; he seemed to stand with JESUS CHRIST, Savior of the World, atop the faded cliffs gray and: ool that rose to crickets, resin, ferns, red maples, forest shade, crowned by sky still luminous as in afternoon; but this position Brebeuf considered highly presumptuous considering his unworthiness, and so his soul leaped into the river, allowing itself to be borne back down the Three Falls of Humility, where he was much bruised and scratched by the river-rocks, a mortification which afforded him some consolation for his many faults. Now he permitted himself to clamber back up the Sauk of Election, to ascend to the Current of Patience which again washed him back to the commencement of the Third Week, to rise from the Sixteenth Rapid to the Third Isle of Prayer, to swim from the Twenty-Third Rapid back up to the Seventy-Second, which he pulled himself up by great might and main, wedging his feet between boulders to brace his climb as the cataract spewed down upon his body and the walls shimmered high and narrow above him like rocky-hued rainbows.