There is a perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by t… - N. Scott Momaday

La tierra del Encanto

Clouds build on the northern ridge
Where the shades of night grow pale
And there comes a rain like smoke.
The mountains loom and recede. And
Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide.
There the distance of time runs out.
And the mind extends beyond itself.

I have seen in the twist of wind
The landscape severed and heard
The edged cries of streaming hawks
First light is a tapestry on canyon walls,
And shadows are pools of illusions.
I am a man of the ancient earth
For I have know the desert at dawn

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn — an illusion still in the land — rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.

The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god.