Man Running

A man was running running for his life, across and up a naked dome of golden sandstone. Far off in silhouette against an evening sky, dark figure running across a field of gold, a flash of gashed vermillion, the flaring fanned-out rays of setting sun peering for one final moment, under a reef of purple clouds, into the slickrock desert, over the rippled sea of golden, lifeless petrified dunes of sand...
He ran, ran to live, up the rising skyline curve of rock, across the huge plasmic crimson bulge of sun, black running human animal caught forever, in perpetual motion, eternal in his fear, upon the red sun and background of the yellow sky.
A stocky man in boots, jeans, no shirt, big hat, puffing like an engine, hoarse and gasping in despair, laboring at ever-slower pace up the barren and unsheltering incline of monolithic stone.
He ran because he was pursued. Fifty yards to his rear and gaining rapidly came a snorting ramping bellowing machine, the diesel-powered forty-ton dirt scooper, product of Caterpillar Inc., bouncing after its prey on rubber-tired wheels each taller than a tall man. The operator's cab projected forward above the front wheels; the windows of the cab, covered with dust, spattered with mud, obscured the nature of whatever it was, if anything, that guided and propelled and animated the machine. Reaching the upward slope, the machine redoubled its efforts, bounding ahead. Puffs of black smoke jetted from the upright exhaust stack, floating like little balls of dirty cotton up and backward on the pure golden backdrop of the sky.
Hopeless flight, implacable pursuit. The running man stopped running, stopped climbing, stopped and turned to face the iron black joggling goblin that approached him, closer, closer, with spinning wheels and howling motor, towering above him, about to run him down, crush him like an insect, leave him smeared in a paste of hair, calcium, protoplasm and blood across the gritty surface of the rock.
The man drew a small object from his belt, something not much bigger than his fist, dark against the sunset light, impossible to immediately identify. The man raised this object and pointed it toward the blunt flat advancing snout of the machine. His finger twitched.
A red flame leaped from the tip of the object in the man's hand. Leaped and disappeared, followed presently by the report of a small compact explosion. The man froze, waiting. The machine slowed, stopped as if surprised, and jiggled for a moment, up and down, on heavy springs, twelve feet short of its victim. An arc of cooling liquid spurted like blood from the creature's nose, spouting under pressure into the air then looping down to spatter on the stone. Hurt, baffled, astonished, the machine remained at a standstill, one dark and solid silhouette of steel, rubber, glass and iron upon the forlorn red flare of dying sun, a complicated outline of angles, joints, hoses, couplings, wheels and linkage rods flat black against the horizon. As the light faded the engine died, the coolant drooped in a smaller arc and petered out, the surrounding sea of desert silence closed in complete upon machine and man.
Silence. Stasis. Creeping darkness.
The man replaced the object in his belt. He turned away from the stricken machine--dead tech--and walked upward on the ridgeline, descended the farther slope and vanished into a dense violet twilight.
We heard him singing. Singing, that is, as a wolf sings, a proud prolonged profound Promethean howl of triumph and joy, a hymn that dwindled after a time to the faintest vulpine vibration on the air but never died, never died completely.
New moon. New moon and evening star.
The new moon, signal of hope, glowed in the western sky. Quite near, almost within the moon's embrace, hung Venus planet of love, rare as radium pure as platinum more precious than gold.
--Edward Abbey (from "Hayduke Lives!")

Mt. Huethawali and beyond from Havasupai Point (top)
Sagittarius Ridge with Holy Grail Temple distant (middle)
Royal Arch Creek (below)