Source Text: The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin

The nature of burned chaos painted
to an intolerable glare of ash and black rains.
The hollows of hard mountains, dark, thin beauty
in the broad wastelands, drifting in between the saline
sculptures of storm scars, edges torn through terrible country.
Residents found maddening, dribbling, thirsting for hot death,
rolling upon the long, heavy breathlessness of the devil’s dance
and whirling up into the pale sky. Here you have a rain that makes
all the world cry in downpours and bursts of violence.
A land of lost love, once visited inevitably,
And if it were not so, there would be little told of it.