Requiem for a Nun

234 WILLIAM FAULKNER

bearing south by recessional south toward that mute and beckoning gleam

the confluent continental swale, baring to light and air the broad blank

mid-continental page for the first scratch of orderly recording-a

laboratory-factory covering what would be twenty states, established and

ordained for the purpose of manufacturing one: the ordered unhurried whirl

of seasons, of rain and snow and freeze and thaw and sun and drouth to

aereate and slack the soil, the conflux of a hundred rivers into one vast

father of rivers carrying the rich dirt, the rich garnering, south and

south, carving the bluffs to bear the long march of the river towns,

flooding the Mississippi lowlands, spawning the rich alluvial dirt layer

by vernal layer, raising inch by foot by year by century the surface of

the earth which in time (not distant now, measured against that long

signatureless chronicle) would tremble to the passing of trains like that

when the cat crosses the suspension bridge;

The rich deep black alluvial soil which would grow cotton taller than the

head of a man on a horse, already one jungle one brake one impassable

density of brier and cane and vine interlocking the soar of gum and

cypress and hickory and pinoak and ash, printed now by the tracks of

unalien shapes-bear and deer and panthers and bison and wolves and

alligators and the myriad smaller beasts, and unalien men to name them too

perhaps-the (themselves) nameless though recorded predecessors who built

the mounds to escape the spring floods and left their meagre artifacts:

the obsolete and the dispossessed, dispossessed by those who were

dispossessed in turn because they too were obsolete: the wild Algonquian,

Chickasaw and Choctaw and Natchez and Pascagoula, peering in virgin aston-

ishment down from the tall bluffs at a Chippeway canoe bearing three

Frenchmen-and had barely time to whirl and look behind him at ten and then

a hundred and then a thousand Spaniards come overland from the Atlantic

Ocean: a tide, a wash, a thrice flux-and-ebb of motion so rapid and quick

across the land's slow alluvial chronicle as to resemble the limber

flicking of the magician's one hand before the other holding the deck of

inconstant cards: the Frenchman for a moment, then the Spaniard for

perhaps two, then the Frenchman for another two and then the Spaniard

again for another and then the Frenchman for that one last second,

half-breath; because then came the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer, the tall man,

roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey, Bible and jug in one

hand and (like as not) a native tomahawk in the other, brawling, turbulent

not through viciousness but simply because of his over-revved glands;

uxorious and polygamous: a married invincible bachelor, dragging his

gravid wife and most