Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [53]
4
MELL, RIVER ROSE, MELL …
The sandbank dipped low at one point, over which we’d rode wild cowboys,— I had a dream of the last houses on Gershom overflowing to as far as that low dip, full of German police dogs—
There were Saturday mornings when a muddy brown pool was joyous to the test of squatting kids … as dewy and mornlike as brown mud water can get,—with its reflected brown taffy clouds–
The ring closes round, you can’t continue forever—
Dust takes a flyer, and then folds under–
Doctor Sax made a special trip to Teotehuacan, Mexico, to do his special research on the culture of the eagle and the snake–Azteca; he came back laden with information about the snake, none about the bird– In the stately block-walls of the Pyramid de Ciudadela he saw the stone snake heads with Blake sunflower collars leering up from hell with the same coy horror of Blake’s figures, the round button eyes over the prognathic gated jaws, the wulp-hole within, the Leer of the Stone bone–other heads were apparently eagle heads, and had the same beady reptilian nameless horror—(on the windy top of the Pyramid of the Sun, just now, as I looked up from my chores near Mrs. Xoxatl’s washlines waving in the lower levels of the same wind, I saw the tiny movement and drowsy flutter of the priest up there cutting out some victim’s heart to inaugurate another 20-day festival for his rackets, the procession is wind-whipped on the slant waiting for him to finish—blood, a beating heart, is offered to the sun and snake—)
I saw the picture Trader Horn, the blackened-by-runners hill in the brown field of Africa–lasi lado, lasi lado, they came running over the round hillside in a fiendish horde all waving their ant spears and screeching in the wild sun of Africa, horrible black Fuzzy Wuzzies of the bush let alone your desert, they wore dirty bones across their breasts, their hair stuck out a foot like Blake Snake halos and they wielded spears and hung people upside down on crosses in fires–the hill resembled exactly the dreaming farm hill on the top of Bridge Street where I saw that Castle rising like a gray smoke–over its bare bald top (in the movie there it was) came this mass of screaming demons with their teeth and bamboos–with their drought– I was convinced the end of the world was coming and these demons were going to come swarming over a sunny hill like that in every town and city in the United States, I thought they were as numberless as ants and poured from Africa in frantic caravans up a wall and down the moiling side–uproars and armies of fiends cataracting across the world howling lasi lado, lasi lado, lasi lado—It seemed to me a drought would come, parch the earth, reduce Lowell and the world to nothingness-parturience with everybody starving and thirsting to death and weeping for rain, and suddenly over that burnt-gold hill under the swarms of puff-white bigclouds leaning over in the blue eternity afternoon that I’d be gazing at from a terrace on the earth on my back with a blade of grass in my mouth … would come the gigantic first rank of the bluggywuggies waving antennae like so many cockroaches, and then the second rank, the solid wave spilling all crinkly over the hill in screeching savagery and black, then the full thing.
This was enough to drive me panicky fullspeed from my own mind–I was a scared kid.
It was therefore easy to see the Castle on that hill, and to prophesy the Snake.
Doctor Sax (striding in the moonlight with his shroud, an eerie constitutional by the moonbranch, meditatively holding his cane to his jowl) (facing the white horses of the horizon moon night) (the caves of darkness and long hair in the East beyond) “Ah–will my cloak ever flare and flutter