Malpais is the pueblo and surrounding mesa where John grows up at the edge of a community that repeatedly excludes him. Its communal customs give shape to his longing for belonging, while the moonlit landscape becomes the setting for an early confrontation with loneliness, time, death, and religious meaning.

Setting and Community

Malpais is a pueblo community with ceremonies and rites that bind its people together. At Kiakime’s marriage, relatives and elders walk behind the couple across the mesa to the cliff edge. Kothlu and Kiakime offer corn meal toward the rising sun, and Khakime’s father follows with a prayer and a feathered prayer stick. The ceremony culminates in Mitsima’s declaration that the couple are married. Linda regards the observance as excessive beside the casual courtship she associates with civilized countries, a contrast that marks how differently she and the pueblo understand intimacy and custom.

John’s Exclusion

John’s position in Malpais is defined by repeated exclusion from the community’s rites. At sixteen, he loves Kiakime, but her marriage makes that hope definitively impossible. Hearing Mitsima say that the marriage is finished, John runs away to be alone; the repeated thought that it is finished turns a public ceremony into a private loss.

The exclusion is sharper during the Antelope Kiva initiation. As the boys prepare to descend into the red-lit kiva and emerge as men, a man pulls John from the line, calling him white-haired and the son of a she-dog. When John returns to the group, he is struck and driven away with thrown stones. He runs bleeding into the darkness while the other boys descend and singing rises from the kiva. The rite that admits them to adult community instead leaves him alone outside it.

Landscape and Isolation

The mesa gives that rejection a physical setting. In the moonlight, the rocks resemble bleached bones; coyotes howl from the valley, and John sits at the precipice with cuts still bleeding. His distress is not simply physical pain: he has been driven away from the others into what he experiences as a world of rocks and moonlight. Looking into the shadow below, he recognizes the presence of time, death, and God. The passage makes the landscape more than a backdrop: its stark emptiness gives visible form to the isolation produced by his exclusion.

Malpais in John’s Recollection

When John later speaks with Bernard, the experiences of Malpais explain why he recognizes loneliness in someone from the Other Place. John says that the other boys shut him out, refused to tell him their secrets, and would not let him join their night on the mountains, when they sought dreams of their sacred animals. He undertook a fast of five days and went into the mountains alone; he will not tell Bernard what he dreamed.

John also recalls standing against a rock in the summer sun with his arms out, trying to know what crucifixion felt like. His memories connect Malpais’s physical landscape to solitary acts of endurance and religious imagination. They also make his sympathy with Bernard more than a momentary identification: John knows from experience what it is to be marked as different and shut out of shared life.