Sublime

In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought.

High overhead sailed white sculpturings of clouds, like billowing concepts in the brain of Michelangelo.

Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.

Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, that image of the perfect marriage, lay now clear and beautiful on the horizon under an almost pure morning sky. Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life! Enormously high too, he noted some vultures waiting, more gr

the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.

Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard’s life!

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