When dawn set the desert glowing we tallied up the sounds we had heard: one insect's and a distant bird's.
Perhaps they want to invade Syria, or make the desert sand glow with nuclear explosions, as Ted Cruz promised.
Their thoughts on the matter hardly extend beyond making it harder than ever for Syrian refugees to get to the US – see Donald Trump's call for a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the country, a proposition supported by two-thirds of Republican voters in last week's New Hampshire primary – and puerile threats to "make the desert sands glow" with US air strikes.
Berry sells tees packaged with squares of turf, the course here being desert; and glowing balls can be used at night when temperatures and flies are more agreeable.
Now, Juárez's once-bustling Lincoln Avenue, where the first Maria Chuchena opened and thrived, is deserted; the only glow, he says, is that of a solitary A.T.M.
Atmospheric moisture or dust particles can refract or reflect that light, amplifying glow (deserts, for example, are low in moisture but high in dust; forests are the inverse).
Unlike the lush Tennessee surroundings of Bonnaroo, the glowing desert sunset landscapes of Coachella or the Louisiana setting of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Rock in Rio USA was on what seemed to be a flat, verdant lawn.
In her prose, the past and present are pushed into vibrant contact: the old red sandstone of Herefordshire has "the glow of desert suns" invested in its grain; the island of Ailsa Craig, formerly the plug of a volcano, is now a gannetry in which "pale-eyed birds press their warm feathers against the once boiling granite".
The smoky Tennessee juke joint and the cute little Manhattan bakery-cafe look like theme restaurants catering to the tourist trade, and even the highways snaking through the mountains and deserts have the inauthentic glow of rental-car advertisements.
Even the chill, stark, Scandinavian landscape is neatly swapped for the dust and golden glow of the desert.
