William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— We sacrifice unto Mithra, the lord of wide pastures, who has a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes, a God invoked by his own name.

— We sacrifice unto Mithra, the lord of wide pastures, who is truth-speaking, a chief in assemblies, with a thousand ears, well-shapen, with ten thousand eyes, high, with full knowledge, strong, sleepless, ever awake.

— We sacrifice unto Mithra, the lord of all countries… we sacrifice unto the undying, shining, swift-horsed sun.

— For his brightness and glory I have offered unto him a sacrifice worth being heard, unto Mithra the lord of wide pastures.

Later someone else said that here the voice quit and rose like the smoke of a train in and out of a tunnel,

— May he come to us for help. May he come to us for ease. May he come to us for joy. May he come to us for mercy. May he come to us for health. May he come to us for victory. May he come to us for good conscience. May he come to us for bliss. He, the awful and overpowering, worthy of sacrifice and prayer, not to be deceived anywhere in the whole of the material world, Mithra, the lord of wide pastures.

But by now, the sound which lay among them like a sound among stones, filling the cavern behind them, commenced to return in a murmur.

— On whichever side he has been worshiped first in the fullness of faith of a devoted heart, to that side turns Mithra, the lord of wide pastures, with the fiend-smiting wind, with the cursing thought of the wise.

The murmur rose, with the sound of an echo from a chasm, and started to disintegrate into separate voices. Someone said, — Just get hold of him. .

— With a sacrifice in which thou art invoked by thine own name, with the proper words do I offer thee libations, O most beneficent Mithra. Should the evil thoughts of the earthly man be a hundred times worse, they would not rise so high as the good thoughts of the heavenly Mithra.

— Look out, be quiet. . come on now, Reverend. .

— Should the evil words of the earthly man be a hundred times worse, they would not rise so high as the good words of the heavenly Mithra.

— That's enough of this. . get hold of him, shut him up…

— Should the evil deeds of the earthly man be a hundred times worse, they would not rise so high as the good deeds of the heavenly Mithra.

The shaft of sunlight struck the gold bull figure showing a hand grasping the horns, again and again, to be interrupted above by a visage which broke it and eyes blazing with the suddenness of lightning, as the voice at each flash became thunderous, and they struck at the same moment,

— To Mithra of the wide pastures, of the thousand ears, of the myriad eyes. .

— Look out! Get his arms. .

— the Yazad of the spoken name…

There was a crash, and a howl of pain.

— be sacrifice, homage, propitiation, and praise. .

Someone finally managed to wrench a board from one of the windows. With the light, everyone looked in different directions. The howl of pain had come from a man now on the floor, and pinned there under the weight of the holy water stoup, drenched, having knocked it over in assailing the altar where it stood. The bell started again, and someone managed to turn off the mechanism. Someone else reached a telephone, and called a minister in a nearby town, inviting, and then entreating, him to come and restore the occasion they had gathered to observe.

Everyone looked in different directions; and afterward, outside, none of them could say for certain how the figure exhorting them had appeared, though two starry-eyed children turned nasty with one another over it, one describing Persian dress, and a turban, the other Assyrian, with a crown, becoming so vivid, indeed, that their schoolteacher, who was quivering nearby, confirmed that they had seen such pictures in a history primer the week before, though this did not deter their zeal for a moment.

One person said he'd been taken to hospital; another, back to the parsonage.

The brisk air was turning cold; and in the shelter of a clapboard buttress, where they'd already retired from the sun before the sky itself commenced to darken overhead, this rising chill embraced a small knot of ladies, uniting them so familiarly that they might have been the immediate source of it, and their voices the shocks of its emanation.

— At our supper last night we never suspected. .

— Never imagined such desecration was taking place right over our heads…

— I heard hammering. .

— Well 7 heard hammering.

— I heard it too, but I never dreamt that something like this. .

— Something like this!. .

— I've had the feeling something like this was going to happen for quite a time now.

— Since the last time he went away for a rest. When we all agreed that a rest would be best.

— Ever since May…

— Since May?

— I've thought. .

— Oh May.

— That was his last really Christian service. May's funeral service.

— How we have missed her.

— How we have needed her.

— How he has needed her guiding hand.

— May would be eighty-three this month.

— Someone ought to be notified. Someone ought to come immediately. Someone ought. .

— The son. .

— The son?

— The son has been gone for such a long time. A prodigal son.

— But he had no brothers. Poor Camilla. .

— Poor Camilla never was strong. Taken and left in foreign lands.

— He wasn't a strong boy. When he took sick. .

— The Lord did spare him.

— The Lord did spare him to do His work. To follow right in his father's footsteps. That is, of course. .

— His fathers six generations back.

— To serve right here in his own community. The people he needs, who need him now.

— Now I shouldn't repeat this, but I heard. .

— Do you know…

— I heard. .

— Do you know what I thought, as I remembered, after that illness that lasted so long, the Lord didn't spare him. As I remembered. ,

— But I was certain…

— Well it's true, the past plays tricks when all we have to depend upon is mortal memory.

— Wait! Don't you smell something?

— I did in there, I smelled something burning.

— The terrible sweet smell of something burning.

Their words rose on bursts of wind, were fouled in the buttressed eddies, and sunk by metallic cries of nails being wrenched from wood inside, where they went themselves a moment later, for it had suddenly begun to snow.

The wind was still gentle enough, and the snow fell lightly; but through it, on the highway, gripping the steering wheel over which he could just see, a young man whose expression did something to redeem the otherwise vapid character of his face peered ahead between knuckles gone white with purpose, as he sped to answer the summons. His only sounds were bleating attempts to control his cold, now in its second, and most watery, day. The storm, as he would call it later, and as, later, it did indeed become, had blown up just as he left the town some ten miles off; and as though it had arisen as a challenge and a dare to his duty, he sped into the white flakes, making of their mild falling a threat worthy of his goal.

He did in fact almost come to grief as he entered the town, where the arrow pointing to left warned of the imminent curve to the right. From time to time he had taken one hand from the wheel, to draw across his nose, which is just what he was doing at that moment, and for uncountable terrifying instants he wove between the Civil War monument and the Depot Tavern, as though choosing which to demolish, an experience which the most worthy of goals could scarcely redeem, and explains why he had to be helped from his car upon arrival at the church.

Things had been set to rights as far as was possible, the pulpit replaced, the damaged pews straightened out, and the windows un-boarded, largely through the efforts of the burly man and his buddies. He stood now to the back of the unsteady gasping congregation, looking quite indignantly about him, and above, from an eye already greatly swollen and discolored. There were others as severely marked, better than a half-dozen of them, and he turned to one now, whose shirt hung in tatters under his torn jacket, to mutter, — We got him there all right, the doc gave him a sedative, put him right out like a light. Then he turned respectfully to the fore, waiting for the conscript in the pulpit to begin.