Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [163]
Then, the Salón Ofelia at last behind them, there was no more dust. And their path became straight, leading on through the roar of Water past the bathing place, where, reckless, a few late bathers lingered, toward the forest.
Straight ahead, in the north-east, lay the volcanoes, the towering dark clouds behind them steadily mounting the heavens.
--The storm, that had already dispatched its outriders, must have been travelling in a circle: the real onset was yet to come. Meantime the wind had dropped and it was lighter again, though the sun had gone down at their back slightly to their left, in the south-west, where a red blaze fanned out into the sky over their heads.
The Consul had not been in the Todos Contentos y Yo También. And now, through the warm twilight, Yvonne was walking before Hugh, purposely too fast for talking. None the less his voice (as earlier that day the Consul's own) pursued her.
"You know perfectly well I won't just run away and abandon him," she said.
"Christ Jesus, this never would have happened if I hadn't been here!"
"Something else would probably have happened."
The jungle closed over them and the volcanoes were blotted out. Yet it was still not dark. From the stream racing along beside them a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling chrysanthemums, shining like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of the water. Wild bougainvillea, brick-red in the half-light, occasionally a bush with white handbells, tongue downwards, started out at them, every little while a notice nailed to a tree, a whittled, weather-beaten arrow pointing, with the words hardly visible: a la Cascada--
Farther on worn-out ploughshares and the rusted and twisted chassis of abandoned American cars bridged the stream which they kept always to their left.
The sound of the falls behind was now lost in that of the cascade ahead. The air was full of spray and moisture. But for the tumult one might almost have heard things growing as the torrent rushed through the wet heavy foliage that sprang up everywhere around them from the alluvial soil.
All at once, above them, they saw the sky again. The clouds, no longer red, had become a peculiar luminous blue-white, drifts and depths of them, as though illumined by moon rather than sunlight, between which roared still the deep fathomless cobalt of afternoon.
Birds were sailing up there, ascending higher and higher. Infernal bird of Prometheus!
They were vultures, that on earth so jealously contend with one another, defiling themselves with blood and filth, but who were yet capable of rising, like this, above the storms, to heights shared only by the condor, above the summit of the Andes--
Down the south-west stood the moon itself, preparing to follow the sun below the horizon. On their left, through the trees beyond the stream appeared low hills, like those at the foot of the Calle Nicaragua; they were purple and sad. At their foot, so near Yvonne made out a faint rustling, cattle moved on the sloping fields among gold cornstalks and striped mysterious tents.
Before them, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl continued to dominate the north-east, the Sleeping Woman now perhaps the more beautiful of the two, with jagged angles of blood-red snow on its summit, fading as they watched, whipped with darker rock shadows, the summit itself seeming suspended in mid-air, floating among the curdling ever mounting black clouds.
Chimborazo, Popocatepetl--so ran the poem the Consul liked--had stolen his heart away! But in the tragic Indian legend Popocatepetl himself was strangely the dreamer: the fires of his warrior's love, never extinct in the poet's heart, burned eternally for Ixtaccihuatl, whom he had no sooner found than lost, and whom he guarded in her endless sleep...
They had reached the limit of the clearing, where the path