The rear mountains swallow the horizon. They have the shape of a phoneme-waveform, a vowel caught in a sky throat, a warning sigh meant to waken you to an alertness which, in the middle of your worry, will allow you to see the setting sun colors prism'd by the mineral contour of the eroding mountain slopes, bright light shining here at the edge of space and Humanity's immortal empire of breath.     He told me that there were demons in the desert.