Picking up some speed here with the reading; hate to say it, but the first 80 pages were duller than matte paint.
There was something dreamlike about it. Not nightmarish: just dreamlike–the peaceful, quiet, remote, sylvan, almost primeval setting of ooze and slime and jungle growth and heat in which the very mules themselves, peacefully swishing and stamping at the teeming infinitesimal invisible myriad life which was the actual air we moved and breathed in, were not only unalien but in fact curiously appropriate, being themselves biological dead ends and hence already obsolete before they were born; the automobile: the expensive useless mechanical toy rated in power and strength by the dozens of horses, yet held helpless and impotent in the almost infantile clutch of a few inches of the temporary confederation of two mild and pacific elements–earth and water–which the frailest integers and units of motion as produced by the ancient unmechanical methods, had coped with for countless generations without really having noticed it; (p. 87)
Boon has been warning Lucius and Ned about this particular spot and how hard it would be to get the car across this mudhole portion of road. What the other two were not made aware of is that there is a gent who is not only prepared sitting by with mules and tackles to get the passersby through the mud for a fee, he is also responsible for producing and maintaining the obstacle.
I like Faulkner's facing up to the clash of past and present, old and new. There is an element of change and there is something that never changes: the folks who will always be there to take advantage of opportunity for self gain.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology