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He could go no farther. Exhausted, helpless, he sank
to the ground. No one would help him even if they could.

Now he was the one dying by the wayside where no Good Samaritan would halt…
How could he have thought so evil of the world when succour was at hand all the time?
And now he had reached the summit.

Strong hands lifted him. Opening his eyes, he looked down, expected to see below him,
the magnificent jungle, the heights, Pico de Orizabe, Malinche, Cofre de Perote, like those
peaks of his life conquered one after another before this greatest ascent of all
had been successfully, if unconventionally, completed.

But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this summit
a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base.

It was crumbling, too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano,
he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horrible,
it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn’t the volcano…

The world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space,
with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium…
through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling into a forest, falling—

Suddenly he screamed and it was as if this scream were being tossed from one tree to another,
as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer,
huddled together, closing over him, pitying…

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.
—From “Under the Volcano,” Malcolm Lowry

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He could go no farther: after Malcolm Lowry

September 27, 2006 12:06 PM

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