"Desert Solitaire"

Water/Air:

• The sand quivered like jelly beneath the cow's hooves, broke open, sucked at the plunging feet... As we went on I looked back and saw the holes the cow had made fill up and brim over with water, like suppurating sores.
• The water was so clear, so perfectly transparent, that only the dance of grains of sand in the bottom of the spring, where the flow came up through a fissure in the rock, revealed that it was under pressure and in motion.
• To keep the gnats out of the canteen I had to place a handkerchief over the opening as I filled it. Then they attacked my eyes, drawn irresistibly by the liquid shine of the human eyeball.
• (In the thunderstorm:) The pinnacles, arches, balanced rocks, fins and elephant-backs of sandstone, glazed with water but still in sunlight, gleam like old gray silver and everything appears transfixed in the strange wild unholy light of the moment. The light that never was.
• The flash flood of the desert poorly resembles water. It looks rather like a loose pudding or a thick dense soup, thick as gravy, dense with mud and sand, lathered with scuds of bloody froth, loaded on its crest with a tangle of weeds and shrubs and small trees ripped from their roots.
• If (the rain) comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; it not, this particular colony of Pelobatidae (toads) is reduced eventually to dust, a burden on the wind.

• The sun had finally dropped below the rim. Life began to seem plausible again after an afternoon of doubt.
• The great Balanced Rock floats a few inches above its pedestal, supported by a layer of superheated air. The buttes, pinnacles and fins in the Windows area bend and undulate beyond the middle ground like a painted backdrop stirred by a draft of air.
• I tramp on through the winding gorge, through the harsh brittle silence. In this arid atmosphere sounds do not fade, echo or die softly but are extinguished suddenly, sharply, without the slightest hint of reverberation.

<<