Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [63]
They were galloping parallel to the road which was hedgeless and on ground level, then the thudding regular thunder of the hooves struck abruptly hard and metallic and dispersed and they were clattering on the road itself; it bore away to the right skirting the woods round a sort of headland jutting into the plain. "We're on the Calle Nicaragua again," Yvonne shouted gaily, "almost!"
At a full gallop they were approaching the Malebolge once more, the serpentine barranca, though at a point much farther up than where they'd first crossed it; they were trotting side by side over a white-fenced bridge: then, all at once, they were in the ruin. Yvonne was in it first, the animals seeming to be checked less by the reins than by their own decision, possibly nostalgic, possibly even considerate, to halt. They dismounted. The ruin occupied a considerable stretch of the grassy roadside on their right hand. Near them was what might once have been a chapel, with grass on which the dew still sparkled growing through the floor. Elsewhere were the remains of a wide stone porch with low crumbled balustrades. Hugh, who had quite lost his bearings, secured their mares to a broken pink pillar that stood apart from the rest of the desuetude, a meaningless mouldering emblem.
"What is all this ex-splendour anyway?" he said.
"Maximilian's Palace. The summer one, I think. I believe all that grove effect by the brewery was once part of his grounds too." Yvonne looked suddenly ill at ease.
"Don't you want to stop here?" he had asked her.
"Sure. It's a good idea. I'd like a cigarette," she said hesitantly. "But we'll have to stroll down a ways for Carlotta's favourite view."
"The emperor's mirador certainly has seen better days." Hugh, rolling Yvonne a cigarette, glanced absently round the place, which appeared so reconciled to its own ruin no sadness touched it; birds perched on the blasted towers and dilapidated masonry over which clambered the inevitable blue convolvulus; the foals with their guardian dog resting near were meekly grazing in the chapel: it seemed safe to leave them...
"Maximilian and Carlotta, eh?" Hugh was saying. "Should Juarez have had the man shot or not?"
"It's an awfully tragic story."
"He should have had old thingmetight, Díaz, shot at the same time and made a job of it."
They came to the headland and stood gazing back the way they had come, over the plains, the scrub, the railway, the Tomalín road. It was blowing here, a dry steady wind. Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. There they lay peacefully enough beyond the valley; the firing had ceased. Hugh felt a pang. On the way down he'd entertained a quite serious notion of finding time to climb Popo, perhaps even with Juan Cerillo--
"There's your moon for you still," he pointed it out again, a fragment blown out of the night by a cosmic storm.
"Weren't those wonderful names," she said, "the old astronomers gave the places on the moon?"
"The Marsh of Corruption. That's the only one I can remember."
"Sea of Darkness... Sea of Tranquillity..."
They stood side by side without speaking, the wind tearing cigarette smoke over their shoulders; from here the valley too resembled a sea, a galloping sea. Beyond the Tomalín road the country rolled and broke its barbarous waves of dunes and rocks in every direction. Above the foothills, spiked along their rims with firs, like broken bottles guarding a wall, a white onrush of clouds might have been poised breakers. But behind the volcanoes themselves he saw now that storm clouds were gathering. "Sokotra," he thought, "my mysterious island in the Arabian Sea, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from, and no one has ever been--"
There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful password of courage and pride--the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one's soul perhaps, he thought,