All the Land to Hold Us by Rick Bass Page B

far-off clunk and rattle of one or more of the desert’s pumpjacks. And to Richard and Clarissa, working down on their hands and knees, with the old reef’s river winds carrying the sounds toward them, and then away, it sounded sometimes not monotonous or arrhythmic, but like a kind of music; one that was as graceful as those rare moments of animal glide were for the running boys. Moments—fragments of moments—that they would remember forever.
    They could both taste the peculiar and specific flavor and odor of the chalk dust as they broke the ancient fossils from the limestone grip of history: and Richard worked for the mystery and romance of being out on the plateau with Clarissa, and beyond the reach of the regular world.
    Clarissa worked for the money, pocketing each Jurassic nugget, each Cretaceous sheet of fan coral, as if it were a typeset character from the ruins of the printing press of some grander civilization.
    But despite the brute economic accounting of her search, and her desire to ride out of town, out past time’s reckoning, she too was beginning to feel the faintest flickers of warmth and mystery, and the romance of it—those waves lapping at the previously firm sand beneath her bare feet, swirling loose sand now around her ankles—and like babes, or the ancient and the infirm, they crept on, groping the twisted, clastic texture of the reef, focusing on one tiny fossil at a time, while above them the world bloomed huge and alive; and with each swing of their rock hammers, more dust filled their lungs, so that it was as if they had reentered and were swimming in that reef, swimming in choppy waves, and were descending.
    They began to like the chalky, acrid taste of the dust. It began to fill their throats and lungs, so that it was as if they were literally eating the mountain.
    Whenever they stopped to rest for the night—shutting off the lantern and laying their rock hammers by their sides and curling up in a blanket and staring up at the stars, and listening to the rivers of wind above them—it would seem to them, those evenings, stranded out on the frozen reef, that they had finally crawled out some exciting and necessary distance ahead of the waves—had reached the unknown shore—and closing their eyes for a short and intimate nap, they would lie there on the bare pale stone, every bit as motionless as the myriad fossils around them.
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    The inland salt lake—Juan Cordona Lake—was perched above the plains just a few miles north of Horsehead Crossing. The lake was a scalloped basin that sat balanced like a shallow dish atop the buried cone of a subterranean salt dome, an entire underground mountain of salt.
    The weight of the overlaying world was constantly squeezing down and re-forming this shifting, malleable, underground salt mountain, so that its movements were like those of an immense animal lying just beneath the surface, and almost always stirring.
    The inexhaustible breath from this animal, the plumes and glittering grains of salt vapor, mingled ceaselessly, through simple capillary action, with the shallow waters of the lake or playa, saturating the lake (which was fed only by intermittent seasonal rains) with its brine and then supersaturating it, until the lake was no longer a lake but a sea of floating salt sludge, thicker than cake frosting.
    The breath of salt kept rising, pulsing to the surface, salt being milked upward by every ounce of fresh water that happened to fall within the dish of the lake; and all that water then evaporated almost immediately, beneath the brain-searing heat (a heat that was magnified by the walls of pure white sand dunes that surrounded the lake, building in times of high wind to crests in excess of fifty feet tall; and the heat was magnified too by the gleaming-bone radiance of the salt flats)—so that what was left behind was a residue of pure salt, oozing slowly, steadily, from the salt mountain so far