The Maze: A Desert Journey

Rees, Lucy

ISBN 10: 0816518319 / ISBN 13: 9780816518319

Published by University of Arizona Press, 1997

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Maze: A Desert Journey
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816518319
• ISBN 13: 9780816518319
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

"Northern Arizona is vast and beautiful. Horizons are huge, for the dry air is so clear you can often see for eighty or a hundred miles. Mountains we would think to walk over in a day may be three days' hard ride away. There is space between each tuft of grass or cactus." With these words, Lucy Rees invites the reader to saddle up and travel with her across the desert to the Hopi Indian mesas. There, she and a companion are searching for an ancient stone carving similar to one in Cornwall, near their native Wales, that has long fascinated them. The intricate design of the stone, spiraling inward and then turning outward again, becomes a purpose for their trek as well as a metaphor for the journey itself. Humorous and wise, this book is both a bold adventure on horseback and a moving account of personal tragedy, courage, and hope.

Review

It seems you don't have to be American to dream about cowboys. Lucy Rees, a writer from Wales, and her companion Rick, travel all the way to Arizona in order to exercise a rather loopy dream of traveling through the American Southwest on horseback. It becomes apparent from the opening pages of The Maze that this is no ordinary travelogue. To begin, Lucy and Rick's original destination had been Mongolia. Equally extraordinary is their aversion to "betraying" the horses they will live with for several months by leaving them at the end of the trip. Their solution to this problem is to consciously choose delinquent horses, which they hope to rehabilitate and then resell to good homes. What they get are Rosie and Duchess: one a "spoiled brat," the other suspicious of people, "unpredictable, hysterical, and dangerous." Lesser beings might have been daunted at this point, deciding to trade in the horses for an RV, but not Lucy and Rick.

Lucy and Rick's goal is a Hopi mesa where a sevenfold maze similar to ones found in Cornwall, Spain, India, Scotland, Scandinavia, and Crete is carved in a rock. To get there, they must "cross desert, high plateau and half Navajoland, which itself is bigger than Wales." But as all good travel stories prove, the journey is the destination, and long before Lucy and Rick arrive at Hopi, they have learned some valuable lessons about themselves and each other.