But this forsaken armada of bottled petitions is only a fanciful flicker, a curl of the illustrator's nib, a slight tint-change in the hazel carpet spread over the surface of doom's deep. Castles perch on cliffs, visible before they should be at this magnification. Monasteries pock-mark the shore, devout in tenuousness. Walled ports, minuscule but intricate with masonry, their plowed fields and fiefs heaped up like carpet remnants around a throne, are as yet exceptions, small halts in continuous wood and wildness.
The storytelling eye hangs suspended in midair a little longer, a surveyor's speculation wider than these fortified hills allow. Then, renouncing its bird's-eye, it nestles down like a silversmithed, dove ciborium lowering itself to the surface of the sin-steeped world. The panels take on earth's tangent, a pilgrim's view. Focus falls to the roads below, ways swarming with travelers, one for every conceivable reason in religion's calendar.
Here, at ground level, belief marches through the year in brief. Each discrete frame is a new saint's day, another motive for mass migration. Across a quilt of color-strewn squares, searchers shake down Santiago de Compostela, assault Amritsar, Lumbini, or Ayodhya. They venture off to venerate Saint Peter's bones in Rome. They scale Mount Abu, wend to Canterbury. They figure the four sacred mountains, the five thrones, the seven sacred rivers. They close in on Buddh Gaya, Lourdes, Assisi, Sarnath, Turin, Goa, Tours, Nankana, Guadalupe, Kusinagara, Fátima, Marburg, the hills of Parasnath and Girnar. The world pictured is a surging hajj, one that every believer must make at least once, if only by proxy.
Conditional, reverential, purgational, memorial, devotional, salvationaclass="underline" the motives for moving sweep an arc as wide as the swing of these walkers' staves. Cartoon figures, burgundy and forest-green, journey to the source of all grace, the spring of all politics, the birthplace of history. The tour is slow but urgent, desperate enough to have demanded this illustrated guide in the first place. It is as if, the drawings insist, only a thousand miles on foot will ever set things right again.
The paneled page tags alongside this parade to those expanses that are a little more sacred, a little closer, if only because they mark the resting place of some grotesque bloodletting. Ink and watercolor snake into lines of supplicants ready to sacrifice all purchase on earth to reach their holy sites. And there, at page bottom, farther than they can hope to see, the luster of goaclass="underline" a temple, crypt, battle site, the empire's earliest universities, wandering schools where they might matriculate.
Tinted print starts to hover just above the frames. Just the spidery shape of the letters speaks of a moving desire, an impulse bedded down below the soul's water table. "Pilgrimage," the captions begin, "is the path of a single life made visible, replayed in the space of a few days." Beneath these words, a band of travelers passes close by a familiar, inviting house en route to the far landscape. The very next picture is the window casement itself, drawn from the inside, the sight of the receding band insisting that the stay-at-home eye chase it down, join it. Go somewhere. What does it matter if you're not back for dinner? The suffering and cold, molestation, looting along the way are mere softened pen-strokes dipped in crimson and gold. The story stakes you only this one round trip, this one staged set of oases leading ever higher up into the mountains, this one chance to recap the embryo's first adventure overseas.
"A single hope, if never more than secret, stabs at the heart of everything that is awake." Flowery voice-over for a child's treasure chest album, but the accompanying astonishments of artwork vindicate the text. Who reads these preliminary bits anyway? The proof is all visual. Wait, walk long enough, and you will arrive. The hinted-at place is just around the next hillside. It will appear in your lifetime, in another half page or two.
Fresco-inspired friezes, severe yet sensuous, tell of the need to replay the whole itinerary in miniature. Swelling rectangles add up to a radiant, full-page display, the fabulous rivals: Mecca itself, and, en face across the stapled spread, Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulcher. Each story panel moves the seeker closer to that ultimate end, the scale model City of God on Earth. From a great distance, it appears only as a gathering, anxious Crosshatch on the horizon. Still miles away over the plain, the towers become visible, then the walls. Then, at long last, the mammoth gate appears and opens, sparkling with celebratory stone revelation, ancient promises — detailed and intricate — carved everywhere into its cyclopean surface.
The dress becomes clear now, the style, time, and place. It is that interregnum of great faith, when most of the world knows this habitation to be almost spent. The globe is degraded; it corrodes only to be restored soon to its old original. Its oversoul migrates through a slow loop, one that narrows its noose to arrive at final things. Crisis cultures, cargo cults, nativistic movements, messianics: everyone on this road-strewn surface survives the present by naming it a station, an inscrutable detour on the way to the next age, the next image, the next frame.
The passes to the shrines of the blessed martyrs, the languishing trade routes are charged now with danger and salvation. An emerald mix of fear and need lights the spired horizons. Pen and color do not dare guess yet at topography's terminus, the shape of the hastening finish, except to fan the palmer's hope that arrival must surely be near, the end of the day of wandering in sight.
The Tour Guide — the Anointed, the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam, the Mahayana redeemer, the Nanabush — is shown preparing his many returns. In every town that the processions pass, the old order is smelted off. The novum is set to make its break. Strange, reified contours, miraculous and unexpected, get ready to rise up out of the earth's destruction. "Come the Fourth Kingdom…" the supertitles predict. "Come the Third Age…" Come the revolution, the return, the liberation, the overthrow, the transforming renewal… The mass pilgrimage rolls across these ocher hills, stopping for alms at all the pox spots of civilization. Suddenly, the stills reveal alclass="underline" this disguised, private campaign, this jihad by another name, draws toward the emblem of all foretold spots, the city at the end of the world.
Illuminated saga retraces the eye's first excursion. To scan these lavish psalter sheets is almost to see through the panels from the other side, to surprise the reading youth under the sheets at night again. Arrows leading from square to square mark a flagstone picture path down which the strip's original owner raced by flashlight to reach story's end. The way is a seven-hundred-year shortcut back to an ancient destiny.
Back to boyhood, back to that moment when the medieval West sits inside a defensive moat rapidly filling up with rubble. The Christian world has restively expected its impending end for twelve hundred years. It waits at this very moment, more certain of now than ever. God's tune rushes to cadence.
"True," a series of recapitulating panels concedes, "prior clockwatchers have been wrong." Many expect the old heaven and earth to burn away just as the Anointed, Antichrist Sylvester II, pronounces midnight mass on December 31, 999. Comets blazed brilliantly in advance. At the sound of transubstantiation's bell, people across the continent drop to the ground, expectant. In reprieve's let-down, hurried calculations produce another thirty years of grace. And when that extension also expires, seers settle on a new due date.