"The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us"

The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us…. Their mirrors arrive from the sky’s chest, slowly preceding them. They suddenly stop in the air and remain suspended…. When they arrive, their songs name the distant lands they came from and traveled through. They evoke the places where they drank the waters of a sweet river, the disease-free forests where they ate unknown foods, the edges of the sky where, without night, one never sleeps.

from The Sky is Falling by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013), quoted by Glenn H Shepard in the NYRB, and from which this blog quoted in June.

Later in the book Kopenawa warns of industrialisation:

The sky…is getting as sick as we do! If all this continues, its image will become riddled with holes from the heat of the mineral fumes. Then it will slowly melt, like a plastic bag thrown in the fire…. If the sky catches fire, it will fall again. Then we will all be burned, and we will be hurled into the underworld like the first people in the beginning of time.

Image of fallstreak by David Barton via ABC