Each morning, the sun god Tonatíu sprang angrily from his bed, without his accustomed dawn ceremony of selecting his bright spears and arrows for the day. Each evening, he plummeted into bed without donning his lustrous feather mantle or spreading wide his colorful flower quilts. In between the abrupt lifting and dropping of the nights’ blessedly cool darkness, Tonatíu was merely a brighter yellow-white spot in the yellow-white sky—sultry, sullen, sucking all the breath from that land—burning his way across the parched sky as slowly and laboriously as I crept across the parched sands below.
