He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again.

The segments of road down there among the dead trees. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. There'd be no surviving another winter here. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

The road book cormac mccarthy