Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [76]
And he sat glooming. “No, ‘tis and will be true, the Snake can’t be real, husk of doves or husk of wood, it will swirl from the earth an illusion, or dust, thin dust that makes the eyelids close–I’ve seen dust gather on a page, ‘tis the result of fire. Fire won’t help the heat of embarrassment and folly. Foo-wee–what shall I do?” He mungled with his ponder fists. “I’ll go through the motions … because this sad rain that now gathers to its intensity …patting the solaced but not chastised river with its manifold spit-hands you might say–no, the Snake’s not real, tsa husk of doves, tsa tzimis, tsa rained out. I talk-how? howp?” He looked up distracted. “But I’ll go through the motions. I’ve waited 20 years for this night and now I don’t want it—’tis the paralysis of the hand and mind, ‘tis the secret of no-fear… Somehow it seems the evil thing should take a care itself, or be rectified in organic tree of things. But these deliberations ah-vail not my old Sprowf Tomboy Bollnock Sax–listen to me, Jacky, kid, boy that comes with me–though doubts and tears are roused up by the rain, wherein I know the rose is flowing, and it’s more natural I lay me down and make peace with bleak embattled eternity, in my rawer bed of dolors, with eyes of the night and soul shrouds, to keep my balanced fingers in–among the shades of arcade shafts, friends and fellow Evangelians of the Promised North–ever promised, ever-never-yielding North shroud ghost of upper snow, rale of snowy singers wailing in the Arctic-speared, solitude night–I go and make my mention, I go and seek my tremble.”
10
WE WENT ON TO THE CASTLE.
Everything began to happen to prevent us from reaching our goal, which Doctor Sax said was the pit—“The pit, the pit, wha do you mean the pit?” I keep asking him as I race after him with more and more fear. I feel like I did on the raft, I can jump or I can stay. But I don’t know how to construe the simple action of the raft with these powders and mysteries, so foolishly I grope along in black life and folly my Shadow. I yearn for the great sun after all this doom and night and gloom, this rain, these floods, this Doctor Sax of the North American Antiquity.
We start up a narrow alley between two sudden stone walls in the yards–rain is dripping from the rocks.
“The sun worshippers go through dank caves for their snake-heart,” cries Doctor Sax, leading far ahead with his hood. Suddenly at the end of the stone alley I see a huge apparition standing.
“It’s Blook the Monster!” cries Doctor Sax coming back my way in the narrow alley and I have to flatten to receive him. Blook is a huge bald fat giant somewhat ineffectual who cannot advance through the alley but reaches over his 20-foot arms along the wall tops like great glue spreading, with no expression on his floury pastry face–an awful ugh–a beast of the first water, more gelatinous than terrifying. Sax joined me in his Shroud and we flipped over the wall in the wink of a bat-wing. “He’s mad as hell because we caught him burying an onion in the garden!” Blook emitted a faint, thin whistling noise of disgust that he missed us. We ran like hell through a drippy bush wet garden, over rills, mud hamps, rocks and suddenly I see a huge spider like four men tied to each other at the back and running in the same direction, a gigantic beast, running like mad across the glow of the rain.
“There’s one of the Mayan spiders that came with the Flood. You ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen the Chimu centipedes in the dongeons of green bile, where they threw a couple of Dovists last week.”
“Yock! Yock!” cried a strange thing that suddenly dove at our heads from the rainy air. Sax waved aside with a claw of his great red-green fingers in the general reddish dark of everything– It was like Hell. We were at the portals of some awful hellhole full of impossible exits. Straight ahead, was our Pit,—in the way, a hundred annoying barriers. We even came to a giant scorpion that lay scat on a wall big and black