The Maze: A Desert Journey [Hardcover]

Lucy Rees (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1996

Author Lucy Rees and a companion travel across the Arizona desert to the Hopi Indian mesas, where they search for an ancient stone carving similar to one in their native Wales. The stone's intricate design becomes a purpose for their trek as well as a metaphor for the journey itself. Humorous and wise, the book is both a bold adventure and a moving account of tragedy and hope.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

By American standards, the Welsh couple were ill-equipped for desert travel?wrong horses, no pack mules, no guns. Rees (Wild Pony) was seeking inner peace after a personal tragedy; her friend Rick wanted to see a stone carving on the Hopi reservation, reputedly identical to one in Cornwall known as the Cretan maze. In Prescott, Arizona, they bought two horses for a journey that would take them across desert, high plateau and half of Navajoland. Rees gives a spirited account of their adventures. One of the horses, Duchess, had been badly handled in the past and was unpredictable. Through Rees's affection, Duchess learned to trust humans again?a rewarding story in itself. Eventually, the travelers found the maze on the second mesa of the Hopi. This combination of travel with horses, a spiritual search and extraordinary adventure leaves the reader with a sense of satisfaction.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 198 pages
• Publisher: Countryman Pr; 1st edition (April 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 088150369X
• ISBN-13: 978-0881503692
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,086,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Labrynth as symbol to understand past painful experiences, February 8, 2008

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L. L. Bruns "Violet O'Capybara" (Venecia, Costa Rica) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Maze: A Desert Journey (Paperback)

Lucy Rees' book, The Maze, is an amazing journey through the actual desert wilderness of the Arazona/Four Corners area and also through the inner landscape of Lucy's past. The problems that occur on the trail with her great friend and the horses bring up memories that have haunted her with insecurity and fear. Lucy is able to bring us into her real journey with a past/present storyline of entering the maze of her life and coming out with gratitude, amazement and love.