House Of Rain
Chapter One
THE FLOOD
CHACO CANYON
It happened quickly, as if a diviner's staff had struck the ground.
Water flashed onto the dry earth. Its dark and wringing hands
plunged over cactus and sage, welling around the trunks of sparse
cottonwood trees. The desert groaned as its thousand parched mouths
opened to an empty summer sky.
Two of us looked down at this flash flood from atop a safe, high
bank. Below us water funneled into Chaco Canyon, passing through a
set of mustard-colored cliffs in the barrens of northwest New
Mexico. The water smelled as ripe as garbage. It was incense to me,
a lurid scent that I have encountered only select times in my life,
brief hours of the desert erupting into sudden and monstrous floods,
where everything living and dead is channeled into a single slot. It
smelled like creation itself.
The flood thundered past buff-colored boulders that had fallen from
the cliffs into beds of withered greasewood and cracked clay soil.
My companion, a man named Adam, had never been to this part of the
desert. Standing above th ... read full excerpt from: House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest ebook
