Mary Hunter Austin - The Land of Little Rain (1903)

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Valleys are the sunken places of the earth, cañons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God.

Mary Hunter Austin
The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits.... One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to 'try,' but to do.

Mary Hunter Austin
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.

Mary Hunter Austin
For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.

Mary Hunter Austin
'A man,' says Seyavi of the campoodie, 'must have a woman, but a woman who has a child will do very well.'

Mary Hunter Austin
Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild creatures, and their cognizance of the affairs of their own kind.

Mary Hunter Austin
The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly of lost treasure.... It is a question whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the tradition of a lost mine.

Mary Hunter Austin
Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas.

Mary Hunter Austin
When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience.

Mary Hunter Austin
Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.

Mary Hunter Austin
When the five coyotes that range the Tejon from Pasteria to Tunawai planned a relay race to bring down an antelope strayed from the band, beside myself to watch, an eagle swung down from Mt. Pinos, buzzards materialized out of invisible ether, and hawks came trooping like small boys to a street fight.

Mary Hunter Austin
None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.

Mary Hunter Austin
Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the streets of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine.

Mary Hunter Austin
Once at Red Rock, in a year of green pasture, which is a bad time for the scavengers, we saw two buzzards, five ravens, and a coyote feeding on the same carrion, and only the coyote seemed ashamed of the company.

Mary Hunter Austin
The true desert breeds its own kind, each in its particular habitat. The angle of the slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure of the soil determines the plant.

Mary Hunter Austin