Eighteen hundred miles separate the Rio Grande at El Paso from the James at Hampton Roads. The intervening land is immensely varied. The South begins, at its western rim, in canyon country, red-walled, black-hilled; the bare and bony mountains stretch across the prairie like the skeletons of dinosaurs. This is hard country, burned by the sun and wrinkled by the unceasing wind; this is Texas, and almost everything men say of it is true. Oklahoma, to the north, is a pocket paper-back edition of its brawny southern neighbor. Both States offer moments of surpassing beauty and long stretches of surpassing dullness; they offer a splendid, lonesome emptiness of time and space, and then, abruptly, the sophistication of Dallas and the busy commerce of Oklahoma City and Houston. Coming east, one finds Arkansas, and below it Louisiana; Ozark country, the endless foothills that never quite reach to the foot of anything, to the south the flatlands and bayous, the white cranes flying, the River, incredibly massive, the jeweled city one caresses as a mistress in his dreams. Across the River, Mississippi and Alabama: cotton country, bottom land, mules and iron; small towns that evoke in bank and clock and feed store, in the inevitable bronze soldier standing guard in courthouse square, the image of small towns everywhere; progress and poverty, the hot breath of Birmingham, the Monopoly suburbs, their roofs all in line and neat bibs of crab grass under their chins. On to the east, Georgia: red clay and cotton, the prosperous incongruity of Atlanta, resting on the homely landscape like a diamond stickpin on a shabby tie. To the south, the separate nation that is Florida, post-card blue, lemon yellow, an old man nodding on a St. Petersburg bench, a swamp child gazing from a quiet pier; Miami, and the Beach, the liquid ripple of Cuban tongues; the bonefish, silver as sixteenth notes in amethyst water. Back again to the north: Tennessee, timbered, taciturn, green-hilled, the great lakes of the TVA; Memphis and Knoxville and Nashville; the accent that thins a short _e_ to a short _i_. Above Tennessee, Kentucky, tied inescapably now to the North and Midwest, hard politics, soft speech, burley tobacco, and good bourbon. To the east again, Virginia and South Carolina, with North Carolina between them, “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” or more accurately, a peak of giddy-up between two valleys of whoa. South Carolina is moss and small creeks, camellias, azaleas, the rugs a little thin, the white tapers gleaming, ancestors on the walls and Calhoun’s brooding spirit still alive, Camden and Columbia, and a classic capitol still pocked by Yankee shells. To the north, tobacco country; Charlotte, thrusting ahead, brief-cased, snap-brimmed; universities, schools, textiles, furniture mills, the black cypress quietude of the inland waterway.