“Ted did not feel like being teased. He reminded me that it was this day in the month before, on April 22nd, that the white wake of the Great Comet was first seen in the east, thirty degrees above the horizon, with its scorpion tail that curled across the heavens like an almighty question mark. That question mark set our preacher a-howling about the eternal War between Good and Evil, and how that scorpion tail was the first sign of Armageddon.”

—Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country, 2008.