Opening paragraphs.....................

     The sun had just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise.  The sand was the color of cinnamon and spiked with green grass and felt cool on his feet, even though they were bruised and threaded with lesions that were probably infected.  He got to his knees and wiped the bugs off the water and cupped it to his mouth with both hands, then washed his face in it and pushed his long hair out of his eyes.  His skin was striped with dirt, his trousers streaked with salt from  the dried sweat of the horse.  For an instant he thought he saw his reflection in the surface of the pond.  No, that was not he, he told himself.  The narrow face and the shoulder-length hair and the eyes that were like cups of darkness belonged on a tray or perhaps to a crusader knight left to the mercy of the Saracens.
     "Venga!" he said to the horse.  "You have to be instructed to drink?  It is no compliment to me that the only horse I could steal is probably the dumbest in Pancho Villa'a army, a horse that didn't have the courtesy to wear a saddle."

-James Lee Burke,  House Of The Rising Sun