The Brave Cowboy (2011)
“But the light had no power to soften the jagged edges and rough-spalled planes of the granite; in that clear air each angle and crack cast a shadow as harsh, clean, sharp, real, as the rock itself—so that though they had endured as they were for ten million years, the cliffs held the illusion of a terrible violence suddenly arrested, paralyzed in time, latent with power.
At the foot of the cliffs were the little stony hills, the incidental rubble that had fallen and merged as the earth split op...en and shoved one edge above the other. Around the hills were litters of boulders, the remains of the ancient pulverized landscape, and a complicated but systematic pattern of ditches, gullies, ravines and canyons that conducted whatever water might fall toward the valley and the river below.
Near one of these hills, beside a sandy wash, in the shadow of the cliffs, a man had once built a house, using the materials that destruction and catastrophe had spawned—stone, mud, wood. The house remained, though the man was gone: now the windows were blank and empty like the cavities of a skull, long since stripped of glass, if they had ever held glass, and the doorway, leaning in a curious way to the east—for the house had shifted without moving from its foundation —was without a door; the rain had undercut the slanting walls, and the flat roof, sagging on rotten beams, half open to the sky, functioned now only as a home for finches and spiders and centipedes and for one stray buckhorn cactus that had somehow taken root in the sand and decayed pine above the front doorway.MoreLess
At the foot of the cliffs were the little stony hills, the incidental rubble that had fallen and merged as the earth split op...en and shoved one edge above the other. Around the hills were litters of boulders, the remains of the ancient pulverized landscape, and a complicated but systematic pattern of ditches, gullies, ravines and canyons that conducted whatever water might fall toward the valley and the river below.
Near one of these hills, beside a sandy wash, in the shadow of the cliffs, a man had once built a house, using the materials that destruction and catastrophe had spawned—stone, mud, wood. The house remained, though the man was gone: now the windows were blank and empty like the cavities of a skull, long since stripped of glass, if they had ever held glass, and the doorway, leaning in a curious way to the east—for the house had shifted without moving from its foundation —was without a door; the rain had undercut the slanting walls, and the flat roof, sagging on rotten beams, half open to the sky, functioned now only as a home for finches and spiders and centipedes and for one stray buckhorn cactus that had somehow taken root in the sand and decayed pine above the front doorway.MoreLess
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