Blood Meridian, McCarthy

They did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when it overtook them at its midnight meridian, sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of such dread pilgrims clanking north.

They rode up through cholla and nopal, a dwarf forest of spined things, through a stone gap in the mountains and down among blooming artemesia and aloe. They crossed a broad plain of desert grass with palmilla. On the slopes were gray stone walls that followed the ridgelines down to where they lay broached and tumbled upon the plain.