THE DESERT

HARD BLACK TONGUES OF LAVA FLICK ACROSS THE ground while the dunes blaze white-gold, and the jagged granite mountains rise up like bones from the soft flesh of the Earth. The day warms as the man spins down a desert trail in a 4X4. Suddenly, human footprints appear from nowhere on the dusty ruts of the roadway. He gets out, backtracks the marks into the desert, but the footprints vanish as if into thin air. So he drives on, the tracks dancing before his hood, and then they veer off into the sands. Once again, he stops, follows them and finds they end without explanation. He is 20 miles from the nearest ranch house. I know the man. This is a true story. This is the Sonoran Desert. The story helps explain why we cannot really master the ground, or stop wondering about it.

We must stop our car, get out, and enter.

Dawn comes softly, a fine line of tints, then a glow, and suddenly a torch flames over the peaks. Silhouettes leap into clarity from the tops of the saguaro, one, two, then three of them. As the day comes on, the forms become Harris' hawks, big russet-colored raptors that hunt as a group.

If the rocks are the bones, the soil the flesh, then the plants and animals, the emblems of life, are the nerves, the strands of information snapping with awareness across the desert. A rabbit moves softly nearby, and the landscape seems new to us, yet already familiar.

The desert is haunted but not by demons. It is the place we believe we have always known, the image that seems to have been the terrain of our earliest dreams. It is saturated with memories we are struggling to capture. That is why we always come to it with an eerie foreknowledge, even if it is our first visit.

Sometimes we say it is forbidding, but we cannot sustain this feeling because we know it is home. A butterfly floats by us enjoying its 15 minutes as a celebrity. The mesquite tree to our left has a century in its wood. The green column of saguaro holds more time than we yet know how to count with certainty.

The day arrives with more force, the dawn song of the coyotes fades away, the birds sound and dart, the deer slip past on the edge of our eye.

We walk into the maze of plants, each carefully spaced in an enormous amphitheater,

One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin. - William Shakespeare

THE DESERT

As the light goes from yellow toward the gold of midmorning. Stillness falls like a soft cloak, and then even the whir of insects drifts away. The hawks have left their perches on the saguaros and now ride the thermals high over our heads. We stretch out under a tree and drink from our canteen.

We follow an Indian woman as she touches each limber bush feeling for the one with the right flex for her basketmaking. We watch a child as he races across an empty flat that spells freedom.

We follow ourselves hunting serenity in an empty valley with the silence of an afternoon stroked only by the wind. Broken pottery lies at our feet as the sun burns color from the rock and plants. We no longer feel the need for speech. The doves roost, and we can hear their coos, the tolling of a velvet bell.

Now afternoon gives way to the first hints of evening. The birds move again hunting water and feed. The reds and blacks and greens return to the sweep of ground.

We think we must get back, but we hesitate. It has taken us centuries to get to this point, this moment of admitting our hunger for the dry ground. We are cautious but no longer know fear. We dream of a mountain lion, the coat a faint yellow, moving silently across the distant sierra, and we wonder at the forces that play against its quick eyes.

I'll tell you another story, one told me by an Indian man of almost 80. I was standing under a ramada in the desert when he leaned his leathery face toward me. He was a shaman, a man who had undergone certain trials, absorbed the legends, and gained deeper powers.

Years ago he went to a cave in the sierra and for four days and nights did not eat, did not speak, did not touch himself except with a special stick.

Then he swung his bull-roarer: two slabs of ironwood held together on a long strand made from the sinews of a deer. A door opened in the cave and golden light flooded out, he said, and then the little people streamed toward him. They became flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. They taught him songs in a strange language so that he could belong.

He said he can take me to the cave. It is up there, he pointed, up there in the sierra, a cave with paintings on its cool walls. I still have not gone there. I do not feel ready.

Now the desert day is ending and night flows down the mountain and drowns the valley. In our hearts we wonder about the cave. We wonder if it is possible for us. We would like to know the songs, have our flesh and our blood mingled with the land.

The moon is up now. The night breeze rises with its warm breath against our faces. The coyotes sing. But we are at ease. We have never been here before. But we know we have come home.

Charles Bowden succumbed to the lure of the desert in 1957, when he first came to Arizona for a visit of "a few days." He's lived in the desert ever since.

In the desert, life abounds. (PRECEDING PANELS, PAGES 4 AND 5) Owl-clover in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. GARY LADD (PAGES 6 AND 7) Cave Creek north of Phoenix. JERRY SIEVE (PAGES 8 AND 9) Mexican goldpoppies bloom among cholla-cactus skeletons. WILLARD CLAY (PAGES 10 AND 11) Saguaros in the San Pedro Valley near Tucson. JACK DYKINGA (ABOVE) An immature red-tailed bawk and (LEFT) a Western banded gecko. BOTH BY GEORGE H. H. HUEY (RIGHT) Along Joshua Forest Parkway between Wickenburg and Wikieup. JACK DYKINGA