Voss - Closing

"Voss did not die," Miss Trevelyan replied. "He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it."

"Come, come. If we are not certain of the facts, how is it possible to give the answers?"

"The air will tell us," Miss Trevelyan said.

By which time she had grown hoarse, and fell to wondering aloud whether she had brought her lozenges.

Voss - pg. 437

Judd was feeling his way with his hands.

"Well, you see, if you live and suffer long enough in a place, you do not leave it altogether. Your spirit is still there."

"Like a god, in fact," said Colonel Hebden, but laughed to show his skepticism.

Voss - pg. 429

The doors and windows were standing open, and the blue night was pouring in. Two little boys, with scrubbed party faces had fallen asleep upon an upright sofa, but their dreams were obviously filled with an especial bliss.

Voss - pg. 414

Moonlight was of doubtful benefit when it came, because all night the spirits of the dead were with him. The thin soul of Turner was hanging like a possum, by its tail, from a tree. There was a cracking of sticks and whips by Mr. Angus, who would rise up very close in a huge, white, blunt pillar of flurry light. The boy thought he would not be able to endure it, and was pouring sand upon his head. When daylight came, his eyes were turned up, and the rims of his eyelids staring outward, in a kind of fit. But he soon recovered in the heat of the morning, and continued eastward, talking to himself of what he had seen.

Voss - pg. 407

"Mr. Voss is already history."

"But history is not acceptable until it is sifted for the truth. Sometimes this can never be reached."

Voss - pg. 386

Voss heard the sucking of fingers beside the fires, as the blacks drowsed off into silence, deeper, closer, their own skins almost singed upon the coals.

Voss - pg. 382

As if to rot were avoidable. By moving. But it was not.

"We rot by living," he sighed.

Grace lay only in the varying speeds at which the process of decomposition took place, and the lovely colours of putresence that some souls were allowed to wear. For, in the end, everything was of flesh, the soul elliptical in shape.

Voss - pg. 370

Towards the end of the afternoon, when the rim of the horizon had again grown distinct, and forms were emerging from the dust, they seemed to have arrived at the farther edge of the plain, from which rose an escarpment. Slowly approaching its folds of grey earth, the party was at length swallowed by a cleft, furnished with three or four grey, miserable but living trees, and, most hospitable sight of all, what appeared to be an irregular cloth, of faded green patchy plush.

All the animals became at once observant. Moisture even showed in the dry nostrils of the dragging horses, whose dull eyes had recovered something of their natural lustre. Little velvet sounds began to issue out of their throats.

Voss - pg. 336

Over the dry earth he went, with his springy, exaggerated strides, and in this strange progress, was at peace and in love with his fellows. Both sides were watching him. The aboriginals could have been trees, but the members of the expedition were so contorted by apprehension, longing, love, or disgust, they had become human again. All remembered the face of Christ that they had seen at some point in their lives, either in churches or in visions, before retreating from what they had not understood, the paradox of man in Christ, and Christ in man. All were obsessed by what could be the last scene for some of them. They could not advance farther.

Voss - pg. 334

"Ah, Palfreyman," said Voss, "you are humble. And humility is humiliating in men. I am humiliated for you."

Voss - pg. 331

In the course of the assault, the faces of all those concerned began to wear an expression of abstraction. In the lyrical grasslands through which they had lately ridden, they had sung away what was left of their youth. Now, in their silence, they had even left off counting their sores. They had almost renounced their old, wicker bodies. They were very tired at sunset. Only the spirit was flickering in the skull. Whether it would leap up in a blaze of revelation, remained to be seen.

Voss - pg. 325

So satin sighed, lozenges were discreetly sucked, and the scented organ meandered through the melodious groves of flowers.

Voss - pg. 324

The young woman, whose eyelids were turned to buckram, was writing in her red room. She wrote:

... It would seem that the human virtues, except in isolated, absolved, absurd, or oblivious individuals are mythical. Are you too, my dearest, a myth, as it has been suggested? ...

Voss - pg. 267

"In the beginning I used to imagine that if I were to succeed in describing with any accuracy some thing, this little cone of light with the blurry edges, for instance, or this common pannikin, then I would be expressing all truth. But I could not. My whole life had been a failure, lived at a most humiliating level, always purposeless, frequently degrading. Until I became aware of my power. The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming."

-- Frank Le Mesurier

Voss - pg. 255

There was an air of peace at that camp, since rain had drowned many doubts. Thick, turbulent, yellow water was now flowing in the riverbed. Green, too, was growing in intensity, as the spears of grass massed distinctly in the foreground, and a great, indeterminate green mist rolled up out of the distance. Added to the gurgle of water, were the thousand pricking sounds of moist earth, the sound of cud in swollen cheeks of cattle, and sighs of ravaged horseflesh that looked at last fed and knowing. There was the good scent of rich, recent, greenish dung. Over all this scene, which was more a shimmer than the architecture of landscape, palpitated extraordinary butterflies. Nothing had been seen yet to compare with their colours, opening and closing, opening and and closing. Indeed, by the addition of this pair of hinges, the world of semblance communicated with the world of dream.

Voss - pg. 187

The dome of silence was devoid of all furniture, even of a throne. So he began pulling logs together, smashing sticks, crumbling scrub, and was building their first fire. Sympathy, brilliance, warmth did not, however, immediately leap forth, only a rather disappointing flame. It was a very human fire. Walking up and down, its maker was overcome by the distance between aspiration and human nature.

Voss - pg. 177

In the heat, after the men had left to muster, Mr. Judd was proceeding methodically. He had a scrap of crumpled paper, on which he would make his own signs. There was a stub of lead pencil in his mouth. One of his thumbs had been badly crushed by a sledge-hammer long ago, and had grown, in place of a nail, a hard, yellow horn. Now, as he worked, he experienced a sense of true pride, out of respect for what he was handling, for those objects, in iron, wood, or glass, did greatly influence the course of earthly life. He could love a good axe or knife, and would oil and sharpen it with tender care. As for the instruments of navigation, the mysticism of figures from which they were inseparable made him yet more worshipful. Pointing to somewhere always just beyond his reach, the lovely quivering of rapt needles was more than that of ferns. All that was essential, most secret, was contained for Judd, like his own spring-water, in a nest of ferns.

Voss - pg. 175

The simplicity of the clay-coloured landscape was very moving to the German. For a moment everything was distinct. In the foreground some dead trees, restored to life by the absence of hate, were glowing with flesh of rosy light. All life was dependent on the thin lips of light, compressed, yet breathing at the rim of the world.

Voss - pg. 172

Such was the predicament of Palfreyman on one particularly white night. Unable to sleep, he had passed the time reviewing houses in which he had lived, minor indignities he had suffered, and one tremendous joy, a white eagle fluttering for a moment on the branch of a dead tree and almost blotting out the sky with the span of its wings.

Voss - pg. 169

About a hundred of these animals had gathered on the farther bank of a second waterhole, where they were climbing and slithering on the hulks of a fallen trees, stretching their necks to pull at the fronds of their live leaves, scratching at remote pockets of their bodies with the tips of their horns, skull-bashing, or ruminating dreamily. As the horsemen approached, the goat-mind was undecided whether to stay or run. Several did remain, and were staring up, their lips smiling, looking right into the faces of the men, even into their souls beyond, but with expressions of politeness.