But they balanced, in the end, and the creature—in the shadows skulked away, unsatisfied.
“So that’s that,” said Bast, wistfully. “Just another skull for the pile. It’s a pity. I had hoped that you would do some good, in the current troubles. It’s like watching a slaw-motion car crash and being powerless to prevent it.”
“You won’t be there?”
She shook her head. “I don’t like other people picking my battles for me,” she said.
There was silence then, in the vast hall of death, where it echoed of water and the dark.
Shadow said, “So now I get to choose where I go next?”
“Choose,” said Thoth. “Or we can choose for you.”
“No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay. It’s my choice.”
“Well?” roared Anubis.
“I want to rest now,” said Shadow. “That’s what I want. I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end.”
“You’re certain?” asked Thoth.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, an(l behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing.
Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.
Chapter Seventeen
Everything is upon a great scale upon this continent. The rivers are immense, the climate violent in heat and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous. The disorders incident to the country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin, are on a great scale.
—Lord Carlisle, to George Selwyn, 1778
The most important place in the southeastern United States is advertised on hundreds of aging barn roofs across Georgia and Tennessee and up into Kentucky. On a-winding road through a forest a driver will pass a rotting red barn, and see, painted on its roof,
SEE ROCK CITY
THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD
and on the roof of a tumbledown milking shed nearby, painted in white block letters,
SEE SEVEN STATES FROM ROCK CITY THE WORLD’S WONDER.
The driver is led by this to believe that Rock City is surely just around the nearest corner, instead of being a day’s drive
.,, away, on Lookout Mountain, a hair over the state line, in Georgia, just southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Lookout Mountain is not much of a mountain. It resembles an impossibly high and commanding hill. The Chickamauga, a branch of the Cherokee, lived there when the white men came; they called the mountain Chattotqnoogee, which has been translated as the mountain that rises to a point.
In the 1830s Andrew Jackson’s Indian Relocation Act exiled them from their land—all the Choctaw and Chickamauga and Cherokee and Chickasaw—and U.S. troops forced every one of them they could catch to walk over a thousand miles to the new Indian Territories in what would one day be Oklahoma, down the trail of tears: an act of casual genocide. Thousands of men, women, and children died on the way. When you’ve won, you’ve won, and nobody can argue with that.
For whoever controlled Lookout Mountain controlled the land; that was the legend. It was a sacred site, after all, and it was a high place. In the Civil War, the War Between the States, there was a battle there: the Battle Above the Clouds, that was the first day’s fighting, and then the Union forces did the impossible and, without orders, swept up Missionary Ridge and took it. The North took Lookout Mountain and the North took the war.
There are tunnels and caves, some very old, beneath Lookout Mountain. For the most part they are blocked off now, although a local businessman excavated an underground waterfall, which he called Ruby Falls. It can be reached by elevator. It’s a tourist attraction, although the biggest tourist attraction of all is at the top of Lookout Mountain. That is Rock City.