...whether animal or human. Yet in its limits the desert offers limitless understanding. Austin writes, "Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you can not go so far that life and death are not before you." Humans express their own sense of limits...

...unusual sensitivity allowed her to see the fragile beauty of what seemed like utter desolation to others. "Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land," she wrote in her still widely read The Land of Little Rain. You cannot go so far that life and death...

...reader's susceptibility to it. Austin repeatedly stresses the unobtrusive signs of life around her ("Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land,...go so far that life and death are not before you"); the arts of environmental accommodation required to survive in the desert, emotionally as well as physically;...

...Hispanic ethnicity. I have used these terms in the book much as a person living in the region would. Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land,...go so far that life and death are not before you. — Mary Austin Prologue Farmington, New Mexico, Thanksgiving, 1 996. A cold wind blew down from the...