The men only have one hundred and twenty-eight scalps and eight heads. How do they only have that many? They slaughtered the village of 1,000+ apaches and killed several more here and there. Were they just too lazy to get the extra scalps? I'm sure all the dead folk had scalps. What's going on? The group really seemed like the go-get-'em type. They could of had ten times the money. I don't get it.
The governor-fellow let's the men go insane the night of their return. In effect, the men go crazy every night. "He was much like the sorcerer's apprentice who could indeed provoke the imp to do his will but could in no way make him cease again." I guess before "Fantasia," this was an old folk tale or something of the like. But it's great either way because all I could see was a young Mickey Mouse panicking while hundreds of mops (or brooms, whatever) have their way with him. And the men are as crazy (maybe not so much crazy as they like to have fun) as those mops. They get the one chance to do whatever and they take that invitation to mean "go insane every night." By the end of their rampage, everyone hates them.
The guys were spending a night at Hueco tanks, and they find a load of ancient paintings (hieroglyphs to the pedants). I don't get why the Judge destroys one of the designs. I know he said he wanted to "expunge [his sketches] from the memory of man," but these aren't his sketches. From what we've seen of the judge, he seems like the kind of guy who would respect ancient drawings and similar artifacts. Maybe that was a design he couldn't trace and he got pissed at it. I don't know. The judge is crazy.
I didn't at all understand this big-fella simile: "Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all," (McCarthy 172). It's big and has lots of faincy words. But what do they all mean?
Throughout the rest of the chapter, the scalphunters become riders of the apocalypse. When they appear, you're dead. I think the most disturbing part of the chapter was their first slaughter, when they killed the village and the women returned to everyone scalped and dead. That's among the most frightening of things that could happen to anyone. Go get groceries, come home and your son and husband are dead with bugs crawling on their bare scalps. Now who's going to eat all soup, because you're definitely not. You don't even like cream of whatever; you got it just for your husband and son, but they're to busy being killed by wanton Americans to eat it. Talk about an awful, awful day. It would do everyone well to remember this next time they have a bad day at the office. Just ask, "Is it as bad as my family being killed and scalped while I wasn't here?" If the answer is "no," then man up.
They kill again and the dead are described as "victims of surgical experimentation." I take this as an allusion to Dr. Mengele, a name which I directly connect with any surgical experimentation. And it's a really effective simile in that the things Mengele did were just so grotesque, it's almost disturbing to hear the name (Mengele is a disgusting name). I would put some links up for pictures, but anyone who wants to can do it on their own time. It's really awful (cough*no testicles*cough).
And lastly, Glanton is now the enemy. Once the hunter, now the hunted (I heard that on a Cheetos commercial). So now he's wanted in both Mexico and America. That's what you get when you're as mad as he is. Then the chapter ends with another title-sort-of-thing. "Rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun." Ya-ay.
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