The Last Stretch

The last chapter (page 231 to the end) of The Road was beautiful. Of course, the entire book was beautiful, but the last chapter was just amazing. I loved this book from beginning to end, but I still cannot get over how elegant the last section was.
My favourite passage from the end of the book is on page 261 where the man walks out into the road and ponders their lives, the world, and the past:

"He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth" (261)

First, there are many words in this which I was unfamiliar with:
Cognate: similar sounding
Imponderable: impossible to guess or assess
Salitter: the essence of God

McCarthy first describes the earth. The "sound without cognate and so without description" rumbles from beneath the man's feet with no explanation other than "the earth itself contracting with the cold" (261). This shows how the world has stopped making sense to the man, it is its own creature now. Weary and dying from human abuse, this creature is left growling and attempting to recover, yet free. As "perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made," we can only see something truly once it has gone (274).
Then the man walks out into the road and stands, listening to "the silence. The salitter drying from the earth" (261). At first this was meaningless to me, but once I looked up the meaning of salitter, I fell in love with these two short sentences. It means "the essence of God drying from the earth." This is why I love McCarthy's writing, its like poetry. Its so beautiful. God comes into to the story frequently nearer to the end of the novel, an example being when the two protagonists shoot the flare gun and the boy asks, "they couldn't see it very far, could they, Papa?" and as the man wonders who the boy means by "they" he offers,"like God?" and the boy responds, "Yeah. Maybe somebody like that" (246). However, the sentence from the above passage says the exact opposite: that everything God was and is is leaving the earth, drying up and dying with the rest of nature. The man realizes this as he is going to die, and perhaps worries about the Godless world in which he leaves his son.
In an allegorical sense, this could relate to our world in that McCarthy believes God is in nature. As life in the plants and animals dies out, so the essence of God dries up from the very soil of the earth. In this way, if we wish to worship God (or some other deity) we must worship and care for the world in which we live in order to keep the holy essence alive.