Though Sir John Mandeville (in his Travels, among the earliest and most heroic of plagiaries in the French) confessed, "Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, for I was not there": what matter? Here above, the concrete cliffs had disappeared, only their lights studding darkness which posed as space and postured firmament.
— John!
— You?. . bumping into you again on the street like this? But I have to hurry, I have to get a train.
— Yes, a train, a train.
Lights flashed past, their beams tangled in darkness to confirm it. — Are you all right? What's that you're carrying? is it real gold? Where are you going?
Through the world of night, lost souls clutching guidebooks follow the sun through subterranean passage gloom, corridors dark and dangerous: so the king built his tomb deep in earth, and alone wanders the darkness of death there through twenty-four thousand square feet of passages and halls, stairs, chambers, and pits. So Egypt.
— Back.
Red in the west as it set, because of the fires of hell says the Talmud: red in the east from the roses of Eden.
— Back where?
— Can we stop for a minute? a glass of brandy?
— I have to make this train.
— Gentlemen. .
Few anywhere disagreed, but that the sun and the moon and the planets issued from a hole in the east, descended into one in the west and returned, by night, through a subterranean passage.
— Gentlemen, I have a religion too. I'm a drunkard.
Raging up and down the sky like a beast in a cage, says the Talmud, and unable to escape, enclosed in the firmament, the gates of its entrance and exit only at opposite ends.
— All right, yes, a train. Wait.
— Gentlemen…
— Hurry. .
Down: down went Tammuz (slain by the boar's tusk), entering at Babylon, the center of the earth, for there was the lid-stone to the lower world.
Thus the Assyrians invoked the bull who guarded the gates: O great bull, O very great bull, which stampest high, which openest access to the interior. .
Please show your ticket at gate
— Leaving on track seven
Their death pursuing its descent, the Piute Indians followed the sun to that hole where it crawled in at the end of the earth, creeping constricted to earth's center, there to sleep out the night, and to waken and creep on to the eastern portal. The sun emerges, eating the stars its children as it rises, its only nourishment; and those on earth at the dawn see only its brilliant belly, distended with stars.
This ticket is your receipt and baggage check. Please keep it with you until you reach destination.
May the bull of good fortune, the genius of good fortune, the guardian of the footsteps of my majesty, the giver of joy to my heart, forever watch over it! Never more may its care cease.
(So reads the inscription of Esar-Haddon, whose father, the murdered Sennacherib, had destroyed Babylon; and he, the son, returned to restore the sacred city, to rebuild the temple of Baal, and refurbish its gods.)
Thrown open, the gates on the eastern face of the temple meet the dawn as the golden tips of the obelisks burn, and the red rim appears from the underworld. Those on earth prostrate before it, and the gates close upon Baal, Who has entered His Temple.
III
It was a man, sure, that was hang'd up here; A youth, as I remember: I cut him down. If it should prove my son now after all-Say you? say you? — Light!
Above the trees, the weathercock atop the church steeple caught the sun, poised there above the town like a cock of fire rising from its own ashes.
Few witnessed this inviolate miracle, for reverence here subscribed to roofs: worship was, as childhood had noted, an affair of defensive indecent enclosure, and few indeed the eyes raised on high unless assured the protective embrace of beams. As a matter of fact few eyes were ever raised at all, but rather lowered in consecrated embarrassment, finally closed in severe chagrin as the voice intoned, — The Lord's mercy is from everlasting to everlasting unto those that fear Him.
When the eyes opened it was to stare at the back of the neck of another similarly occupied; and if the eyes were raised no further, the voices were: O God be-neath Thy guid-ing hand Our ex-iled fa-thers crossed the sea, they sang under that roof which rose to the level of the treetops outside, mounting New England gothic toward the white spire alerted by the weathercock which caught his eye, as he climbed the hill toward the Post Road. But even he, when he reached it, walked with his eyes lowered up the silent nave.
On either hand, the visages of the houses watched him pass, self-contained facades indifferent to his presence, but watching still, guarded, as he passed immediately before the panes and fanlights; and when with seven more steps he escaped their line of vision, they did not turn in indecorous curiosity but continued to stare out straight ahead. Unconcealed by walls, or coy behind hedges, sober-mouthed some of them with columns Ionic and Doric (with never the cheer of Corinthian), these miens of narrow clapboard and eighteenth-century brick looked upon the passer-by without deviation or interruption, with stares neither crooked nor circuitous, the lineal stare of propriety.
(Beyond, there were, to be sure, occasional cupolas, sportive relics of nineteenth-century profligacy.)
He passed the Civil War monument which thirty years before had spiked the sky, and stood now dwarfed in deference to greater wars. (And the resolute iron cannon at its foot was replaced by a mobile 75, albeit crippled by loss of one of its wheels.)
As he reached the transept, the spire behind him burned at its tip with the light of the sun, and from it the bell labored the early hour. Beyond the lucent spire the sky was patched with small clouds which did not move, no more than the ragged-edged patches of snow, reflecting here that celestial course of the sun which he trod on earth.
Past the highway's curve (and the arrow there, pointing the wrong way to delude barbarians), the mile from the railway station, and he had not paused; nor so much as raised his eyes but once when they were raised by the transfiguration of the gold cock in the sun. Mirabile dictu: another blue day. What a narrow chin in his hand, when he raises his hand there, then taps two fingers on his lips and looks over the shoulder quickly. Bells, from far down the nave there. — God of our fa-thers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung bat-tie line (fingers stifle the lips) hymn no 383. Singing way, over the shoulder elders from preference heard no music, alarm it was for it set something living in them, and would that their children believe no such thing existed, to hang their heels on the air. But they heard, they heard and what's more without humility and nor lightened nor lost set instanter to compose, whipped their children to practice as they'd been done for discovery. The bell again. Again. Adeste — ad esse fidelis: hymn no 223 larynges distended A,M,D,G, infra dig dominocus: Oh for a Faith that Will Not Shrink.
Demons the motes in a sunbean, said Blessed Reichelm (though serious statisticians precisely populated hell's habitant host at 1,758,064,176): the Saxons driven through a river blessed upstream by bishops (kept their sword-arms dry). Blessed Leo X, could nicht anders, the 95 Thæces stuck to the door, in the beginning this end:
Town founded 1666 annus mirabilis Oh gosh Oh gee h-Holy Cowrist w-We got a big job ahead of us interdenominational infra supra sub threw the inkpot: Nunnery lecture, illustrated, Pagan ceremony, robed priests, Nuns, high altar, &c. A wail from the tomb. See girl in dungeon. Uncle Sam to the rescue. Public invited. Collection 50cent leadeth us not into temptation.
Surprise! to be kissed on the cheek so. After all that time. There, over the shoulder describe necessity without touching me. Ab-scondam faciem meam white Christ the fugitive. Consider me with my nose gone, knock on wood, — or ask Helen for a piece, she found it: rub it, Aladdin, Constantine, Nicodemus blown back by the wind from the river m-Mthrfckr et considerabo novissima eorum (sic)