NP: Blood Meridian

[Steve Maas]

>From _Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West_
By Cormac McCarthy

[…] The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were 
beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already 
you could see through the dust on the ponies' sides the painted chevrons and 
the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade 
of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the 
pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from 
human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their 
mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those 
ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing 
shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand 
unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, 
hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or 
wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery 
and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of 
slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat 
and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained 
weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that 
bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn 
backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish 
conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of 
mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and 
many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beats until they 
trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of 
brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson 
red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a 
company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous 
tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet 
than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and 
clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing 
where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

--Pp. 52-53, Vintage International Edition (1992)

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