干旱之地

干旱之地

Pale, dry, baked earth, that blows into dust of fine sand. Low hills of baked pale earth, sinking heavily, and speckled sparsely with dark dots of cedar bushes. A river on the plain of drought, just a cleft of dark, reddish-brown water, almost a flood. And over all, the blue, uneasy, alkaline sky.
A pale, uneven, parched world, where a motor-car rocks and lurches and churns in sand. A world pallid with dryness, in human with a faint taste of alkali. Like driving in the bed of a great sea that dried up unthinkable ages ago, and now is drier than any other dryness, yet still reminiscent of the bottom of the sea, sand hills sinking, and straight, cracked mesas, like cracks in the dry-mud bottom of the sea.
So the mud church standing discreetly outside, just outside the pueblo, not to see too much. And on its fa.ade of mud, under the timbered mud-eaves, two speckled horses rampant, painted by the Indians, a red piebald and black one.
Swish! Over the logs of the ditch-bridge, where brown water is flowing full. There below is the pueblo, dried mud like mud-pie houses, all squatting in a jumble, prepared to crumble into dust and be invisible, dust to dust returning, earth to earth.
That they don’t crumble is the mystery. That these little squarish mud-heaps endure for centuries after centuries, while Greek marble tumbles asunder, and cathedrals totter, is the wonder. But then, the naked human hand with a bit of new soft mud is quicker than time, and defies the centuries.
Roughly the low, square, mud-pie houses make a wide street where all is naked earth save a doorway or a window with a pale-blue sash. At the end of the street, turn again into a parallel wide, dry street. And there, in the dry, oblong aridity, there tosses a small forest that is alive: and thud—thud—thud goes the drum, and the deep sound of men singing is like the deep soughing of the wind, in the depths of a wood.
(form Dance of the Sprouting Corn by D. H. Lawrence) Particular Scenes 特设场景
speckle  点缀，装点
cedar  雪松
cleft  裂缝，裂口
alkaline  碱性的
parch  烘烤，烧焦
lurch  蹒跚，东倒西歪地向前
churn  剧烈抖晃，翻腾
pallid  苍白的，虚弱的
mesa  平顶山，方山
pueblo  印第安的村庄

fa.ade  门面，正面
rampant  （马等）用后腿立起的，跃立的
piebald  有花斑的马
squat  蹲伏
crumble  破碎，崩溃，倒塌
tumble  倒塌
asunder  分散，碎裂
totter  摇摇欲坠
sash  窗框格

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