AtDTDA: 18 A contre-jour shot 507

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

o I answer myself,  I [or the interweb] contain multitudes. There was so 
much in this one scene, had to point it out. First off: "Sure, well being an 
angel I'm used to that". Of course, she's no angel, she's Erlys, Dally's mom and 
for a while, Merle's beau. She also was just talking about how she's no angel:

          "He'd never asked her what she was doing alone on foot at so awkward 
          an hour, but she got around to telling him all the same—the faro 
          debts, the laudanum, bad loans and worse creditors, Bert's family, 
          the Snidells of Prospect Avenue [1]. . . .:

. . . .but surely, by now, you must have noticed just how many allusions to 
angels we find in TRP's writings?

Then there's the "luridly exploding childhood sky", which in fact is a 
reminiscence of Krakatoa. . . .

          "Will you just look st that!" She trailed a black crepe sleeve across 
          the west, "Like those sunsets when I was a kid."

          "I remember. Volcano blew up, out there in the East Indies 
          someplace, dust and ashes stayed aloft, all the colors changed, 
          went on for years."

          "That Krakatoa," she nodded, as if it were some creature in a 
          child's story.

          "This ship's cook I run with briefly, Shorty, he was there—well, a 
          couple hundred miles downwind, not that it mattered, said it was 
          like the end of the world." [2]

          "I thought sunsets were always supposed to look like that. 
          Every kid I knew. We all believed if for a while till they started  
          getting back to ordinary, then we figured it was our fault, 
          something to do with growing up. maybe everything else was 
          supposed to fade down that way too. . . "

And Krakatoa seems to be a pre-echo of the even greater upcoming 
blast at Tunguska:

          Meantime, in another part of the taiga, Kit and Prance were 
          going round and round as usual on the interesting topic of 
          which one was less constitutionally able to clean up after 
          himself, when with no announcement, everything, faces, 
          sky, trees. the distant turn of river, went red. Sound itself, 
          the wind, what wind there was, all gone to red as a living 
          heart. Before they could regain their voices, as the color 
          faded to a blood orange, the explosion arrived, the voice of 
          a world announcing that it would never go back to what it 
          had been. Both Kit and Prance remembered the great 
          roaring as they passed through the Prophet's Gate. 782

          And so the drums began. The dungur, rising to them out of the 
          taiga inscrutable and vast. Through the long twilight into the pale 
          evening. One drum would have been soul-rattling enough, but 
          soon there were a dozen. Deep and far-reaching. Kit stood 
          nearly paralyzed. It went on for days. After a while he thought he 
          heard something familiar in it. He had begun to mistake it for 
          thunder. Not ordinary thunder but whatever Agdy had brought 
          down on the day of the event. Were they trying to 
          commemorate it? summon it back? Or provide homeopathic 
          echoes to protect them from its return? 783

. . . .and who knows what sort of rift in reality the Tunguska event portends?

". . . .But the brightest part of that luridly exploding childhood sky was 
now right behind her face. . . ." which, of course is in the eye of the 
beholder, said beholder being alchemical photographer Merle Rideout 
with his time-traveling film emulsions and range-finder eyes, drinking in 
what must be the loveliest contre-jour shot imaginable, and so, in his 
own way, falling in love. This all is, of course, Erly's flashback on board the 
Stupendica, a bit of backstory in play as Dally and Kit cast off for strange 
waters.

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              "Sure, well being an angel I'm used to that." But the brightest 
          part of that luridly exploding childhood sky was now right behind 
          her face, and some of her hair was loose, and she could detect in 
          his gaze enough of what he must be seeing, and they both fell 
          silent.

1: I recall a mention of Burt Snidell somehow being involved with 
Lew Basnight, but I might be getting the edges of the frame a bit 
blurry right about now, with so many of the story threads sub-dividing
and time traveling.


2: Personal reminiscence: as a child in La Puente (West Covina, Greater 
Los Angeles region, 1961-1963) we had "end of the world" sunsets, and 
happened to live there during the Cuban Missile crisis. Some nights, the 
skys were all lit up bright red, with lavender and amber clouds.