The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than ...at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a lit...tle (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's alive and waiting for you. Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you, or the cold at night. A thousand ways t...he desert can kill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In time the scouring of wind and rain will wear down the ranges and plane off the region until it has the drab monotony of the old...er deserts. In the meantime--a two-million-year meantime--travelers may enjoy the cruel beauties of a desert in its youth,....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In spite of all the learned have said, I still my old opinion keep;... The posture, that we give the dead, Points out the soul's eternal sleep. Not so the ancients of these lands-- The Indian, when from life released, Again is seated with his friends, And shares again the joyous feast.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars--on stars where no human race is.... I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At first I was nearly roasted out, for I lay against one side of the camp, and felt the heat reflected not only from the birch-bar...k above, but from the side; and again I remembered the sufferings of the Jesuit missionaries, and what extremes of heat and cold the Indians were said to endure. I struggled long between my desire to remain and talk with them and my impulse to rush out and stretch myself on the cool grass; and when I was about to take the last step, Joe, hearing my murmurs, or else being uncomfortable himself, got up and partially dispersed the fire. I suppose that that is Indian manners,--to defend yourself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we thus swept along, our Indian repeated in a deliberate and drawling tone the words "Daniel Webster, great lawyer," apparently... reminded of him by the name of the stream, and he described his calling on him once in Boston, at what he supposed was his boarding-house. He had no business with him, but merely went to pay his respects, as we should say. In answer to our questions, he described his person well enough. It was on the day after Webster delivered his Bunker Hill oration, which I believe Polis heard. The first time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him, and then went away. The next time, he saw him go by the door of the room in which he was waiting several times, in his shirt-sleeves, without noticing him. He thought that if he had come to see Indians, they would not have treated him so. At length, after very long delay, he came in, walked toward him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, "What do you want?" and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he was going to strike him, said to himself, "You'd better take care; if you try that I shall know what to do." He did not like him, and declared that all he said "was not worth talk about a musquash." We suggested that probably Mr. Webster was very busy, and had a great many visitors just then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »