… but here the earth was the floor of the sky.” So says Willa Cather of the landscape of New Mexico. See? Here is the sky over the bricks of Chaco Canyon… 

…and above Taos…

…and above Santa Fe… 

And here is Death Comes for the Archbishop, the book in which she says so:

It’s pictured here in front of the skyline of Denver and inside the Chevy Impala that Martin and I rented from the exceedingly customer-service-oriented people at Enterprise and drove all over the Southwest.  I’ve been on a Cather kick this summer, and I’d recommend that everyone read her whenever and wherever possible. But if you get a chance to actually be in one of the places she is writing about as you are reading her, you might find, as I did, that the landscape makes the book realer than real, and the book does the same for the landscape.