The Window to the West - Entry #10

Continuing with my dersert travels I divert from my usual photographic fare, but perhaps it is not that far off.

Last week, I recounted my experience in Terlingua, TX during Día De Los Muertos. That same day, five hour perhaps before I walked under that field of stars and luminous graves, I embarked on a short hike. Taking a tip from a local, I set out on a dirt that path that took me past the famous Perry Mansion, once the estate of the Terlinqua quicksilver tycoon, Howard E. Perry. But his mines were the Chisos of Terlingua proper. My destination was further. The Rainbow Mines.

The night before, over beers in the Starlight Theater, my local confidant told me, "You know you've made it by the overwhelming smell of sulfur." And as I came to end of a steep hill, a sharp rancid smell met my nose and I knew. The Rainbow Mines like the nearby Chisos were also meant for that blood-red mineral ore, cinnabar, which when processed produces elemental quicksilver, mercury, a valuable commodity during the turn of the century. It seems that cinnabar was not the only mineral uncovered Rainbow miners a thousand feed below the desert.

Finally, at the end of the road I came to a ruined house of stone and mud, now no more than a few walls, wood framed doors, and a window. Ah, what a view! Stretched before me, a limitless landscape of stone and earth. This window was a portal to a land lost, a land without ending, the West itself.