Slowly the mists rolled away, slowly the sun came toiling up from behind the two mighty mountains, slowly the morning cookfires sent their thin wreaths of smoke upward to be slowly dissolved upon the winds. Heaps of big brown adobe bricks stood curing in the air, cattle lowed and slowly moved along the roads towards pasture. Burros laden down with firewood passed them on their way. A thin and melancholy scream announced an eagle in the air. A thin and melancholy scream announced the mas o menos coiling its way up along the narrow tracks towards town. The bells of the three churches broke into voice as they had each morning for hundreds of years, the great wheels turning, the bells revolving, falling, falling back, the tongues resounding against the sides, the sextons bending to the ropes, rising, releasing, grasping, bending. The old women in black picking their way along the unpaved streets, the middle-aged women setting up their breakfast stalls in the market. And from every house, the sound, immemorial, older than the bells, older than any sound of human kind except the sleepy human voices themselves, the sound of the pat-pat-pat of women’s hands shaping the dough for the tortillas.
