Hooflet

"Our boots was cut to pieces. Clamberin over those old caved and rimpled plates you could see well enough how things had gone in that place, rocks melted and set up all wrinkled like a pudding, the earth stove through to the molten core of her. Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there's no up nor down to it and there's men in this company besides myself seen little cloven hoofprints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what litte doe ever trod melted rock? I'd not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It's a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other. And somethin put them little hooflet markings in the lava flow for I seen them there myself."

-- the expriest in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

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The above passage met me today and knocked me over as I sat. Chapter ten of Blood Meridian might be the best thing I've read in months. Maybe years.

For those who have read it: Isn't that image of the judge doling out killing powder as the Indians ascend, and the caballeros/matadors lined up, "circlin past him like communicants," perfect? Just perfect. After he inverts the Inferno, McCarthy gives us a lapsed man of God who took gunpowder from a demonic white man--the antithesis of communion.

On the rim of seeming hell, no less. And after this littele ceremony, death to the red men. Brilliant.

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Was supposed to be the last day of the tour today.

Supposedly.