East of Flagstaff, we looped through a landscape of steep mesas and sculptured buttes, crystals of white quartz, red and brown iron oxide, blue manganese. Standing on a precipice, I saw a nude figure running toward Marathon, shadowed by a lung-gom-pa loping over a jagged desert floor, and Mangas Colorados' courier who jogged day and night, stopping only to bleed his swollen calves into the thirsty sand. Picked across the alluvium of a river-bed, a cosmography even older than the gods. Snapped a few pictures trekked back to the car.