NP: Blood Meridian

[Richard Romeo]

just this paragraph is worth the total output of the
euginides,lethems, franzens, eggers and the current
fools who rule the fiction roost.

imho, of course

rich


--- Steve Maas <tyronemullet at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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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