Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

But here is a Collective Ghost of more than household Scale,— the Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves, petty and grave ones alike, going unrecorded, charm’d invisible to history, invisible yet possessing Mass, and Velocity, able not only to rattle Chains but to break them as well. The precariousness to Life here, the need to keep the Ghost propitiated, Day to Day, via the Company’s merciless Priesthoods and many-Volum’d Codes, brings all but the hardiest souls sooner or later to consider the Primary Questions more or less undiluted. Slaves here commit suicide at a frightening Rate,— but so do the Whites, for no reason, or for a Reason ubiquitous and unaddress’d, which may bear Acquaintance but a Moment at a Time. Mason, as he comes to recognize the sorrowful Nakedness of the Arrangements here, grows morose, whilst Dixon makes a point of treating Slaves with the Courtesy he is never quite able to summon for their Masters.

“There is something irresistibly perverse,” as the Revd then noted, “about a young white woman sitting upon a Stoep in the evening, among a steady coming and going of black servants meant, as in the Theater of the Japanese, to be read as invisible, whilst she poses all a-shine, she and her friends. According to which steps they sit upon, and which are then claim’d by the Feet of young Sparks who might wish to linger, the possible viewing-angles, for both Parties, are more or less multiplied, each combination of Steps having its own elaborate Codes for what is allow’d, and what transgresses, from Eye-play to the readjustment of skirts and underskirts, and the length of time ’tis consider’d proper to gaze. Some Belles like to ‘boss’ their male Slaves about in front of the young men, whilst others wish to be caught gazing after Girl-slaves with unconceal’d envy. Over the Range of their Desires, they are shameless, these Dutch girls of all ages, for they are the Girls of the end of the world, and the only reason for anyone to endure church all day Sunday is to be reminded of the Boundaries there to be o’erstepp’d. The more aware of their Sins as they commit them, the more pleas’d be these Cape folk,— more so than Englishmen, who tend to perish from the levels of Remorse attending any offense graver than a Leer.”

As Planets do the Sun, we orbit ’round God according to Laws as elegant as Kepler’s. God is as sensible to us, as a Sun to a Planet. Tho’ we do not see Him, yet we know where in our Orbits we run,— when we are closer, when more distant,— when in His light and when in shadow of our own making. . . . We feel as components of Gravity His Love, His Need, whatever it be that keeps us circling. Surely if a Planet be a living Creature, then it knows, by something even more wondrous than Human Sight, where its Sun shines, however far it lie.

Little by little, as weeks pass, the turn of Spirit Mason and Dixon imagine they have witness’d is reclaim’d by the Colony, and by whatever haunts it. Any fear that things might ever change is abated. Masters and Mistresses resume the abuse of their Slaves, who reply in Bush tongues, to which, soon enough hoarse with Despair, with no hope of being understood, they return, as to childhood homes. . . . Riding in and out of Town now may often be observ’d White Horsemen, carrying long Rifles styl’d “Sterloops,” each with an inverted Silver Star upon the Cheek-Piece.

Out upon Munden’s Point stand a pair of Gallows, simplified to Pen-strokes in the glare of this Ocean sky. A Visitor may lounge in the Evening upon the Platform behind the Lines, and, as a Visitor to London might gaze at St. Paul’s, regard these more sinister forms in the failing North Light,— perhaps being led to meditate upon Punishment,— or upon Commerce . . . for Commerce without Slavery is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must ever include, as an essential Term, the Gallows,— Slavery without the Gallows being as hollow and Waste a Proceeding, as a Crusade without the Cross.

“Twenty-nine’s Fell Shadow! O, inhospitably final year of any Pretense to Youth, its Dreams now, how wither’d away . . . tho’ styl’d a Prime, yet bid’st thou Adieu to the Prime of Life! . . . There,— there, in the Stygian Mists of Futurity, loometh the dread Thirty,— Transition unspeakable! Prime so soon fallen, thy Virtue so easily broken, into a Number divisible,— penetrable!— by six others!”

“Behind our public reaction to the Event, the outrage and Piety, what else may abide,— what untouchable Residue? Small numbers of people go on telling much larger numbers what to do with their precious Lives,— among these Multitudes, all but a few go on allowing them to do so. The British in India encourage the teeming populations they rule to teem as much as they like, whilst taking their land for themselves, and then restricting the parts of it the People will be permitted to teem upon. “Yet hear the Cry, O Lord, when even a small Metaphor of this continental Coercion is practis’d in Reverse, as ’twas in the old B.H. of C.

“ ‘Metaphor!’ you cry,— ‘Sir, an hundred twenty lives were lost!’ “I reply, ‘British lives. What think you the overnight Harvest of Death is, in Calcutta alone, in Indian lives?— not only upon that one Night, but ev’ry Night, in Streets that few could even tell you how to get to,— Street upon desperate Street, till the smoke of the Pyres takes it all into the Invisible, yet, invisible, doth it go on. All of which greatly suiteth the Company, and to whatever Share it has negotiated, His Majesty’s Government as well.’ ”

“The Chronoscope,” which, for a fee, may be squinted into,— here in all colors of the Prism sails the brig Rebecca, forever just about to be intercepted by the infamous Guarda-Costa. Mason’s Squint is not merely wistful,— the ship’s name is a Message from across some darker Sea,— as he has come to believe in a metaphysickal escape for the Seahorse, back there off Brest, much like this very depiction,— the Event not yet “reduc’d to certainty,” the Day still’d, oceanick, an ascent, a reclaiming of light, wind express’d as its integral, each Sail a great held Breath. . . . Into just such a Dispensation, that far-off morning, had he risen . . . like a Child . . . India, all Islands possible, the open, inextinguishable Light . . . his last morning of Immortality.

Ev’ryone lies, James, each appropriate to his place in the Chain. . . . We who rule must tell great Lies, whilst ye lower down need only lie a little bit. This is yet another thankless sacrifice we make for you, so that you may not have to feel as much Remorse as we do,— as we must.

The Loaf, the indispensible point of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness.

The baker’s trade terrified the young man. He learn’d as much of it as would keep him going,— but when he began to see into it,— the smells, the unaccountable swelling of the dough, the oven door like a door before a Sacrament,— the daily repetitions of smell and ferment and some hidden Drama, as in the Mass,— was he fleeing to the repetitions of the Sky, believing them safer, not as saturated in life and death? If Christ’s Body could enter Bread, then what else might?— might it not be as easily haunted by ghosts less welcome? Alone in the early empty mornings even for a few seconds with the mute white rows, he was overwhelmed by the ghostliness of Bread.

Rebekah gazed back, an enigma to him, Eve in paradise,— or Eurydice in hell, yet to learn, after it was too late, where she’d been . . . his mind rac’d with ancient stories. How could he allow that she might have her own story? How could he not choose the easier road, and refer her to some male character, the love-crazy Poet, the tempted Innocent? Was he supposed to light a pipe, pick her up, settle back, and read her all at one sitting? Was this what women wanted? Whom could he ask?

Emerson meanwhile points out to his Flock the lines of the Roman baths and barracks and the temples to Mithras, the crypts in which the mysteries were pass’d on to novices, once long ago invisibly nested at the Camp’s secret core, now open to anyone’s curiosity. “The moral lesson in this,” declares Emerson, “being,— Don’t Die.”

“The simpler explanation,” Emerson with a distinct uvular component in his Sigh, “may be that none of you people has ever known a moment of Transcendence in his life, nor would re-cognize one did it walk up and bite yese in the Arse,— and in the long sorry Silence, grows the suspicion that Jesuits are but the latest instance of a true Christian passion evaporated away, leaving no more than the usual hollow desires for Authority and mindless Obedience. Poh, Cousin,— Poh, Sir.”

I was adrift in Waters unknown, Intrigues and Faction within the Royal Society, as among Nations and Charter’d Companies. Foolishly seeking in the Alignment of Sun, Venus, and Earth, a moment redeem’d from the Impurity in which I must ever practice my Life,— instead, even this pitiable Hope is interdicted by the deadly l’Grand,—’ . . . not at war with the sciences,’— Poh. In Plain Text, that Brass Voice announc’d,— ‘The Business of the World is Trade and Death, and you must engage with that unpleasantness, as the price of your not-at-all-assur’d Moment of Purity.— Fool.’ ”

“In Bishop we say, ‘Ye may take the Boy out of the Country,—’ ” “Yes yes, ‘but never the Country out of the Boy.’ ” “Naa, that’s not it,— ‘But tha’ll never take the Girl out of the City,’ ’s how we say it . . . ?” Mason is staring, shaking his head, “What . . . does that mean?” “Something about Women?”

In their Decadency these Virginians practice an elaborate Folly of Courtly Love, unmodified since the Dark Ages, so relentlessly that at length they cannot distinguish Fancy from the substantial World, and their Folly absorbs them into itself. They gaily dance the steps their African Slaves teach them, whilst pretending to an aristocracy they seem only to’ve heard rumors of. Their preferr’d sport is the Duel,— part of the definition of “Gentleman” in these parts seems to be ownership of a match’d set of Pistols. To anyone who has observ’d slave-keepers in Africa, it will seem all quite ancient,— Lords and Serfs,— a Gothick Pursuit,— what, in our corrupted Days, has become of Knights and Castles, when neither is any longer reasonable, or possible. No good can come of such dangerous Boobyism. What sort of Politics may proceed herefrom, only He that sows the Seeds of Folly in His World may say.

Cities begin upon the day the Walls of the Shambles go up, to screen away Blood and Blood-letting, Animals’ Cries, Smells and Soil, from Residents already grown fragile before Country Realities. The Better-Off live far as they may, from the concentration of Slaughter. Soon, Country Melancholicks are flocking to Town like Crows, dark’ning the Sun. Dress’d Meats appear in the Market,— Sausages hang against the Sky, forming Lines of Text, cryptick Intestinal Commentary.

Mason did note as peculiar, that the first mortal acts of Savagery in America after their Arrival should have been committed by Whites against Indians. Dixon mutter’d, “Why, ’tis the d——’d Butter-Bags all over again.” They saw white Brutality enough, at the Cape of Good Hope. They can no better understand it now, than then. Something is eluding them. Whites in both places are become the very Savages of their own worst Dreams, far out of Measure to any Provocation.

Watch this.” He sets his Lips as for a conventional, or Toroidal, Smoke-Ring, but out instead comes a Ring like a Length of Ribbon clos’d in a Circle, with a single Twist in it, possessing thereby but one Side and one Edge. . . .

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?— in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ’tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,— serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,— Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,— winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

“Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all’s right now,— that they are free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,— with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell’d,— Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev’rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,— even unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs ’round Hell.”

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,— Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin. . . . Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,— nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,— her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,— that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,— not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,— rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.

“Just so. Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,— who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. As Æsop was oblig’d to tell Fables, ‘So Jacobites must speak in children’s rhymes, As Preachers do in Parables, sometimes.’

“I am no attorney,” I try to console her, “but his case sounds doubtful.” “If he goes ahead,” warns Mr. Edgewise, “obtains a warrant, pays the caution money, has title, then it’s his, if no one can prove the land isn’t escheatable.” All now fall to arguing about Land-Jobbery, the discussion growing at times spirited and personal. Everyone in the Coach, it seems, has suddenly become a Philadelphia Lawyer. “Why,” Mrs. Edgewise demands to know, “must this subject rouse quite so much Passion?” The Purveyor of Delusion confers upon his wife a certain expression or twist of Phiz I daresay as old as Holy Scripture,— a lengthy range of Sentiment, all comprest into a single melancholick swing of the eyes. From some personal stowage he produces another Flask, containing, not the Spruce Beer ubiquitous in these parts, but that favor’d stupefacient of the jump’d-up tradesman, French claret,— and without offering it to anyone else, including his Wife, begins to drink. “It goes back,” he might have begun, “to the second Day of Creation, when ‘G-d made the Firmament, and divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the Waters which were above the Firmament,’— thus the first Boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division.”

“What Machine is it,” young Cherrycoke later bade himself goodnight, “that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro’ another Day,— another Year,— as thro’ an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight . . . we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,— we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop . . . gather’d dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver, to discover that there is no Driver, . . . no Horses, . . . only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity. . . .”

“The Lord’s long Night of gaming draws to a close,” pronounces Squire Haligast, “— the Object in its Journey, comes nigh, among the excursions of Chance, the sins of ministers, the inscriptions upon walls and Gate-posts,— the birth of the ‘Sandwich,’ at this exact moment in Christianity,— one of the Noble and Fallen for its Angel! Disks of secular Bread,— enclosing whilst concealing slices of real Flesh, yet a-sop with Blood, under the earthly guise of British Beef, all,— but for the Species of course,— Consubstantiate, thus . . . the Sandwich, Eucharist of this our Age.”

“You’ve had the pleasure of Dragoons in your neighborhood? They prefer rifle-butts to whips,— the two hurt differently,— what otherwise is the difference in the two forms of Regulation? Masters presume themselves better than any who, at their bidding, must contend with the real forces and distances of the World,— no matter how good the pay. When Weavers try to remedy the inequality by forming Associations, the Clothiers bring in Infantry, to kill, disable, or deliver up to Transportation any who be troublesome,— these being then easily replaced, and even more cheaply, by others quite happy to labor in Silence.”

young troops against their own people? Their mouths ever keeping up the same weary Rattle about Freedom, Toleration, and the rest, whilst their own Land is as Occupied as ever it was by Rome. These forces look like Englishmen, they were born in England, they speak the language of the People flawlessly, they cheerfully eat jellied Eels, joints of Mutton, Treacle-Tarts, all that vile unwholesome Diet which maketh the involuntary American more than once bless his Exile,— yet their intercourse with the Mass of the People is as cold with suspicion and contempt, as that of any foreign invader.” “We shall all of us learn, who they are,” Capt. V. with a melancholy Phiz, “and all too soon.”

“They’ll believe what they like,” groans Mason, “in this Age, with its Faith in a Mechanickal Ingenuity, whose ways will be forever dark to them. God help this Mobility. They have to take all Projectors upon Trust,— half of whom have nothing to sell, who know nonetheless of this irrational need to believe in automatons, believe that they can sing and dance and play Chess,— even at the end of the Turn, when the latch is press’d and the Midget reveal’d, and the indomitable Hands fall still. Even as Monsieur Vaucanson furls back the last Silk Vestment,— no matter. The Axmen have a need for artificial Life as perverse as any among the Parisian Haute Monde, and this French toy, conveniently invisible, seems to— ”

Such is the Duck’s Influence in the Camp, that several Axmen approach the Revd upon the Topick of Angels in general. “For instance,” carols young Nathe McClean, lately dazy for a Milkmaid of the Vicinity, “tho’ we know the Duck has been transform’d by Love, what of the Angels,— that is, may they . . . um . . .” “Aye, they do that, Lad, and they drink and smoke, and dance and gamble withal. Thought ev’ryone knew that. Some might even define an Angel as a Being who’s powerful enough not to be destroy’d by Desire in all its true and terrible Dimensions. Why,— a drop of their Porter? ’twould kill the hardiest drinker among ye,— they smoke Substances whose most distant Scent would asphyxiate us,— their Dancing-floors extend for Leagues, their Wagering, upon even a single trivial matter, would beggar Clive of India. And who’s to say that Human sin, down here, may not arise from this very inadequacy of ours, this failure of Scale, before the sovereign commands of Desire,— ” “Sin as practis’d is not deep enough for you, Sir?” inquires Dixon. “Why is it that we honor the Great Thieves of Whitehall, for Acts that in Whitechapel would merit hanging? Why admire the one sort of Thief, and despise the other? I suggest, ’tis because of the Scale of the Crime.— What we of the Mobility love to watch, is any of the Great Motrices, Greed, Lust, Revenge, taken out of all measure, brought quite past the scale of the ev’ryday world, approaching what we always knew were the true Dimensions of De...

“Now then ye heathen, hold, ’tis not how we Christians settle our differences.” “Yet they seem like white men,— ” “Cleverly indeed fiendishly disguis’d, tho’ ‘Darby’ and ‘Cope’ are not quite British Names, are they?” “Why, they are as British as anyone here . . . ?” Dixon points out. “Not according to your pay-List,— see here, it reads, ‘Darby and Cope, Chinamen.’ ” “Thah’s . . . ’Chain-men’ . . . ?” “Ah.” “Not the same,— ” “Oh dear.”

“Then as we’ve no choice, I may speak freely and share with you some of my darker Sentiments. Suppose Maskelyne’s a French Spy. Suppose a secret force of Jesuits, receives each Day a summary of Observations made at Greenwich, and transcalculates it according to a system known to the Kabbalists of the Second Century as Gematria, whereby Messages may be extracted from lines of Text sacred and otherwise, a Knowledge preserv’d by various Custodians over the centuries, and since the Last, possess’d by Jesuit and Freemason alike. The Dispute over Bradley’s Obs, then, as over Flamsteed’s before him, would keep ever as their unspoken intention that the Numbers nocturnally obtain’d be set side by side, and arrang’d into Lines, like those of a Text, manipulated till a Message be reveal’d.” “Bit sophisticated for me. Tho’ I don’t mind a likely Conspiracy, I prefer it be form’d in the interests of Trade,— the mystickal sort you fancy is fair beyond me, I’m but a simple son of the Pit.” “ ‘Trade.’— Aha. You heard me mention Jesuits,— so now you’re making veil’d allusions to the East India Company, in response,— I do see, yes . . . Drivel, of course.” “Come, Sir, can you not sense here, there, just ’round the corner, the pattering feet and swift Hands of John Company, the Lanthorns of the East . . . ? the scent of fresh Coriander, the whisper of a Sarong . . . ?” “Sari,” corrects Mason. “Not at all Sir,— ’twas I who was sarong.”

“Christ went away,” he discovers at last how to tell her, one morning, the eaves a-drip, the bleary Sun irregularly brighter and dimmer, “one day, for no reason that I could see, Christ came to me and said, ‘Peter, I am going away. You thought it was hard before this? Here is where it gets impossible.’ “ ‘Are you coming back?’ I almost couldn’t speak. “ ‘You must live ever in that Expectation.— Come, spare Me that Face,— of course it is a lot to ask.’ He seem’d in a dangerously merry State. Was it relief at being shut of me, at last? “ ‘How do I proceed without you?’ “ ‘What have I been teaching you all this time?’ “I was smit dumb, Luise. I didn’t understand the Question. ‘Be more like You?’ I tried. He’d been teaching me? All this time? Wehe! “ ‘Alas.’ His Smile, at least, was not a pitying one, nor was it quite as disappointed as I’d fear’d. He turn’d, for the first time I saw the back of His Robe. He had a Motto in German embroider’d fine as could be in Gold Threads, upon the back. I couldn’t read what it said. He receded. He was gone.”

In the midst of these lightless Woods are gun-smithies where the most advanc’d and refin’d forms of Art are daily exercis’d upon the machinery of Murder by Craftsmen whose Piety is unquestion’d. . . .

DePugh recalls a Sermon he once heard at a church-ful of German Mysticks. “It might have been a lecture in Mathematics. Hell, beneath our feet, bounded,— Heaven, above our pates, unbounded. Hell a collapsing Sphere, Heaven an expanding one. The enclosure of Punishment, the release of Salvation. Sin leading us as naturally to Hell and Compression, as doth Grace to Heaven, and Rarefaction. Thus— ” Murmurs of,” ‘Thus’?” “— may each point of Heaven be mapp’d, or projected, upon each point of Hell, and vice versa. And what intercepts the Projection, about mid-way (reckon’d logarithmickally) between? why, this very Earth, and our lives here upon it. We only think we occupy a solid, Brick-and-Timber City,— in Reality, we live upon a Map. Perhaps even our Lives are but representations of Truer Lives, pursued above and below, as to Philadelphia correspond both a vast Heavenly City, and a crowded niche of Hell, each element of one faithfully mirror’d in the others.”

One day, the Meridian having been closely enough establish’d, and with an hour or two of free time available to them, one heads north, one south, and ’tis Dixon’s luck to discover The Rabbi of Prague, headquarters of a Kabbalistick Faith, in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of Paris, whose private Salute they now greet Dixon with, the Fingers spread two and two, and the Thumb held away from them likewise, said to represent the Hebrew letter Shin and to signify, “Live long and prosper.”

“Hence as you may imagine, we take a lively interest in this Line of yours,” booms the Forge-keeper, “inasmuch as it may be read, East to West, much as a Line of Text upon a Page of the sacred Torah,— a Tellurian Scripture, as some might say,— ” “— ’Twill terminate somewhere to the West, no one, not even you and your Partner, knows where. An utterance. A Message of uncertain length, apt to be interrupted at any Moment, or Chain. A smaller Pantograph copy down here, of Occurrences in the Higher World.” “Another case of, ‘As above, so below.’ ” “No longer, Alas, a phrase of Power,— this Age sees a corruption and disabling of the ancient Magick. Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurances, Peddlers upon the global Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks,— these are the last poor fallen and feckless inheritors of a Knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed. The coming Rebellion is theirs,— Franklin, and that Lot,— and Heaven help the rest of us, if they prevail.”

“The Model,” the Wolf of Jesus addressing a roomful of students, “is Imprisonment. Walls are to be the Future. Unlike those of the Antichrist Chinese, these will follow right Lines. The World grows restless,— Faith is no longer willingly bestow’d upon Authority, either religious or secular. What Pity. If we may not have Love, we will accept Consent,— if we may not obtain Consent, we will build Walls. As a Wall, projected upon the Earth’s Surface, becomes a right Line, so shall we find that we may shape, with arrangements of such Lines, all we may need, be it in a Crofter’s hut or a great Mother-City,— Rules of Precedence, Routes of Approach, Lines of Sight, Flows of Power,— ”

This is the third continent he has been doing Feng-Shui jobs on, and he thought he’d seen crazy people in Europe, but these are beyond folly. Whig country-homes, sinister chateaux, Adriatic villas, Hungarian hot springs, Danish harems in the Turkish style,— not one of their owners having hir’d him out of respect for the Dragon, nor for what he could do or find out or even tell them,— when ’twas not innocently to indulge a fascination with the exotic, ’twas to permit themselves yet one more hope in the realm of the Subjunctive, one more grasp at the last radiant whispers of the last bights of Robe-hem, billowing Æther-driven at the back of an ever-departing Deity. A people without faith,— very well, he could understand it, now and then even respect it,— yet here in America, is little but Faith,— church-spires on every town skyline, traveling ministers who draw congregations by the hundreds and thousands, across flooded pastures, beneath rain-combed skies and in under the outspread wings of their white tents, singing far off in the woods, full of fervent strange harmonies that grow louder as the traveler approaches. . . .

“Geometry and slaughter!” ejaculates Squire Haligast, “— The future of war, yet ancient as the mindless Exactitudes of Alexander’s Phalanx.” “Perhaps,” the Revd suggests, “we attribute to the Armies of old, a level of common Belief long inaccessible to our own skeptical Souls. Making the Prussian example all the more mystical,— whom or what can any modern army believe in enough to obey? If not God, nor one’s King . . . ?” “They submit,” Zsuzsa replies, “to the preëmptive needs of the Manœuvre,— a Soldier’s Faith at last must rest in the Impurity of his own desires. What can Hansel possibly wish for, that Heinz in front of him, and Dieter behind, and a couple of Fritzes on either side, have not already desir’d,— multiplied by all the ranks and files, stretching away across the Plain? The same blonde from down the Street, the same Pot of beer, the same sack of Gold deliver’d by some Elf, for doing nothing. Who is unique? Who is not own’d by someone? What do any of their desires matter, if they can be of no use to the Manœuvre, where all is timed from a single Pulse, each understanding no more than he must,— ”

First I heard the voices of the Town, then at the edges of my Vision, Blurs appear’d, and Movement, which went suddenly a-whirl, streaking in to surround me, as in the mesh of prolong’d Faces, only hers stood firm.— And when I join’d her again, before I could think of what to say, she kiss’d me and declar’d,— ‘Somebody got in late last night.’ “The only proof I had that ’twas not a Dream was the Bite I receiv’d whilst in my Noctambulation of the City.— “This Life,” runs the moral he is able by now to draw for Dixon, “is like the eleven days,— a finite Period at whose end, she and I, having separated for a while, will be together again. Meanwhile must I travel alone, in a world as unreal as those empty September dates were to me then. . . .”

couple of pack-horses. “All right then John, come along, there’ll be no Moors left by the time we get to Jerusalem.” “What?” “The Crusade . . . ? Oh, bother, you said you’d come. I say what’s that on your line? Ghastly thing. Throw it back in, let’s go bash old Abdul, whatwhat?”

“To rule forever,” continues the Chinaman, later, “it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,— to create thus a Distinction betwixt ’em,— ’tis the first stroke.— All else will follow as if predestin’d, unto War and Devastation.” “Wait,” objects Mr. Dixon. “It’s as plain as pudding that Pennsylvania and Maryland are so different, that thy fatal Distinction was inflicted upon these Shores, long before we arriv’d,— ” “Poh, Sir,” goads Mason, “the Provinces are alike as Stacy and Tracy.” “Except for the Negro Slavery upon one side,” Dixon points out, less mildly than he might, “and not the other.” “If you think you see no Slaves in Pennsylvania,” replies Capt. Zhang, his face as smooth as Suet, “why, look again. They are not all African, nor do some of them even yet know,— may never know,— that they are Slaves. Slavery is very old upon these shores,— there is no Innocence upon the Practice anywhere, neither among the Indians nor the Spanish nor in the behavior of the rest of Christendom, if it come to that.”

“Listen to me, Defecates-with-Pigeons. Long before any of you came here, we dream’d of you. All the people, even Nations far to the South and the West, dreamt you before ever we saw you,— we believ’d that you came from some other World, or the Sky. You had Powers and we respected them. Yet you never dream’d of us, and when at last you saw us, wish’d only to destroy us. Then the killing started,— some of you, some of us,— but not nearly as many as we’d been expecting. You could not be the Giants of long ago, who would simply have wip’d us away, and for less. Instead, you sold us your Powers,— your Rifles,— as if encouraging us to shoot at you,— and so we did, tho’ not hitting as many of you, as you were expecting. Now you begin to believe that we have come from elsewhere, possessing Powers you do not. . . . Those of us who knew how, have fled into Refuge in your Dreams, at last. Tho’ we now pursue real lives no different at their Hearts from yours, we are also your Dreams.”

But out under the Moon, Chestnut Ridge and Cheat behind them, and Monongahela to cross, into an Overture of meadow to the Horizon, low-lands become to them a dream whilst under a Spell, the way it gives back the Light, the way it withholds its Shadows,— who might not come to believe in an Eternal West? In a Momentum that bears all away? “Men are remov’d by it, and women, from where they were,— as if surrender’d to a great current of Westering. You will hear of gold cities, marble cities, men that fly, women that fight, fantastickal creatures never dream’d in Europe,— something always to take and draw you that way,”

Geminity hath found a fleshless Face,— No second Chance, ’tis Death that’s won the Race Between the Line in all its Purity, And what lay, mass’d, within the mortal Tree . . .

“They don’t want any of thah’? They want to know how to stop this great invisible Thing that comes crawling Straight on over their Lands, devouring all in its Path.” “Well! of course it’s a living creature, ’tis all of us, temporarily collected into an Entity, whose Labors none could do alone.” “A tree-slaughtering Animal, with no purpose but to continue creating forever a perfect Corridor over the Land. Its teeth of Steel,— its Jaws, Axmen,— its Life’s Blood, Disbursement. And what of its intentions, beyond killing ev’rything due west of it? do you know? I don’t either.” “Then,— just tidying these thoughts up a bit,— you’re saying this Line has a Will to proceed Westward,— ” “What else are these people suppos’d to believe? Haven’t we been saying, with an hundred Blades all the day long,— This is how far into your land we may strike, this is what we claim to westward. As you see what we may do to Trees, and how little we care,— imagine how little we care for Indians, and what we are prepar’d to do to you. That Influence you have felt, along our Line, that Current strong as a River’s,— we command it. . . . We might make thro’ your Nations an Avenue of Ruin, terrible as the Path of a Whirl-Wind.”

“Slaves. Ev’ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,— more of it at St. Helena,— and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom’d to re-encounter thro’ the World this public Secret, this shameful Core. . . . Pretending it to be ever somewhere else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies, down there, down where it smells like warm Brine and Gunpowder fumes, they’re murdering and dispossessing thousands untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily into the Hands of Slave-owners and Torturers, but oh, never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of Fools . . . ? Christ, Mason.” “Christ, what? What did I do?” “Huz. Didn’t we take the King’s money, as here we’re taking it again? whilst Slaves waited upon us, and we neither one objected, as little as we have here, in certain houses south of the Line,— Where does it end? No matter where in it we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? America was the one place we should not have found them.” “Yet we’re not Slaves, after all,— we’re Hirelings.” “I don’t trust this King, Mason. I don’t think anybody else does, either. Tha saw Lord Ferrers take the Drop at Tyburn. They execute their own. What may they be willing to do to huz?”