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“How is the Duck?” Peter blurts. “She told me about it. Luise.” Armand almost blurts back, “The Duck is excellent,” but wagering it is a religious question, replies, “I see the Duck seldom of late. Perhaps, by now, she has taken in her charge so many other Souls as troubl’d as my own, that there remains less time for me,— perhaps, as she has continu’d upon her own way, I have even pass’d altogether from her Care.” “But, Time, surely, by now, no longer matters to her?” Peter now curious, “— no longer passes the same way, I mean.” The Frenchman shrugs. “Yet we few, fortunate Objects of her
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“Has no one heard of the Black Dog in these parts, then . . . ?” wonders Dixon.
the black dog runs at night
“ ’Tis well known,” various ancient Pennsylvanians and Marylanders assure the Surveyors, “that placing a Chicken ’pon a Straight Line’ll send it nodding faster than ever a head put under a wing.” The Girl, returning to fetch her Hen, agrees briskly. “Chicken on a Line? Thought ev’rybody knew that.”
“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.” “But those are Threats we do not make.” “But might as well make. As the
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Here are the last Cadre, out in the uninterrupted Visto,— from a certain Height, oddly verminous upon the pale Riband unfolding,— fairly out in the Hundred-League Current of Sha, where ev’ry Step is purchas’d with a further surrender of Ignorance as to what they have finish’d,— what they have left at their Backs, undone,— what, measuring the Degree of Latitude next Spring, they shall be newly complicit in,— tho’ if it takes them much longer to get over the Ridge, even if they escape freezing solid, they may yet have journey’d further into Terrestrial Knowledge, than will allow them to
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At which Armand runs in looking anxious. “The Duck is doing something . . . autoerotique, now?” They re-phrase,— unconsol’d, Armand wanders away. Becoming reaccustom’d to this City’s Angular Momentum is costing him daily Struggle. He appears to miss the West Line, and the Duck it has captur’d and denied him.
lmao
“Ev’rywhere they’ve sent us,— the Cape, St. Helena, America,— what’s the Element common to all?” “Long Voyages by Sea,” replies Mason, blinking in Exhaustion by now chronick. “Was there anything else?” “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
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how long before or after his interception, he could never know. There may be found, within the malodorous Grotto of the Selves, a conscious Denial of all that Reason holds true. Something that knows, unarguably as it knows Flesh is sooner or later Meat, that there are Beings who are not wise, or spiritually advanced, or indeed capable of Human kindness, but ever and implacably cruel, hiding, haunting, waiting,— known only to the blood-scented deserts of the Night,— and any who see them out of Disguise are instantly pursued,— and none escape, however long and fruitful be the years till the
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