Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

He slept curled among the stones, the pistol clutched to his chest. His feet thawed and burned and he woke and lay staring up at a sky of china blue where very high there circled two black hawks about the sun slowly and perfectly opposed like paper birds upon a pole.

He moved north all day and in the long light of the evening he saw from that high rimland the collision of armies remote and silent upon the plain below. The dark little horses circled and the landscape shifted in the paling light and the mountains beyond brooded in darkening silhouette. The distant horsemen rode and parried and a faint drift of smoke passed over them and they moved on up the deepening shade of the valley floor leaving behind them the shapes of mortal men who had lost their lives in that place. He watched all this pass below him mute and ordered and senseless until the warring horsemen were gone in the sudden rush of dark that fell over the desert. All that land lay cold and blue and without definition and the sun shone solely on the high rocks where he stood. He moved on and soon he was in darkness himself and the wind came up off the desert and frayed wires of lightning stood again and again along the western terminals of the world. He made his way along the escarpment until he came to a break in the wall cut through by a canyon running back into the mountains. He stood looking down into this gulf where the tops of the twisted evergreens hissed in the wind and then he started down.

The snow lay in deep pockets on the slope and he floundered down through them, steadying himself along the naked rocks until his hands were numb with cold. He crossed with care a gravel slide and made his way down the far side among the rubble stone and small gnarled trees. He fell and fell again, scrabbling for a handpurchase in the dark, rising and feeling in his belt for the pistol. He was at this work the night long. When he reached the benchland above the canyon floor he could hear a stream running in the gorge below him and he went stumbling along with his hands in his armpits like a fugitive in a madman’s waistcoat. He reached a sandy wash and followed it down and it took him at last out upon the desert again where he stood tottering in the cold and casting about dumbly for some star in the overcast.

Most of the snow had blown or melted from off the plain on which he found himself. Tandem storms were blowing downcountry from the north and the thunder trundled away in the distance and the air was cold and smelled of wet stone. He struck out across the barren pan, nothing but sparse tufts of grass and the widely scattered palmilla standing solitary and silent against the lowering sky like other beings posted there. To the east the mountains stood footed blackly into the desert and before him were bluffs or promontories that ran out like headlands massive and sombre upon the desert floor. He clopped on woodenly, half frozen, his feet senseless. He’d been without food for almost two days and he’d had little rest. He cited the terrain before him in the periodic flare of the lightning and trudged on and in this manner he rounded a dark cape of rock off to his right and came to a halt, shivering and blowing into his clawed and palsied hands. In the distance before him a fire burned on the prairie, a solitary flame frayed by the wind that freshened and faded and shed scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste. He sat and watched it. He could not judge how far it was. He lay on his stomach to skylight the terrain to see what men were there but there was no sky and no light. He lay for a long time watching but he saw nothing move.

When he went on again the fire seemed to recede before him. A troop of figures passed between him and the light. Then again. Wolves perhaps. He went on.

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

When the sun rose he was asleep under the smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog. The storm had long passed off to the south and the new sky was raw and blue and the spire of smoke from the burnt tree stood vertically in the still dawn like a slender stylus marking the hour with its particular and faintly breathing shadow upon the face of a terrain that was without other designation. All the creatures that had been at vigil with him in the night were gone and about him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgurite in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur.

Seated tailorwise in the eye of that cratered waste he watched the world tend away at the edges to a shimmering surmise that ringed the desert round. After a while he rose and made his way to the edge of the pan and up the dry course of an arroyo, following the small demonic tracks of javelinas until he came upon them drinking at a standing pool of water. They flushed snorting into the chaparral and he lay in the wet trampled sand and drank and rested and drank again.

In the afternoon he started across the valley floor with the weight of the water swinging in his gut. Three hours later he stood in the long arc of horsetracks coming up from the south where the party had passed. He followed the edge of the tracks and sorted out single riders and he reckoned their number and he reckoned them to be riding at a canter. He followed the trace for several miles and he could tell by the alternation of tracks ridden over that all these riders had passed together and he could tell by the small rocks overturned and holes stepped into that they had passed in the night. He stood looking out from under his hand long downcountry for any dust or rumor of Elias. There was nothing. He went on. A mile further and he came upon a strange blackened mass in the trail like a burnt carcass of some ungodly beast. He circled it. The tracks of wolves and coyotes had walked through the horse and boot prints, little sallies and sorties that fetched up to the edge of that incinerated shape and flared away again.

It was the remains of the scalps taken on the Nacozari and they had been burned unredeemed in a green and stinking bonfire so that nothing remained of the poblanos save this charred coagulate of their preterite lives. The cremation had been sited upon a rise of ground and he studied every quarter of the terrain about but there was nothing to be seen. He went on, following the tracks with their suggestion of pursuit and darkness, trailing them through the deepening twilight. With sunset it grew cold, yet nothing like so cold as in the mountains. His fast had weakened him and he sat in the sand to rest and woke sprawled and twisted on the ground. The moon was up, a half moon that sat like a child’s boat in the gap of the black paper mountains to the east. He rose and went on. Coyotes were yapping out there and his feet reeled beneath him. An hour more of such progress and he came upon a horse.

It had been standing in the trace and it moved off in the dark and stood again. He halted with his pistol drawn. The horse went past, a dark shape, rider or none he could not tell. It circled and came back.