[N]ovv he, comes violently on, and vvithall aduancing his rapier to ſtrike, […] Sir, I miſt my purpoſe in his arme, raſht his doublet ſleeue, ran him cloſe by the left cheek, and through his haire.

Juxtaposing a secular vision of an earth apocalyptically destroyed through the activities of a Euro-American culture devoted to exploiting resources in every possible way with an equally apocalyptic, sacred vision of the age of the coming of the fifth world in which the culture of destruction will pass away, Silko depicts a world in which apocalypse saturates the everyday, undoing the realism of the nuclear complex by positioning it in a different timeline that has a different past, a different future, and a different present to anything that the nuclear state might think to contain in even its most totalizing attempts to model the world.

That will be how we lose what we have gained, The incremental rapture at the core, Spleened of the belly's thick placental wrath, And the seed's roar.

By far the greater number of the inhabitants of Sikhim, however, are the Paharias, who number nearly 50,000.